Byzantium's Crown (16 page)

Her glance slid to the tiny window, then back to him. The sky was lighter.

"Then love me," Stephana asked. "We have so little time left."

Thutmosis departed in a cloud of dust, leaving behind him advice to Heptephras that Marric would never have considered in his own house: arm the slaves. If raiders came, Thutmosis wanted them to protect his aunt and his inheritance with their lives. But arming slaves was profoundly dangerous; periodically the empire quaked at tales of slaves rebelling and massacring their owners, or roving as bandits. Granted, house and field slaves with swords in their hands were not as fearsome as trained fighters. Many would probably prove too broken in spirit to learn to hold a sword.

Why was Marric objecting, anyhow? Why Heptephras did arm the slaves it meant that he could find a chance to strike out for his freedom and that of his friends. For the villa slaves, Thutmosis' advice meant additional hours of work to master hacked-up shields and blunted blades. It left them aching and exhausted. For Marric too, arms practice was sheer misery. He might have dreamed of having a sword in hand once again, but the one he was issued was poorly balanced. He had wanted to fight against equals, not hold back his hand practicing with someone less skilled than a twelve-year-old boy, especially with Sutekh looking on suspiciously. The familiar habits of hand and eye meant that Marric had to force himself to lunge clumsily, to use his shield like a tyro and expose his midsection. Otherwise the overseer might fear him and contrive his removal. He knew Marric had been a soldier: best let him think he had been an incompetent one.

So, with the submissive manner he had learned all too swiftly, Marric shared the slaves' tongue-lashings. At the end of each practice he turned in his weapon under Sutekh's baleful scrutiny. For the rest, he avoided the man as if his life depended on it, as, in fact, it did.

Even life as a slave was precious to him now because of his deepening love for Stephana. Many times she would slip from the inner courts to lie by his side. For those short hours he could hear himself called by his true name and feel himself to be a man and a lover, not portable property. But gradually even Stephana's love contributed to Marric's growing depression.

One night he sat in his cubicle stropping a worn-out blade that he had managed to steal. Cast-off blades were melted down but never tossed away for fear some slave would do precisely as Marric had done. The whetstone scraped harshly on his ears. Though it set his nerves on edge (though failed to put an edge on the blade), he kept scraping stubbornly away.

He heard footsteps and tensed. As Stephana came in, he relaxed. He had no time to hide his booty, but in any case he trusted her completely. Concern widened her eyes as she saw what he had been doing.

"If they catch you with that . . . she warned.

"At least now I have a weapon to protect you with."

"I don't need that kind of protection."

Marric dropped the blade and took her roughly into his arms.

"They'll punish you if they find you with it," she whispered against his mouth.

"I am being punished by just living already. How do you stand it, my heart? Today Heptephras found me in the garden. I was looking for you. Yes, I know I should not have gone there. 'What are you doing here?' she asked me. Do you know, Stephana, I actually felt guilt? So I lied. I said I thought one of the tiles that bordered the lotus pool had seemed loose. She praised me for that, then told me to fix it later. I was ready to kiss her feet or caper before her because I'd been let off."

Marric's voice rose and he pounded one hand against his pallet.

"It's not bad enough to be sold as a slave. Now I feel myself becoming one. What will be left of me, Stephana? I don't know how much longer I can keep going."

Stephana held him close and would have spoken.

"The worst of it is that I cannot ease your way, cannot safeguard you as I would wish. Oh, I would give you joy—"

"You do, you do."

"But I cannot help you, cannot get you free!" He buried his face against her hair, kissing it, and then her eyes and lips.

"For whatever reason, Marric, that's not our fate now."

"Isis!" The goddess' name came out almost as a sob. "Once I was a man, not a slave."

"You still are, beloved," Stephana assured him.

"What will be left of me? A slave master and a slave empire. You heard: Irene cannot hold it safely."

Somehow—and Marric loved her the more for it—in the hours they stole together, Stephana found a way to let him feel like a man, a lover, and even a prince again. She would lie in his arms, head pillowed on his chest, whispering reassurance until they both slept. Sometimes she carded warnings to him.

