Ash: A Secret History (120 page)

She spared a glance to see how the Faris was taking her familiarity with Carthaginian politics.

“You’re wrong. Nothing matters to our King-Caliph but the death of the Duke and the fall of Burgundy.” As if they were sisters, the Visigoth woman said, “Father is ill; he took injuries in the earth tremor. Cousin Sisnandus commands the House. I speak with Sisnandus, through the Stone Golem – he assures me Father will be well, soon.”

At the mention of the
machina rei militaris,
Ash felt the nape of her neck turn cold. “You can still speak to it? To the Stone Golem?”

The Faris’s gaze slid away. “Why should I not?”

Something in her tone made Ash freeze, hardly breathing, trying to pick up every nuance.

“I tell the Stone Golem what the tactical situation is, and Sisnandus and the King tell me to continue here. I would sooner hear it from Father…” She sighed, rubbing at her eyes. “He must recover, soon. It takes two weeks, a month, to go back in person: I cannot leave here.”

Her eyes opened: her dark gaze met Ash’s. Ash thought,
There is something different about you,
but could not work out what it might be.

“You’ve heard the other voices,” Ash said. Not knowing, until she heard herself say it, that it must be true. “You’ve heard the Wild Machines!”

“Nonsense!”

The Faris looked for a moment as if she might jump to her feet. Her robe fell back further, disclosing that the woman was wearing her shift, with a belt and dagger fastened over it any-old-how; the signs of a sudden waking alarm. Her hand moved down to caress the curved knife’s hilt.

The Faris glanced over towards the nearest golem. Lamplight shone on its red stone limbs, its eyeless face. “‘Wild Machines’…?”

“They told me Friar Bacon called them that.”

“They
told
you…” The woman stumbled over her words. Her voice strengthened. “I – yes – I heard what the
machina rei militaris
reported, on the night of your attack on Carthage. The tremor disturbed it, obviously: it told me nothing but some myth or legend that someone once read into it. Garbled nonsense!”

Ash felt the palms of her hands become cold, wet, with sweat. “You heard it. You heard them!”

“I heard the Stone Golem!”

“You heard something speaking
through
the Stone Golem,” Ash said, leaning forward intensely. “I made them tell me – they weren’t expecting it – I can’t do it again. But you heard them say what they were:
ferae natura machinae.
And you heard them say what they want—”

“Fiction! Nothing but fiction!” The Faris shifted around in the chair, so that she no longer looked at Ash. “Sisnandus assures me it is a made-up story some slave must have read into the Stone Golem at some point – probably some slave with a grudge. He has executed many slaves in retribution. A temporary glitch, nothing more.”

Oh lord.
Ash stared at the Carthaginian woman.
And I thought
I
was avoiding thinking about this…

“You can’t believe that,” she said gently. “Faris. Where there was one voice, I heard many. You heard them too. Didn’t you?”

“I didn’t listen. They told me nothing! I won’t hear.”

“Faris—”

“There
are
no other machines!”

“There’s more than the voice of the Stone Golem—”

“I will not listen!”

“What have you asked them?”

“Nothing.”

To an outsider – and Ash suddenly conceives of that hypothetical outsider, perhaps because she wonders if slaves or guards are listening at doors – this would seem uncanny: two women with the same face, talking to each other with the same voice. She has to touch her scars to reassure herself, seek out the fading tan that masks the Visigoth woman’s eyes, to know that they are not the same person, that she is not in the same place as the dead baby and the boar wood.

“I don’t believe you haven’t spoken to them,” Ash said flatly. “What, not even to find out what they are?”

The woman’s cheeks flushed slightly.

“There is no
them.
What do you want with me,
jund?
”

Ash leaned forward to the brazier. “I’m your bastard sister.”

“And that means?”

“I don’t know what it means.” Ash smiled, quickly and ruefully. “On the most pragmatic level, it means I hear what you hear. I’ve heard the Wild Machines telling me what they are. And I’ve heard them say why they’ve manipulated House Leofric for the past two hundred years, trying to breed you—”

“No!”

“Oh yes.” Ash’s smile glinted. “You’re Gundobad’s child.”

“I have heard none of this!”

