Ash: A Secret History (104 page)

Men piled up the stairs from Carthage’s main gate, on to the aqueduct. Ash pounded in their wake.

“Go! Go!
Go!
”

All the noise is behind her, now.

“My lord Oxford! You take the van,” Ash said brusquely. “You know the way. Geraint, Angelotti, take the centre. I’ll bring up the rear.”

There is no time and no disposition for arguing: they like the confidence with which she tells them what to do. Angelotti goes forward with only a murmured wail under his breath: “My
guns
…”

“Too much weight! Euen, keep your guys back; help the wounded. Angelotti, I want two lines of missile weapons behind us, and two ahead of us; don’t shoot unless I give the word. Geraint, take forward position. Oxford, get ’em moving!”

Something resonant and obscene in East Anglian English echoed back; she spared two heartbeats to look forward along the aqueduct and see her men gathering around the Blue Boar banner of my lord Oxford.

Dim starlight lit broken ground. It is already night.

“’Ere they come!” Geraint yelled from further back along the aqueduct.

Ash, leaning over the brick coping, saw the foot of the street – coming up from the harbour – all one mass of armed men. Visigoth militia flags. Without hesitation, she bawled at Thomas Morgan and her banner went forward along the aqueduct, out into the darkness, fifty feet above the ground, the desert, the stone statues of the Caliph’s Bestiary.

The brick cover of the aqueduct is covered with sparse, lichen-like grass: a green neglect. It skids under her heels, leaves cold black trails behind her.

“Run!” she urged. “Run like fuck!”

Breath burns in her throat, and the borrowed armour rubs her under the armpits, in the soft flesh there under the mail: she will have cuts and bruises, tomorrow. If there is a tomorrow. And there is,; there will be: the darkness around them is unbroken, a long line of running men, two hundred or so men with weapons and bows, pelting along the hollow echoing cylinder of brick that brings water into Carthage, and takes them out – out over the desert, under the black sky where different stars are slowly dawning, away from the towering fires of Carthage harbour, and the rioting streets. Outdistancing pursuit.

We have left the Stone Golem.

Out into silence.

We have left Godfrey.

Out into silver veils of light, shimmering across the southern sky.

Scaling ladders led them down from the aqueduct, four miles beyond the city walls.

Ash’s feet hit the desert dirt. She is estimating, thinking, planning – doing anything except paying attention to the silvery light gilding the broken ground.

“They’re going to be behind us! Let’s move it!”

Nothing now but to urge them on, her voice hoarse, her visor up, her scarred face visible so that they can
see
their commander. There are sullen growls from some men: none that she hasn’t marked down before as men who will do this, in the sweat and strain of combat. The rest – some still amazed, her reappearance startling news – act with brutal professional efficiency: weapons gathered, lance-members counted.

Keep them moving or they’ll start to grumble about losing,
Ash resolved as she pounded across broken ground, into the temporary fortified wagon-camp.
Don’t give them time to think.

Her squire came running out with absurd joy on his face.

“Boss!” Rickard’s voice squeaked into boyish registers.

“Get the wagons harnessed and moving! Don’t slow down!”

Moving in towards the wagons, Richard Faversham came level with her. The big black-haired deacon had a man in full Italian armour slung bodily over his shoulders – and he was running. Not staggering, running.

Dickon de Vere,
Ash recognised; yelled, “Keep going!” and fell back further to Floria and men with her, men carrying wounded and injured men on bill-shafts, and in makeshift arrangements of ropes, other men’s shirts, or just slung between them, gripping wrists and ankles.

Over the sound of screaming, Floria yelled, “I’m going to lose some of them. Slow down!”

It is an eternity in Ash’s mind since the tent outside Auxonne; now here is Floria –
Floria!
– dirty-faced and utterly familiar and bawling her out again.

“We can’t – leave them. Prisoners – be killed. Keep going! You can do it!”

“Ash—”

“You can do it, Floria!”

A swift flash of a grin, teeth in a dirty face, white eyeballs; and the surgeon said in the space of a heartbeat, “Cunt!” and, “We’re here, don’t worry, don’t leave us!”

“We don’t leave our own!”

