Ash: A Secret History (143 page)

“I never asked the Lion which battles I should fight,” Ash growled. “I just asked Him how to win them once we were on the field. Getting me the job in the first place isn’t His business!”

Angelotti’s pale throat showed, under his helm, where he had left off his bevor, and now threw his head back and laughed. Several of the Visigoths they passed stared curiously. Rochester’s escort had the expressions of men thinking
he’s a gunner.

“Madonna Ash, you are the best woman of any in the world!” Angelotti sobered; his eyes still bright with affection. “And the most dangerous. Thank God you are our commander. I shudder to think how it would have been, otherwise.”

“Well, you’d still be ass-upwards on a gun-carriage, for one thing, and the world would have been spared one more mad gun-captain…”

“I will see who I may speak with among the Visigoth gunners, during this truce. Meantime, madonna—” Angelotti’s gold curls, clamped down by his sallet, were dulled by the dank morning. He lifted his steel-covered arm, pointing: “There, madonna. See? That is where she expects you.”

In a rattle of scabbards on armour, they rode forward. Ash saw the Visigoth woman turn away from her commanders and walk out to a little awning, set up in a space in the middle of the camp. A table, two ornate chairs, and a plain canvas awning: set in the middle of thirty yards of bare earth. No room for anything to be concealed, and anything done there would be public.

Public, but not overheard, she reflected, judging the distance to the surrounding Visigoth
qa’ids, ’arifs, nazirs,
and troops.

The ’
arif
Alderic, as she expected, stepped forward from among the units of soldiers.

“Please you to join the Captain-General,” he said, formally.

Ash dismounted, slinging her reins to Rochester’s page. She kept one hand automatically on the hilt of her sword, palm flat against the cold metal of the cross.

“I accept the truce,” she replied, equally formally. Surveying thirty yards of unoccupied, trodden earth, with the table in the middle of it, she thought
What
a target for the archers.

“Your weapons,
jund
Ash.”

Regretfully, she unbuckled her sword-belt, handing him sword, scabbard and dagger together in a tangle of leather straps. With a nod of acknowledgement, she went forward.

Under the laminated plates of her backplate, under the pinked silk arming doublet, sweat dampened the skin between her shoulder-blades as she walked out across the open space.

The Faris, seated at the small table under the awning, stood up as Ash came within ten yards of her, holding her hands out from her sides. Her hands were bare, and empty. The white robes over her coat of plates and mail hauberk might easily conceal a dagger. Ash contented herself with leaving her bevor up, and tilting her sallet for a clearer view of the Visigoth woman; leaving steel plate and riveted mail to cope with any theoretical stiletto.

“I would have had wine set out for us,” the Faris said, as soon as Ash came within speaking distance, “but I thought you would not drink it.”

“Damn right.” Ash stopped, for a moment, resting her gauntleted palms on the back of the carved white oaken chair. Through the linen, she felt the shapes of the ornamental carved pomegranates. She looked down at the Faris, seating herself again on the opposite chair. The remarkable face – familiar to her only from scratched, polished metal mirrors, and the dark, glassy pools of river backwaters – still shocked her: a churning sensation somewhere in her gut.

“But in that case,” Ash added, “we get to sit here and freeze our asses off, and be thirsty.”

She managed a pragmatic, confident grin; walking round and hitching up back tasset-plate and fauld to sit down on the ornate chair. The seated Visigoth woman signalled without looking behind her. After a few seconds, a child-slave approached with a wine jug.

The bitter wind that now shifted the morning mist blew filaments of silver hair across the Faris’s face. Her cheeks were white, the flesh drawn; and faint purple shadows lay under her eyes. Hunger? Ash thought. No. More than that.

“You were in the forefront of the defence of the walls, yesterday,” the Faris said abruptly. “My men tell me.”

Ash sprung the bevor pin, pushing the laminated plate down, and reached for the silver wine goblet offered by the slave. The wine smelled, to her chilled nose, merely like wine. She clamped her mouth over the edge of the goblet, tilted it, from long practice appearing to drink deeply; put it down, and wiped the wine from her lips with the gauntleted heel of her hand. No liquid entered her mouth.

