Byzantium's Crown (11 page)

Marric lay listening to the shaduf laboring to pump water into the fields from the canals. This year the floods had come late and not risen as they should have.

Running feet approached. The door slammed open. Marric leapt into a defensive crouch, the blanket that was his only covering falling down along his hips. The gouges on his back and sides ached, but no trickle of warm blood told him that the scabs had broken open.

Stephana stood with her back to the door. She was breathing hard, and her face was distraught. She clutched her medicines to her breast with both hands.

"I won't be afraid. "I'm not . . . I'm not!" Her voice trembled on the knife edge of hysteria. Three times she attempted to reset the wards, then dropped her hands in despair.

"Only fools never fear," said Marric. "What happened, Stephana?" She sank on her knees and he reached out to her.

"You're trembling," he said. "Here, before you drop those jars, give them to me." He pried the unguents out of her fingers.

Stephana's eyes were wild with fear and with a remembered revulsion. One hand inched upward to her mouth; Marric caught the other one. When she jerked away, he began to understand.

Her light garment fell from one shoulder to her waist, exposing flesh reddened and scratched from breast to throat, as if someone had tried to tear her clothes from her and had clutched her breast so hard he left finger marks on her skin.

"Who hurt you?" Marric asked in a soft growl. From the way she held her head low and shook it—did she fear for him? Or was she ashamed? Only Sutekh the overseer would be rash enough to lay violent hands on the mistress' favorite maid.

"How else did he harm you?" Marric made his voice gentle.

"He . . . no, not this time. This time I got away." Stephana's voice was dull with humiliation. She brought up her hand to rub the scratches on her body.

Marric reached for the ointments. "Come here, Stephana. We'll use some of these on you." As he inched closer, he sensed that she feared nearness to him, and bent to draw his blanket over his loins.

"You helped me. Let me help you," he urged. He unstoppered a glass tube with one hand. With the other he pried gently but relentlessly at her fingers.

Why had her magic not spared her this? Anger blazed up in him, and Stephana winced and backed away, moaning at her own helplessness.

Though she had fought Sutekh bravely, now, as reaction to the struggle set in, she had no more fight left in her. Marric laid his arm around her shoulders. He only wanted to draw her close and comfort her before he tended her scratches, but she went rigid.

"Steady now," he murmured. "You saved my life. Do you really think I would try to rape you."

What was it about this woman that tore so at his heart? An invisible cord seemed to draw them together. The sight of her panic, her fear of him and of his touch, made him ache. What a terrible life for a gentle woman: most nights a different master or strangers, and most of them brutal. "I'm not afraid," she had declared so proudly. But she did fear now, and Marric wanted to help her.

He laid a hand on her shoulder again and tipped her face up with his other hand. "I am going to smear some of this balm on those scratches," he said.

"I don't need it."

He shook his head at her.

"Enough talk on the subject. This way I will not worry that you go untended. Come closer." Marric remembered what an old army surgeon had once told him: better tend a wagonload of wounded men than one battered woman.

"Look, you can put your hand on top of mine if you don't trust me . . . and to make sure I do this right," he added. "Come, Stephana. Who is being the coward now?

She let her head droop. Marric reached for linen, wet it, and began delicately to dab her shoulder near her throat. Nails had bit into her flesh and raked downward. As Marric worked, Stephana's unsteady breathing, still too much like sobs, fanned his temple. He thought he would more quickly forgive the overseer for his own beating than for abusing Stephana. Damn the man, he had enjoyed it. Now for the nard. Marric took a generous fingerful and began to work it in. Stephana's skin was very soft. It warmed as the salve sank in. Though her hand hovered protectively close to his own, she relaxed somewhat.

But Marric's injuries were healing, and his body let him know it. Rose scent clung to Stephana's hair, and made him dizzy. His breath grew more rapid. He tried to keep the motion of his fingers, smoothing down her shoulder to her breast, steady as he worked in the ointment. He tried to think he was dressing the wounds of, say, a common soldier. But the contact was too intimate. Accidentally, his finger brushed her nipple, and it hardened. For a heartbeat, they both held motionless.