That is partly for Floria, wavering on the edge of exhaustion as she runs; partly for the men with Floria. Mostly for Ash herself: the body of Mark Tydder is being carried with them, but not Godfrey’s body.

Unburied, and in a sewer.

“
Go!
—Wuff!” Ash ran into Thomas Morgan’s backplate as her banner-bearer came to a sudden halt.

And there is nothing around them now but their own camp, a square of wagons which men are rushing to lead out into column; two hundred and fifty men whose faces she knows. No sound of pursuit.

“Well—” Floria halted at her elbow, letting her impromptu helpers go ahead. She bent almost double, chest heaving. “You always tell me any fucking moron can attack—”

“—but it takes brains to get out again in one piece!” Ash turned and hugged the disguised woman enthusiastically. Floria winced as plate armour dug into her jack. “You can thank de Vere for this. We’re going to do it—” She crossed herself: “
Deus vult.
”

“Ash… What’s
happening,
here?”

Men pelt past her, running: Angelotti is walking up and down behind his lines of arquebusiers. Ash met Floria’s exhausted gaze.

“We’re trying to get to the shore, the galleys—”

“No.
That.
”

Closer now: they gleam, under starlight, pyramids, blackly glowing. A little further south, only a little; and cold sweat makes her wet under the armpits and between her breasts. Men are crossing themselves, someone is praying in a half-shout to the Green Christ and Saint Herlaine.

“I don’t know… I don’t know. We can’t stop to think about it now. Get the wounded on the carts.”

Wounded men, some who can walk, some who have to be carried – Ash estimated twenty-five men in all – are taken past her; and she turns her back on all Floria’s questions, leaves the woman to her ferociously active duties as surgeon; yells “Take the roll!” to Angelotti and Geraint as she waves them into camp, jogging to join the Earl of Oxford.

No sound of pursuit, and Euen Huw’s scouting men behind her have not ridden with news of any; but this is the heart of the Empire, they are close to the main caravan routes, and ten miles from the beach where Venetian ships may – or may not – be waiting.

Ash stared south across the intervening miles at blackly glowing edifices of stone.

Where the voice of the
machina rei militaris
had fallen silent in her head, among the pyramids and monuments ageless beyond the measure of man.

The visual memory in her mind is of riding past their flaking surfaces, seeing, under the painted plaster, the red bricks of which they are made: a million flat bricks fashioned from the red silt of Carthage.

It comes in the kind of intuition that is faster than words or thought: a knowledge, a certainty that she is right, before she ever goes back, plodding, to follow the line of reason that led her here:

The red silt of Carthage. As the Rabbi made the
machina rei militaris,
the Stone Golem, the machine-mind; the second one of which is not shaped like a man.

“Those.” Ash spoke over the noise of men shouting orders, horses neighing, the sudden shots of distant arquebuses. “The pyramids. Those are the other voices. The voices that spoke from the earthquake. Those are the Wild Machines.”

“
What?
” John de Vere demanded. “
Where,
madam?”

Ash’s fists knotted in her mail gauntlets. She ignored the Earl, stared at the saw-toothed horizon; spoke without any intention of speaking words aloud: “
Sweet Christ, did the Rabbi make
you,
too?
”

A ripple of vibration came, below hearing, so low that she felt it up through the soles of her boots, came grinding through earth and air.

Voices in her head deafened her, more surely than Angelotti’s guns:

‘
IT IS SHE
.’

‘
IT IS THE ONE
!’

‘
THE ONE WHO LISTENS
!’

“My lord, there is pursuit!”

“Captain Ash!”

‘
IT – IS – SHE
.’

Her soul shakes like a struck bell.

‘
NO
.
NOT SHE
!
THIS IS THAT OTHER ONE
,
NEW ONE
,
NOT KNOWN
,
NOT OURS
.’

‘
NOT SHE WHO LISTENS TO THE
MACHINA REI MILITARIS
.’