“You won’t take this place by assault.” She looked from the flat area, towards Dijon. From the ground, the grey and white walls and towers appeared satisfactorily solid and appallingly tall. She noted the interview was being conducted well away from the remaining saps, creeping ever closer under the earth. “Hell. It really does look nasty from out here. Glad I’m not on the outside! Golem siege-towers or not…”

The Faris, ignoring her, persisted: “You were fighting!”

The Visigoth woman’s tone told her much. Ash kept her expression calm, friendly, and confident; and listened to the note of extreme strain.

“Of course I was fighting.”

“But you were silent! You asked the Stone Golem nothing! I know you asked for nothing, no tactics; I asked it!”

The lemon-yellow of the rising sun paled to white. With the mist dispersed, Ash risked a quick glance around the nearer part of the Visigoth camp. Deep mud ruts, some tents ragged; fewer horses than she had expected. Behind the troops drawn up in ranks – obviously the best, for show purposes – she could see many men sprawled on the freezing wet earth in front of some of the turf huts. At this distance, hard to see if they were wounded or whole; but possibly whole, and just short of tents in winter. Faces in the ranks showed hunger; were thin – but not yet gaunt. A whole cluster of stone self-moving siege-machines appeared to be parked towards the Suzon bridge, either in waiting, or broken down.

The Faris burst out: “How can you risk fighting, without the voice of the machine?”

“Oh, I get it…” The armour would not let her lean back, but Ash carefully spread her arms on to the arms of the chair, giving the impression of relaxed expansiveness. “Let me tell you something, Faris.”

While her gaze avidly totted up the number of spears and bows, the numbers of barrel-laden wagons in the background, Ash said aloud, “I could already fight when I was five. They had us in training, the kids on the wagons. I could already kill a man with a stone from a sling. By the time I was ten, I could use a half-pike. The women on the baggage train weren’t there for ornament. Big Isobel taught me how to use a light crossbow.”

Ash flicked her gaze back to the Visigoth woman. The Faris stared, opening her mouth to interrupt.

“No. You asked me a question. This is the answer. I killed two men when I was eight. They’d raped me. I was in sword-training with the other pages by the time I was nine, with somebody’s broken, re-ground blade. I wasn’t strong enough, the camp
dog
could have bowled me over – but it was still training, you understand?”

Silent, her dark eyes fixed on Ash, the Visigoth woman nodded.

“They kept knocking me down, and I kept getting up. I was ten or eleven, and a woman, before the Lion ever spoke to me. The Stone Golem,” Ash corrected herself. A dry wind blew across the camp. Prickles of cold touched the little amount of skin she had exposed: snow-crystals stinging her scarred cheeks. “In the year or so then before I could get back to our company, I made my mind up that I would never come to rely on anything – not a Saint, not Our Lord, not the Lion: nothing and nobody. So I taught myself to fight with and without my voices.”

The Faris stared at her. “Father told me it came to you with your first woman’s blood. With me – I have never
not
heard it. All my games as a child, with Father, were playing how to speak with the
machina rei militaris.
I could not have fought in Iberia without it.”

Both her face and her voice remained calm. On her lap, almost concealed by the edge of the table, Ash saw that the Faris’s bare hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists.

“We have a conversation to finish. When I came into your camp, two nights ago, you asked me about my priest,” Ash said harshly. “Godfrey Maximillian. You were hearing him then, weren’t you? He speaks to you as the machine.”

“No! There is only one voice, the Stone Golem—”

“
No
.”

Ash’s impatient contradiction cracked out, loud enough to be heard across the open square of earth. One of the Visigoth
qa’ids
moved forward. The Faris signalled him back, without taking her eyes off Ash’s face.

“God damn it, woman,” Ash said softly. “You know the other voices are real. Otherwise you wouldn’t have stopped talking to the Stone Golem. You’re afraid they’re listening to you! It’s
their
voices you’ve been following, for the last twenty years. You can’t ignore this.”

The Visigoth woman unclenched her hands, rubbing them together. She reached for her goblet and drank.

“I can,” she said briefly. “I could. Not now. Every time I fall asleep, I have nightmares. They speak to me on the borders of sleep – the Stone Golem, the Wild Machines – your Father Godfrey, he speaks to me, in the place where the
machina
should be. And how can
that
be?”