Stephana gasped. Her hand closed over his and pushed it away. It would be dishonest to ask, Have I hurt you? just so he could replace his hand and caress her. For this time his touch would be a caress, not an expression of concern. Even as Marric wondered how she would feel in his arms, he realized that he would never force the slightest touch on her. How could he destroy any faint trust she might hold for him? But Isis, Isis, he wanted her.

Very slowly and very carefully, he moved away.

"Knot up your gown," he said, and turned to the food she had brought him. He was very hungry.

"Your back heals," Stephana said after a long pause. "Does this hurt?" She ran her fingers across the welts tentatively. "Not much? Good." In some places Sutekh's lash had wrapped about Marric's sides. She traced these lines too. Marric drew back, unable to tolerate a healer's touch he found so unexpectedly erotic.

"I see," she whispered.

"Do you?"

"You're the one who doesn't see, Mor. You never have. You still think like a man whose will is his own, not a slave."

"I am a man, not a slave."

When Marric had been a prince, a governor, even a junior officer, he had always found women: highborn ones, his for an easy chase; slaves, his for a casual summons. And they had all seemed eager, had seemed to take equal pleasure in the sport. Had any of those women had to battle fears like Stephana's? Had he ever forced a slave? He was bitterly ashamed that he couldn't remember clearly.

Slavery was far worse for a woman than for any prince, for any man at all. With that agonizing sensitivity of hers, Stephana faced added humiliations. Marric wanted her, but her life had been so painful that he wondered if she could ever respond to anyone.

She scrambled her jars, plates, and linen together and fled. Marric did not know if she would ever come back.

"You will be scarred," Taran the druid told Marric after inspecting his back.

"Do you think I care about that? I was a soldier. But"—the question escaped before he could stop it—"what can I do?"

"About Stephana?" asked the druid. His eyes met Marric's, and a familiar roiling in his soul warned him that Taran looked into his thoughts. This time, however, instead of rebelling or recoiling from the touch, Marric held firm.

"So you sense that your life is joined to hers?" Taran asked. "I think you are right. But I imagine, Mor, that you are not the sort of man to whom things of the spirit come easily."

There had been that place of light. Even the glimpse of it had changed him. But for the rest of it, no, the things of the spirit came hard.

"However long on the Wheel it has taken you to come this far, I begin to understand you. I know you.

"Stephana knows you, too. You see, she is not just an adept and a student; she is a seeress, and far advanced in her tale of lives. She has foreseen that if she makes no grievous errors in life, she will be freed to take the next step along the Way. Now she must atone for one thing and one thing only in all her past lives before she wins release: cowardice caused her to betray a friend. It was a slave's act, and she has been reborn as a slave to atone for it. So, in this life, she knows that She must battle fear and aid someone who needs it. That person too is ordained for her."

Marric gestured impatiently.

"But you want more of her than prophecy or her quick wits. You want her. That terrifies her still further. She has suspected, you see, that you are the one who will demand courage of her. Mor . . . " The druid let Marric see that he knew his true identity with his tone of voice. "Not an easy man to help, are you?"

I don't want this. I don't want to be responsible for a slave woman or for a sorceress. What happens when I escape?

Yet the remembrance of how soft her skin had been made his fingers tremble with desire to stroke it.

"I would not harm her. How could I? Sutekh had hurt her. I only meant to care for her as she had done for me. Yet the instant I touched her—" He remembered his desire for her. Then he drew the last thing, the unbearable memory out. "She said once that I would be her death."

"Adepts do not fear death, my son. Not as you do. Violation, humiliation: these are the things that Stephana fears." Taran waved a hand and turned aside. When he spoke again, it was in a deliberately inconsequential tone.

"You're well enough now to do light work. I will have Nicephorus tell Strymon."

"Is Nico also a seer?"

"Just a scholar with some small power. Nicephorus is too committed to individuals to be greatly adept. He fears for them and fights with all his heart to protect those he loves. He fought bravely for your life."

"What are they—Nico, Stephana—to you?"

"My pupils now. In another life perhaps they were my teachers, and I repay them now. Later they may be guides to other spirits, as will I."