“Your – our father, Leofric; he’s been used. Is
being
used.” Ash stood up. She gave a sudden, wary glance at the golems. They remained still. “Faris, in the name of Christ! You’re the one, you’ve been hearing the Stone Golem since you were born, you’ve got to tell me what you’ve been hearing from the Wild Machines!”

“
Nothing.
” The woman also rose. She stood barefoot on the furs thrown down on the rough-hewed oak boards, her eyes on a level with Ash’s. Her head tilted a little to one side, studying. “This is some fantasy of a discontented slave. How can it be anything else?”

“This isn’t your war. It isn’t Leofric’s war. It isn’t even the fucking
King-Caliph’s
war.” Ash turned her back, stalking up and down the chamber, in and out of lamplight and brazier light. “It’s the Wild Machines’ war. Why? Why, Faris? Why?”

“I don’t know!”

“
Then bloody ask!
” Ash roared. “
You
might get an answer!”

The nearest golem shifted on its stone feet. Ash froze, waiting until it returned to complete immobility; as she might have done for a large, fierce, not very intelligent dog.

The woman said, “I … heard voices. Once! And— It is some error. Leofric will correct it, as soon as he is well!”

“You know what they are – I bet you’ve even seen them, in the desert – Alderic called it ‘God’s blessing’—”

“Be quiet.” The Visigoth general spoke with a sudden, immense authority. A little helplessly, Ash stopped pacing. She felt herself to be in the presence of a woman who had fought a dozen Iberian campaigns before she ever set foot in Christendom. Unarmoured, without weapons; the woman was nonetheless a warrior. The only crack in her composure came with her shifting, inadequate gaze.

“Look at it from my point of view,
jund,
” the Faris said quietly. Her voice shook. “I have three armies in the field. That’s my priority. That gives me enough work, twenty-four hours of the day. I do not need to bother with some
rumour.
Where would these other
machinae
be? How would we not know of them, and the
amirs
who must have built them?”

“But you know it’s no rumour: you
heard
—” Ash broke off.

She isn’t listening to me. She knows what she heard. But she won’t admit it – even to herself.

Do I tell her what
I
know?

A gleam in the corner of the chamber resolved itself into another body-form, covered by a white harness. Seeking a diversion of the Faris’s attention, Ash moved closer to it. She reached up and touched the breastplate, slid her fingers down over the fauld to the left lower lame, and the newly riveted strap on the tasset of the completely familiar Milanese armour.

“Bloody
hell.
Been carting this around with you, then? All the way from Basle? But then, I suppose it fits
you,
too!”

Ash ran her fingers back up her own armour, where it hung on the body-form, giving the strap that buckled placket to breastplate a solid tug. “Buckles could do with a polish. All these bloody slaves, you’d think you could manage that.”

“Sit down, mercenary.”

With that reminder of enmity, Ash remembered the matter of time, saw no clock in the chamber, could see no moon through the tapestried doorway. I won’t know, she realised. When all hell breaks loose, I won’t know whether it’s John Price putting his attack in, or the rest of the company being caught on their way in through the sally-port.

“You know this isn’t about armies,” Ash said, turning to face the Visigoth woman. “If it was, you’d be fighting the Turk, not Burgundy. Whatever they are, whatever they want, these Wild Machines: they’re getting stronger. You must know that
they
make the darkness, not some damn Rabbi’s curse. And now it’s spreading—”

The Faris shook her head, loose hair shimmering. “I don’t
listen!
”

“Do they call you ‘Gundobad’s child’?”

Dark eyes, under silver brows, watched her with a flat lack of affect. The Faris said mechanically, “Nothing speaks to me except the tactical machine. Anything else is history, legends that someone once read into the Golem. Nothing else speaks to me.”

She isn’t seeing me, Ash thought. She isn’t even talking to me.

Is this what she said to
Leofric?
The day that it happened?

The realisation was sudden, but absolute; Ash imagined both the woman’s first tentative questions to her adoptive father, and the lord-
amir
’s instant, panicky replies. And now her denial.

But how long has Leofric been ill? Ever since the quake, two months ago? Christus!
Was
he injured in the earth-tremor, or is it something else—?