Ash moved her shoulders, restrained by cuirass and pauldrons from a shrug. “He’s a priest. When he died, the machine was speaking through me. I can only suppose God’s grace saved him by a miracle and put his soul into the machine. Maybe not God – maybe the Devil. The hours don’t pass the same for him. It’s more like Hell than it is like Heaven!”

“It’s strange. To hear a man speak, here.” The Faris touched her bare temple. “Another reason for doubt. How can I be sure anything the
machina rei militaris
tells me is trustworthy now, if it carries the soul of a man – and an enemy?”

“Godfrey wasn’t anyone’s enemy. He died trying to rescue a physician who’d been treating your King-Caliph.”

Somewhat to Ash’s surprise, the Visigoth woman nodded. “Messire Valzacchi. He is one of the men treating Father, under Cousin Sisnandus’s care.”

The morning sun made Ash squint. A growing bitter cold froze the dank morning. The wind blew a flurry of white snow-powder across the earth, from the thin clouds massing in the north. Momentarily diverted, she said, “What
did
happen to Leofric?”

She was not expecting an answer. The Faris, leaning forward, said earnestly, “He returned from the Citadel in time to take refuge in the room of the
machina rei militaris.
”

“Ah. So he was down there while we were trying to blow the place.”

As if Ash’s mild, sardonic amusement didn’t exist, the Visigoth woman went on:

“He was there when the Stone Golem … spoke. When it repeated what the – other voices – said.” Her gaze flicked away from Ash’s face, but not before Ash filled in the missing phrase: ‘what the other voices said
to you’.

“I am not a fool,” the Faris said abruptly. “If Cousin Sisnandus believed that what my father heard was more than a product of his mental breakdown, he still would not tell the King-Caliph and rob House Leofric of what political influence we have left. I know that. But I know that Father
is
ill. They found him the next day, among the pyramids, under God’s Fire, surrounded by dead slaves. His clothes were torn. He had scratched away part of the side of a tomb, with nothing but his hands.”

The thought of those hands, that have examined her body with steel instruments, being torn and bleeding; of the man’s mind shattered – Ash kept herself from showing her teeth.
How sad.

“Faris, if you’ve heard Godfrey,” she persisted, pressing her point, “then you’ve heard the Wild Machines.”

“Yes.” The Visigoth woman looked away. “Finally, this past night, I could do nothing else but listen. I have heard.”

Ash followed her gaze. Hundreds of surrounding faces stared back at the two of them: at the fate of Dijon being negotiated under truce, in the mud of a camp with winter coming on.

“They follow you, Faris.”

“Yes.”

“Many of them men from your Iberian campaigns? And from fighting the Turk, over by Alexandria?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’re right,” Ash said, and when the woman looked back at her, went on: “Your own men
are
in danger. The Wild Machines don’t care how they win this war. For one thing, they’re telling you to assault the city, take it in a hurry, kill the Duke by sheer force of numbers; and that’s bad tactics, you could lose half an army of men here for nothing. That’s lives wasted; lives of men you know.”

“And secondly?” the Faris said sharply.

“And, secondly – ‘We have bred the Faris to make a dark miracle, as Gundobad made one. We shall use her, our general, our Faris, our miracle-maker – to make Burgundy as if it has never been.’”

Ash, speaking the words seared into her memory, watched the woman’s face start to seem grey, sunk-in, desperate.

“Yes,” the Faris said. “Yes, I have heard those words. They say it is they who made the long darkness over Carthage. They
say.
”

“They want the Duke dead and Burgundy gone so that they can make a miracle that makes the world into a desolation. Faris, will the Wild Machines care if the Visigoth army is still inside the borders of Burgundy when that happens? When there’s nothing but ice, darkness, and decay – the way it’s starting to be around Carthage. And do you think anyone’s going to survive it?”

The Faris leaned back in her chair, her coat of plates creaking slightly. Aware of every movement – any signal that might be an attack, a hand that might be going for a stiletto – Ash found herself mirroring the Visigoth woman, sitting back and away from her.

Another flurry of snow-particles dust-devilled across the earth, beyond the guy-ropes and tent-pegs of the awning.