"I have heard that Sutekh watches you at practice more carefully than he does all the other slaves combined. Can you be more awkward?"

"More awkward than I am already?" Marric laughed without joy. "One day, one of us will kill the other."

"There is already too much death in the world!" Stephana cried softly. "And much of it by your own hand. Have you forgotten already, my love?"

"What makes you think I would be the one to die?"

"If you kill him, you will be executed. Then what will become of—"

"What will become of us in any case? Say I submit. Say that gradually I become used to the collar. Then one day, perhaps, when your belly swells with my child—
^"

"Isis grant!" Stephana laid her hand over his as he stroked her, lingering over where a child might lie some day.

"Do you think I want our child to live as a slave?" Marric held her so tightly that she cried out. "Since Heptephras favors you, she might let us be paired together, mated like prize animals. Perhaps we would grow smug in our privileges, like some slaves I have seen. And that is the most we can hope for."

Stephana stroked his brow with her hands. He remembered that she had done that when he was weak with fever. "You were not meant to die a slave, Marric."

"How can I be sure? Stephana, I cannot trust myself. I told you about Alexa. Even if I got free, what sort of . . . "

She raised herself on one elbow and looked into his eyes. "Trust my visions, Marric. Trust me."

"Forgive me," he muttered.

"Forgive you? For helping me come alive? Marric, I need you so."

He fell into sleep holding her and knowing that his love for her bound him here more strongly then the collar that marked him as a slave.

For the fifth time Marric beat down the stable man's awkward guard. The man's entire left side lay open to a lethal blow. Marric thwacked him hard with the flat of his blade.

"Keep your arm up, damn you!" he shouted and stepped closer to tug it into position himself. Then he repositioned the man's oval shield. The Egyptian would never make a fighter.

"Hold it steady," he ordered, then bore down on his arm to see if he would be obeyed. Of course the man let the shield droop. So did his sword, an antique spatha that was far above the man's weight. Already demoralized, the stable hand lost his balance as Marric pushed him and sprawled onto the practice ground.

Marric gave him a hand up. "Try again, and thank the gods that you face me, not a Berber."

"A Berber?"

Why would anyone have told the man whom he might be fighting? Arms practice was simply one more incomprehensibility to the slaves. Perhaps Mor the slave wouldn't have been able to piece the story together either; Marric, schooled in the niceties of power straggles, found intrigue the breath of life. Stephana had prophesied only that a raid would come from the east. The emir there was pushing the Berbers out.

"You! You're here to practice, not lounge about like a lovesick girl," Sutekh snapped at him. His blade looked like fine army issue. "You heard me. Jump to it!"

"He's winded," Marric said. "I'll take him on again when he catches his breath." For a moment Marric forgot that Sutekh was the hateful overseer whom he wanted to kill. He saw him instead as a drillmaster, necessarily harsh in a harsh job.

"Who conducts these drills, slave?" Sutekh shouted. "You or me? I say you fight. Right now!"

Marric glanced about the practice area. All the other man were sparring and hacking more or less incompetently at one another. Slightly defiant, he folded his arms on his chest and looked meaningfully at Sutekh's blade.

"Perhaps your memory fails you, slave. Shall I beat it back into you?"

"With that sword, or your whip?" A vein pounded in Marric's temples: at last, at last.

"Come on then, hero," said the overseer. He swung his whip about to clear room for them and motioned Marric forward.

"Let's see how you do against a real man."

From the corner of his eye he saw a flash of white, saw several more following, and knew that Lady Heptephras was obeying her share of Thutmosis' instructions by sending the indoor slaves to do outdoor work while the men practiced. A filled jar poised against arm, Stephana watched dismayed while Marric and the overseer faced off. Marric nodded reassurance at her, then pointed with his chin: get away, get out of Sutekh's line of sight.

"Come on, Mor! I thought you were our fire eater."

Stephana disappeared, and Marric drew breath again. She was out of sight now, safe, in case he—he had no intention of losing this fight. Perhaps he could even make Sutekh's death look like an accident. But it had been long, too long since he rode with his army or met a real fighter blade to blade. If slavery had made him doubt he was a man, could he be sure he was still a warrior?