And who’s this ‘cousin Sisnandus’? How much does he know? About the Wild Machines, about any of this… How ill
is
Leofric?

“So what’s ‘Father’ said to all this?” Ash demanded, sardonically.

The woman looked up. “I shall hardly bother him with such nonsense, until he recovers his full health.”

Aware of being on dangerous ground, Ash only watched the woman now, saying nothing.

Have the Wild Machines already spoken through the
machina
and made House Leofric set a guard on it? Can I ask her that?

No. I’m not getting through to this woman. Whatever I’d ask her – she doesn’t want to know. She’s shut down for the duration.

And I don’t know what she’ll repeat through the Stone Golem.

The Faris leaned back in her chair. The orange light from the oil lamps limned her brow, cheek, chin, shoulder. She passed a hand over her face. Some of the weariness went, and with it, strangely, some of her authority. She looked up at Ash, her expression acutely indecisive.

“Is your confessor with you?” the Faris said, suddenly, into the silence.

Ash gave a startled laugh. “My
confessor?
You’re going to have me executed? Isn’t that a bit extreme?”

“Your priest, the man Gottfried, Geoffroi—”

“Godfrey?” Stunned, Ash said, “Godfrey Maximillian’s dead. He died trying to get out of Carthage.”

The Faris put her arms on the back of her chair, resting her weight on it. Ash watched her look up at the plank-and-earthen roof, as if the answers were somewhere in the dirt; and look down again, meeting Ash’s gaze.

“I … have questions I would have asked a Frankish priest.”

“You’ll have to try someone else. They don’t come much deader than Godfrey when I saw him last,” Ash said coarsely.

“You’re certain?”

A chill that was nothing to do with winter twisted in her gut. “What’s one priest, to you? When did Godfrey Maximillian ever meet you?”

The Faris looked away. “We never met. I had heard his name at Basle, as a priest of your company.”

Spurred, impulsive, Ash blurted, “Would you know his voice?”

The colour of the woman’s face altered, subtly; she looked now as if she were unwell.

“You are the only other one,” the Faris said suddenly. “
You
hear. You and I, both. How else am I to know I am not sunstruck-crazy?”

“…Because we hear the same thing?” Ash said.

It was no more than a whisper: “Yes.”

Armour, golems, the Visigoth camp outside: all forgotten. Nothing else exists but the realisation:
She isn’t talking about the Wild Machines now.

Cold sweat slicked Ash’s palms. Dry-mouthed, she asked, “What
do
you hear, Faris?”

“I hear a heretic priest, persuading me that I should betray my religion and my King-Caliph. I hear a heretic priest telling me that my
machina rei militaris
is not to be
trusted
—”

On the last word, risen an octave, she cut herself off.

Almost in a whisper, the Faris finished: “I hear great voices, tormenting a heretic’s soul.”

Ash, holding her breath, released air slowly and silently through her nostrils. The golems’ perfumed lamps made the atmosphere heavy; both cold and stifling. Aware that one wrong word or gesture could lose it, she said quietly, “A ‘heretic priest’ … yes, it is; it must be. Godfrey Maximillian. I … heard him too.”

With that, the realisation hit home. She momentarily forgot where she stood; was back in the command tent, her dream of boars and snow fading, hearing a voice—

It really
is
him. Godfrey, dead Godfrey; if she hears him too,
it has to be!

She pushed the heel of her hand into her eye-sockets, one after the other, smearing away water. Rapidly, remembering the woman in front of her, she said, “And the ‘great voices’ you hear are the Wild Machines.”

“A dead heretic, and ancient machine-minds?” The Faris’s perfect face moved in an expression of sardonic humour, fear, forgiveness: all in a second. “And you’ll tell me, too, that I can’t trust the Stone Golem to win my battles for me, now. Ash – what else
would
you say to me? You’re fighting with the Burgundians.”

“And if you pay me to fight on the same side as your men,” Ash said steadily, “I’ll tell you exactly the same thing.”

“I will not trust an enemy!”

“But you’ll trust the Stone Golem, after
this?
”

“Be quiet!”

The flickering light of oil lamps gleamed on armour, on mail, on the red stone limbs of the golem.

Godfrey,
Ash thought, dazed.
But how?