Ash: A Secret History (77 page)

Amir
Leofric’s hands closed over hers, clasping them tightly. Ash met his eyes steadily. He was nodding, unstoppably, in agreement; his eyes were wet.

“I never thought to have two such successes,” he explained, simply. “It does speak to you, doesn’t it? My dear girl.”

“That was two hundred years ago,” Ash said. “What happened then?”

She felt him unite with her in a moment of pure curiosity on her side, pure understanding of the desire for knowledge on his. The two of them sat companionably side by side on the bed.

Leofric said, “Radonic bred the twins and their offspring together. He wasn’t a man to keep careful records. After he died his second wife Hildr and her daughter Hild took over; they kept minutely detailed notations of what they did. Hild was my great-great-grandmother. Her son Childeric, and her grandsons Fravitta and Barbas, continued the breeding programme, always tantalisingly close. As you know, as our conquests spread, many refugees and much scholastic knowledge came to Carthage. Fravitta built the ordinary golems, about the year 1390; Barbas presented them to King-Caliph Ammianus; they have since become popular through the Empire. The youngest son of Barbas, Stilicho, was my father; he raised me in the knowledge of the utmost necessity of our eventual success. My success was born four years after the fall of Constantinople. And so may you have been,” Leofric finished thoughtfully.

He’s older than he looks.
Ash realised the Visigoth lord must be in his fifties or sixties.
That means he grew up under the threat of the Turks – and that begs another question.

“Why isn’t your general attacking the Sultan and his Beys?” Ash asked.

Absently, Leofric muttered, “The Stone Golem advised a crusade in Europe to be a better beginning; I must say I agree.”

Ash blinked, frowned. “Attacking
Europe
is a better way to defeat the Turks? Ah, c’mon! That’s crazy!”

Leofric ignored her mumble. “All has gone so well, and so speedily; if it were not for this cold—” He broke off. “Burgundy is the strategic key, of course. Then we may turn our attention to the Sultan’s lands, God willing it so. God willing that Theodoric lives. He has not always been such a bad friend to me,” the elderly man mused, as if to himself, “only in this last illness, and since Gelimer got his ear; still, he cannot very well stop a crusade once begun with so many victories…”

Ash waited until he looked up at her, raising his bowed head. “The Eternal Twilight has spread north. I saw the sun go out.”

“I know.”

“ You don’t know a damn thing about it!” Ash’s tone rose. “You don’t know any more about what’s going on than I do!”

Leofric shifted very carefully on the edge of the white oak bed. Something squicked in the depths of his gown. The pale blue doe put out an indignant nose, and scuttled hastily on to his striped sleeve.

“Of course I do!” the Visigoth
amir
snapped. “It’s taken us
generations
to breed a slave who can hear the Stone Golem without going mad. Now I have a chance of there being
two
of you.”

“I’ll tell you what I think,
Amir
Leofric.” Ash looked at him. “I don’t think you have any use for another slave-general. I don’t think you need another Faris, another warrior-daughter who can talk to your machine – no matter how long it took you to breed that one. That’s not what you want at all.” She spared a finger for the rat, but it was sitting up on its haunches, grooming velvet-blue fur, and ignored her.

“Suppose I
can
hear your tactical machine. So what,
Amir
Leofric?” Ash spoke very carefully. The fog of misery was beginning to clear. Her body has ached from other wounds than this, if none so deep. “You can offer me a place with you, to fight for the King-Caliph, and I’ll agree, and turn my coat as soon as I get back to Europe; he and you both know that. That’s not important, it’s not what you need!”

The exhilaration of unguarded honesty filled her. Looking around the room at the three slave-children, she briefly realised,
I’ve taken to talking as if they’re not there, too.
Her gaze returned to Leofric, to see him thrusting his fingers through his hair, spiking it up still further.

Come on, girl, she thought. If he were a man you were hiring, what would you make of him? Intelligent, secretive, with none of the normal social restraints about causing physical harm to people: you’d pay him five marks and put him on the company books in a second!

And he didn’t get to stay an
amir
without being devious. Not in this court.

“What are you saying?” Leofric sounded bewildered.

“Why is it cold, Leofric?
Why is it cold here?
”

The two of them looked at each other, for what must have been an actual minute of silence. Ash read the flinch of his expression clearly.

“I don’t know,” Leofric said at last.

“No, and nor does anyone else here, I can see it by the way you’re all running around scaring yourselves shitless.” Ash made herself grin. It was not very close to her usual gaiety of heart; she still ached too much. “Let me guess. It’s only been cold since your invasion started?”

Leofric snapped his fingers. The smallest slave-child came and took a rat from him, cradling the blue doe with exquisite care in her thin arms. She walked unsteadily towards the door. One of the boys took the mismarked buck, twitching its whiskers, anxious to copulate with the doe; and at Leofric’s signal, the slave scribe followed them out.

He said, “Child, if you did know of a reason for this intemperate weather, you would have told me of it, to save your life. I know this. Therefore, you know nothing.”

“Maybe I do,” Ash said steadily. In the half-chill room, her sore body ran cold sweat, darkening the robe gathered up under her armpits. She went on desperately, “Something I may have seen – I was there when the sun went out! – it might tell you—”

“No.” He rested his chin on the knuckle of his first finger, nestling it in his untidy white beard. He held her gaze. She felt something tighten under her solar plexus: fear slowly squeezing her breath. She thought, Not now! Not when I’ve just found out I can
make
it talk to me—

Not now, under any circumstances.