‘
NOT SHE WHOM WE HAVE BRED
—’

‘
BRED OUT OF SLAVES
—’

‘—
MADE OUT OF HUMAN BLOOD
—’

‘—
BRED FOR
,
FOR TWO HUNDRED YEARS
—’

‘—
OUR WARRIOR-GENERAL
—’

‘
NOT SHE WHO MOVES FOR US
,
FIGHTS FOR US
,
WARS FOR US
;
NOT OUR WARRIOR
—’

“The Faris.” Through hot tears shaken out of her by voices that deafen, she looked at John de Vere, Earl of Oxford. “They’re saying – that –
they
– bred her, bred the Faris-General—”

The Earl in his armour is clasping her arms, staring into her face, frowning under his raised visor that is splashed red with some man’s blood.

“There is no time, madam Captain! They are on us!”

“The Wild Machines – they bred her – but how?”

De Vere thrust out a hand, stopping his aide; his gaze fixed on Ash. “Madam, what is this? You hear them now? These – other machines?”

“Yes!”

“I don’t understand. Madam, I am but a simple soldier.”

“Bollocks,” Ash said, with a perfectly friendly grin at John de Vere, his mouth curving in reluctant humour; and in an instant, voices thundered again in her head:

‘
SHE IS NOT OURS
!’

‘
WHO IS SHE
?’

‘
WHO
,
THEN
?’

‘
WHO
?’

‘
WHO
!’

“Who are you?” Ash screams, not certain whether she asks or only echoes; deafened, shaken, falling down on her knees. Steel armour crunches against the broken paving of the desert. “What do you want? Who made you?
Who are
you?
”

‘
FERAE NATURA MACHINA
:
⁹
SO HE CALLED US
,
WHEN HE SPOKE WITH US
—’

Ash shut her eyes. Footsteps ran either side of her, someone – the Earl? – shook her violently by the shoulders; she ignored it, and reached out, listening. Listening as she did within the palace of the King-Caliph, something in her mind which is at once a pull, an enclosing, a violent and sudden creation of a gap which must be filled—

“I
will
know!”

John de Vere’s voice shouted in her ear: “Get up, madam! Order your men!”

She is half up, on one knee, her eyes open to see his face with a trickle of blood running from mouth to chin – arrow-nick – and all but on her feet; then:

“I don’t care if the world falls in, I
will
know what I am sharing my soul with!”

A great masculine grunt of irritation. “Madam, not
now!
”

Two men pelt past her towards the moving wagons: Thomas Rochester and Simon Tydder, bandaged, with Carracci between them on a stretcher made of two bill-shafts and someone’s blood-soaked Lion Azure livery tabard. Ash finishes standing up, fists clenched, torn between the two urgencies.

“These are nobody’s machines. Who could own these—”

“Leofric, the King-Caliph, what does it matter!”

“No. They’re too – big.”

Ash calmly met John de Vere’s harassed gaze: a man intent on necessary orders, actions, emergency measures.

“They know about the Faris. The ‘one who listens’. If she’s theirs— But does
she
know about the Wild Machines? She’s never said a damn thing about ‘Wild Machines’!”

The Earl snapped, “
Later.
Madam, your men need you!”

Ash looks out across the earthquake-broken desert, back into darkness: the black city five miles away which has seen two deaths before this bloody shambles: Godfrey and her unborn child. She thinks herself bitter now; stronger; morally compromised, perhaps. Revenge is not so easy.

She is no longer free to be only a soldier. Perhaps she never has been.

“My lord –
you
brought ‘em in,
you
take ’em out!”

Ash clasped the Earl’s armoured hand and forearm, with a fierce grin. Bright-eyed behind her visor, she is all legs, cropped hair, broad shoulders, warrior-woman.

“Some choices don’t
have
a right answer. Get my guys out! I’ll follow.”

“Madam Ash—!”

“Carthage has done enough to me! It’s not going to do anything more. I will
know,
before I leave here—”

Across the black open countryside, under a sky of void, a dozen ancient pyramids burn silver, massive monuments of stone: and in her mind she does everything that she has done before, but harder: listens, reaches out,
demands.

“—
Now!
”

The stone paving rose up and smacked her in the face.

In that instant, before the channel of communication is shut down behind a violent, appalled wall of silence, what she gets is not voices, not narrative, but concepts slammed whole into her mind—