As he had learned since recruit training, Marric brought his weapon up in salute. The other man simply raised his sword and grinned.

"Pretty, pretty. Let's see if you know anything else."

The other slaves gathered around. Once Marric had watched a pack of dogs circling its leader and the scrappy, younger challenger. The pack had helped the stronger dog by hamstringing its rival, then tearing out the loser's throat. Marric had broken up that fight. What about the slaves, though? Remembering Marric's fight with the Gepid, would they curry favor with Sutekh by tripping him up?

He dared not think of that, or of anything but the movements of the overseer circling him, waiting for an opening. He was a big man but not a clever one. Marric could take him.

And then what?

"Ya illaha Allah!"

War cries shrilled out as Berbers dropped over the wall into the courtyard. Leaving their horses behind, they had crept up on the household. Doubtless they planned to take villa after villa until they cleared a path to the very harbor of Alexandria itself. After that first shriek they fought in silence.

Marric ducked under Sutekh's guard and gestured with his sword at the astounded slaves. "Get them!" he shouted. Horus grant that they fight like men, not property, heedless of who owns it. He started forward alone and was immediately engaged by a Berber. Marric countered automatically, and remembered that parrying a curved blade was different from parrying a straight sword, especially given the fine steel the Berbers used. Behind him he heard the screams that told him how quickly some of the other men in the courtyard had forgotten.

Keep your distance!" he shouted. "Get out the kontoi!"

The yard boiled into the confusion of a battlefield where screams, shouts, and the stinks of sweat and blood robbed men of their senses. The household, by sheer weight of numbers, might repel the attackers. Marric spitted one man, yanked his blade free, and pushed forward.

The field worker next to him shrieked. Blood gouted from his face and off the curved blade that had sliced half of it away. Another man took his place.

"Nico, get back!" Nicephorus had grabbed one of the kontoi and wielded it to deadly advantage.

"Not me, brother," said the scholar. "The safest place to be is at your side!" The Berbers fell back before him. As Nicephorus' arm tired, he dropped the lance and caught up a sword. His size made him nimble.

Marric laughed. All the indignities, the whippings, the enforced docility fell away from him in a shower of blood. Let Sutekh bellow: he could see that the slaves were following Marric's lead.

Again Marric shouted and gestured for the slaves to charge. They obeyed, some waving swords, others forcing the raiders back against the retaining walls with long spears until the only Berbers left in the yard were dead or dying, their blood mingling with the blood of slaves in the thick dust.

Ready to pursue the Berbers, Marric leapt at the wall. Nicephorus grabbed his arm. Marric caught himself before he struck him.

"You can't," Nicephorus gasped. "Over there. Regroup."

So the scholar was also a strategist? Marric breathed deeply to calm himself. A gash on one arm and scratches along his side began to sting.

"The city—" he gasped.

"Safe, for now."

"No!" Marric's eyes kindled. Now, while the household was confused, while people were still sorting out the living from the dead and wounded, or the slaves who had broken and hidden, now the gods had granted them all a chance to escape. When you find your own way, come back, Imhotep the priest had said. Well, he had found it. Nicephorus was beside him. Stephana, he hoped, still was hiding in the stables.

"What are you, Mor?" the scholar breathed. "Or who?"

"Don't call me Mor." Marric spoke fast. "The name is Marric—as if you didn't know!"

They ran for the stables. Marric slapped two house slaves on the shoulders as he passed. "Mount guard," he ordered. Most of the men simply had collapsed onto the ground among the wounded and the dead. They were too weary even to wipe their blades or feel pride in their victory.

There were horses and harness in the stable. Strymon might as well blame their loss on the Berbers. Marric was saddling a horse whose sleek limbs and arched neck promised speed and unimpaired wind when he heard an evil chuckle behind him.

"So the hero is simply a slave who would be a runaway. I think I like this, Mor. I like this much better than gutting you in a practice bout."

Marric's hands undid the saddle girth. One heave, and Sutekh would have the saddle in his face.