"And I?"

"You know well what you are, and why we are drawn to help you. The land withers."

"The water sinks . . . I saw in the city, fights, hunger . . . they hunt druids—"

"Just so. The land fails when deprived of its proper leadership. Sometime I must tell you of my homeland in the Isles of the Mists."

"A man I knew once came from there."

"Aillel, who joined the Varangian Guard? He was a prince among us."

Marric no longer bothered to wonder how Taran knew Aillel's name. "I met a druid in Byzantium and he—what do you call it?—he scryed for me. Warned me. Are you warning me, too?"

Taran glanced aside. The sky was reddening before a fierce dawn. "I see danger for both of us if I do not leave now. But let Stephana fight her own battles. Little as she may trust herself, she has enough courage for the task."

Taran slipped out of the shed. A faint tingling, followed by a sense of vacancy, a way laid open, told Marric that the wards that had been protecting him were removed. He was free to take up his own life again.

The morning star dimmed in the sky. With a sudden flash of green at the horizon, dawn drove the last soft traces of violet night before it. Marric gazed east, narrowing his eyes as the red sun smoldered in the shrunken lake. The canal that began at the Nile and ran many miles to Alexandria carried less water, too. The water levels in the house cisterns had sunk still further. And the fresh, living mud that had made Egypt the granary of Empire was very thin this year.

All the slaves feared the great crocodiles that were ravenous and torpid by turns. They were going to get hungrier still. But Marric had no intention of remaining a slave long enough to see.

As the food ran out, soon the poorest and the eldest in Alexandria would begin to starve. The babes at their mothers' breasts would thrive for a time, then die quickly. People would knife others at first for a loaf of bread, and later for even a chunk of a loaf. Disease would scythe through the crowded Old City.

Out here the slaves would not starve; still, the prospect of famine and plague in Alexandria made Marric feel helpless and guilty. By rights, he was the land's steward, as Horus had been when gods still walked the earth. If the empire starved, it was his fault. Hellenes, his dynasty called themselves. Still, this land was dear to their hearts.

Sun, water, and land quivered in the early morning quiet. Even a slave might find the sight peaceful. The sun felt good on Marric's healing back and chest. Now he felt strong enough to try to escape.

A shadow, stunningly dark in the brilliant light, startled him. With the pitcher on her head supported by an upraised, slender arm, Stephana looked at a casual glance like any one of a hundred women carrying water. But Marric would always know her. Something in her bearing, a blend of assurance and fragile grace, delighted him. The light made her gleam. She raised a hand to shade her eyes.

Once he escaped, he would never see her again.

He shut that thought from his mind. Why was Stephana out here? Usually she did not venture far from the inner courts, as he well understood. From what he had seen, and what Nicephorus, had let fall, it was no wonder that her hair had silvered when she was little more than a girl. But no maid: the secluded innocence of maids had been utterly foreign to her ever since slavers had snatched her in childhood from her seacoast home. Since then, Tarran and Nicephorus had been the first men who had perceived her as more than a pair of hands or a convenient female body. And then Marric, wanting to comfort her, had had to touch her too intimately and destroy whatever trust she might have come to have for him too.

She might not trust him now, but Marric was sure of one thing. She was too vulnerable to attack by slaves or lizards, standing alone at the water's edge. He moved slowly toward her.

She had her back toward him. Lifting the pitcher from her head, she knelt and filled it. With the care of a priestess performing a solemn ritual, she poured the water back. The place where she had emptied her pitcher lay unnaturally calm, reddened from the earth and the sun that simple folk said quickened it to produce frogs. Stephana stared rapt at the smooth water.

Her low cry broke the morning's peace. The pitcher fell unnoticed from her hands and shattered. A shard of the unglazed pottery rolled into the water and broke the spell she had laid upon it. As if released, Stephana leapt to her feet and turned, ready to flee.

She had been only a child who liked to stare out over the winedark Aegean, imagining, as children did, that she could see pictures in its surging waves. Then, as the child grew toward womanhood, she could see. What she saw terrified her. She ran from the visions straight into the cruel actuality of a slaver's hold.