“You’re still at war, I saw that coming in,” she said, her voice still steady. “Whatever victory you had can’t have been final, can it? I’ll give you the disposition and array of Charles of Burgundy’s troops. You and the King-Caliph think I’m a Faris, a magical general, but you’re forgetting:
I was one of Charles’s hired officers.
I can tell you what he has.”

She said it fast, before she could regret saying it:

“It’s simple. I’ll turn coat, in exchange for my life. I’m not the first person to make that bargain.”

“No,” the
amir
Leofric said absently. “No, of course. You shall dictate what you know to the Stone Golem; doubtless my daughter will find it useful, if somewhat overtaken by recent events.”

Her eyes ran tears. “So I live?”

He ignored her.

“Lord-
Amir
!” She shrieked.

He spoke absently, as if he had not heard her.

“Whereas I had hoped to have another general, perhaps to lead our army in the east, I shall not have it under this King-Caliph, not with Gelimer to speak constantly against me. However,” Leofric mused, “this gives me an opportunity which I had not expected to have before the end of this crusade. You – not being needed, as she is – can be dissected, to discover the balance of the Humours
¹²
within your body, and if there are differences in your brain and nerves which make it possible for you to speak with the machine.”

He looked at her with an absence of feeling that was frightening in itself.

“Now I shall find out if this is indeed the case. I have always had my failures to dissect. Since there is no further use for you, now I may vivisect one of my successes.”

Ash stared at him. She thought, I must have mistaken the word. No, that was clear, pure, medical Latin. Vivisect. Meaning ‘dissect, while still alive’. “You
can’t—
”

A sound of footsteps beyond the door brought her bolt upright, grabbing at Leofric’s arm as he rose to his feet. He evaded her grip.

It was not a slave who entered but the ’
arif
Alderic, a frown buried somewhere in his neatly braided beard; clasping his hands behind his back and speaking rapidly and concisely. Ash, too shocked, didn’t understand what he was saying.

“No!” Leofric strode forward, his voice going up high. “And this is
so?
”

“Abbot Muthari has announced it, and called for prayer, fasting and repentance, my
Amir
,” Alderic said, and with the air of a man repeating his initial message, slowly, as if the elderly lord-
amir
might not have understood: “The King-Caliph, may he live for ever, is dead of a seizure this half hour, in his rooms in the palace. No doctor could bring breath back to his body. Theodoric is dead, my lord. The King-Caliph is dead.”

Stunned for different reasons, Ash heard the soldier speak his news with something approaching complete unconcern.
What’s a King-Caliph, to me?
She knelt up on the bed. The woollen gown fell away from her bloodstained body. One hand knotted into a fist.

“Leofric!”

He ignored her.

“Leofric!
What about me?
”

“You?” Leofric, frowning, looked over his shoulder. “Yes. You… Alderic, confine her to the guest quarters, under guard.”

Her other hand made a fist. She ignored the Visigoth captain as he gripped her arm. “
Tell me you’re not going to kill me!
”

The
amir
Leofric raised his voice to his slaves. “Get my court robes!”

A bustle began.

He said, over his shoulder, “Think of it as a reprieve, if that comforts you. We are about the business of electing a new King-Caliph – which will be a busy few days, to say the least.”

He smiled, his teeth shining in his white beard.

“This is merely a pause, before I can investigate you. As custom dictates, I can begin my work again immediately upon the inauguration of Theodoric’s successor. Child, don’t think of me as barbaric. It is not as if I’m torturing you to death as part of the celebrations. You will add
so much
to the sum of our knowledge.”

  Message: #164 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash / texts / archaeological evidence

Date:    20/11/00 at 10.57 p.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna –

Everything’s STOPPED.

Some trouble with the local authorities – we’re being forbidden to carry on with the digging on-site. I don’t UNDERSTAND how this can be happening! It is extremely frustrating that I, myself, can do nothing about this.

I thought it was solved this morning: Isobel came back, optimistic. I think-she had gone through ‘unofficial channels’ and greased a few palms with money. She drove back with Colonel █████ █████, who seemed very jovial, promising the use of his men for heavy work here where required. But this afternoon, STILL nothing is happening, there are obscure ‘difficulties’.

I am concerned; it seems to be more than the usual patronage and nepotism; but Isobel has been too busy for me to ask her.

One minor good thing, I suppose, is that it gives me an enforced opportunity to work on ‘Fraxinus’. Mediaeval Latin is notoriously ambiguous, and ‘Fraxinus’ more idiosyncratic than most. I am finalising the translation furiously! In fact, I am putting the finishing touches to the next section.

Since we’re encrypted, I can now tell you something about the site. What we have here is a beautiful midden. That’s a refuse-heap. Archaeology, as Isobel informs me, mainly consists of digging in other people’s dung. She, however, did not say ‘dung’.

You would not think – everything covered by suburbs: two-storey white buildings festooned with television aerials – that any of this was the site of Carthaginian and Roman settlements. Even the Roman aqueduct is pretty much gone. But when I walked down to the beach this morning, and stood there under a lurid dawn sky, with the cold wind blowing off the sea into my face, I suddenly realised that most of the worn and rounded ‘pebbles’ under my feet were actually bits of Roman brick and Carthaginian marble. Some of them might even have been pieces of golem, shapeless after five centuries of being rolled around by the sea.