Ash: A Secret History (189 page)

I am not sure, now, why I was so certain that some trace of the Wild Machines must remain, after such a fracture in the universe’s history as we seem to see the traces of, here. Purely, I suppose, this question –

If there had been no ‘black miracle’, we should not be seeing these traces of a fracture in history. But, if the Wild Machines precipitated the Faris into causing the fracture and altering the fabric of the universe, then why is there no trace of them having survived it?

If you want to wipe the human race out of history, presumably you want to be around afterwards to take advantage!

What HAPPENED?

– Pierce

  Message: #223 (Pierce Ratcliff)

Subject: Ash

Date:    17/12/00 at 03.10 a.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

Sorry, shouldn’t be posting in the early hours, can’t think straight, _but_

If the Carthage site and the messenger-golem are what you say they are, you don’t mean

>> What HAPPENED?

You mean: what IS STILL HAPPENING?

What will happen if you fly over the desert *again, * in, say, a month’s time? What will you see *then?*

– Anna

PART FIFTEEN

25 December–26 December AD 1476

‘
Ex Africa semper aliquid novi
’
¹

I

Ash felt the wind from the company tower’s door, blowing in past the group of knights: keen, and with a bitter, damp edge to it. Bewilderment gave way to clarity with a speed that surprised her.
Kill her and the Wild Machines do nothing. For the next twenty years. Minimum.

She said, “We have to execute her, right now.”

The Earl of Oxford nodded soberly. “Yes, madam. We do.”

She saw Jonvelle’s gaze go past her, and turned her head.

Floria walked towards them, stripping ivy-leaves from her shoulders; Robert Anselm close behind. The Burgundian, Jonvelle, bowed to his Duchess.

“What’s this?” Floria demanded.

Ash quickly looked to see where Fernando del Guiz was – a bare yard away: stark amazement on his face. Angelotti stood at the German priest’s side, one hand on the bollock dagger at his belt.

“The Faris is here,” Ash said flatly.

“
Here?
”

“You got it.”

“Here in
Dijon?
”

“Yes!” There was an audience, Ash saw, but nothing to be done about it. The company’s archers and men-at-arms formed a tight-packed circle, avidly listening. Euen Huw, stripping off ivy-creeper and his ‘Saracen’ chemise, pushed in beside Angelotti; Rickard, open-mouthed, beside Ash herself.

“Tell her, my lord,” Ash appealed to de Vere.

“Madam Duchess, report says that while we were convening with the King-Caliph, a party of unarmed Visigoth slaves approached the north-east gate. The guards did not fire on them; and were even less likely to do so when they saw, as they thought, Captain-General Ash coming back in under their escort.” Oxford nodded to Ash. “The Visigoth woman has chopped off her hair and dirtied her face. It will have been enough to get her in. All but a half-dozen of the slaves went back to the Visigoth camp; the woman then sits herself down and demands to speak to the Duchess of Burgundy, and to Ash, to whom – she says – she surrenders.”

“She’s out of her mind.” Floria blinked. “Is this true?”

“I see no reason to doubt Jonvelle’s men. I have, besides, seen her now. It is the Visigoth general.”

“She has to be killed,” Ash said. “Somebody get my axe: let’s get up to the north-east gate.”

“Ash—”

Amazed, Ash heard something close to hesitation in Floria’s voice. Jonvelle drew himself up; plainly ready to take orders from his Duchess.

“This isn’t a matter for
argument.
We don’t mess around here,” Ash said gently. “Fucking hell, girl. You hunted the hart. She’s my blood relative, but I know that we have to kill her,
now.
She’s what the Wild Machines will use, to make an evil miracle. The second you’re killed, that’s what happens: they act through her – and we’re dead. All of us. As if we’d never been.” Ash watched Floria’s face. “Like it is beyond these borders. Nothing but cold and dark.”

“I came only to be sure it was not you, Captain Ash,” John de Vere said briskly. “Otherwise I am not sure but I should have done the task myself.”

Jonvelle coughed. “No, sieur, you would not have. You would not have been obeyed by my men. We are at the command of Burgundy, not England. Her Grace must give the word.”

“Well, God’s grace grant that we do it now!” De Vere was already turning, giving orders to the Janissaries, when Floria interrupted:

“Wait.”

“Christ, Florian!” Ash shouted, appalled. “What do you mean, ‘wait’?”

“I’m not ordering any execution! I took an oath to do no harm! I’ve spent most of my adult life putting people back together, not killing them!” Floria gripped Ash’s arm firmly. “Just wait. Think.
Think
about this. Yes: I hunted the hart: she’s no danger while there’s a Duchess of Burgundy.”

The Earl of Oxford said, “Madam Florian, this is a hard truth, but men and women are dying in the streets of this city from siege-weapon fire, and if by the same accident we were to lose you, with the Faris yet living, we lose everything.”

“You were in Carthage with me,” Ash urged. “You saw the Wild Machines. You saw what they could do to me there. Florian, in Christ’s name, have I ever lied to you about anything important? You
know
what’s at stake here!”

“I won’t do it!”

“You should have thought of that when you killed the hart,” Ash said wryly. “An execution isn’t easy. It’s vile, messy, and unjust, usually. But there isn’t a choice here. If it makes it easier – if you don’t want the blood on your hands – then me and my lord the Earl and Colonel Bajezet’s five hundred Turks will go up to the north-east gate and do it now, whatever Jonvelle here says.”

Floria’s fist clenched. “No. Too easy.”

What there might be of an ache inside – for Floria, for the Faris; for herself, even – Ash put away, in the same way as she forced tears back from her prickling eyes. Ash put her hand over Floria’s; the woman still in the Noble Doctor’s long gown, fragments of palmate green leaves caught in her hair, her cheeks red with the heat of the hall.

“Florian,” she said, “I’m not going to waste any time.”

Robert Anselm was nodding; if was apparent from the faces of the company’s lance-leaders that there was no disagreement. They might look with all sympathy at the doctor; but in terms of action, Ash judged, that was irrelevant.

Angelotti said quietly to Floria, “It’s never easy,
dottore.
After battle, there are some men who cannot be saved.”

“Sweet
Christ
but I hate soldiers!”

Hard on Floria’s agonised, appalled exclamation, a soldier in Jonvelle’s livery tumbled through the door between the company’s guards. Ash narrowed her eyes to better see his sweating, distraught face under the brim of his war-hat. She immediately beckoned the man forward; then signalled her deference to Jonvelle himself.

“Yes, Sergeant?” Jonvelle demanded.

“There’s a Visigoth herald at the north-east gate! Under flag of parley,” the man gasped. He dashed the edge of his cloak across his streaming nose, and heaved in another breath. “From the King-Caliph. He says you have his general here, and he demands that you release her. He’s got about six hundred of our refugees rounded up in the ground between the lines. He says, if you don’t let her go, they’ll kill every last man, woman and child of them.”

The refugees and their escort stood in the excoriated no-man’s-land under Dijon’s walls, between the north-eastern gate and the east river.

Ash wore no identifying livery; had her bevor strapped on, and her visor barely cocked high enough above it to give her a field of view between the two pieces of armour. She rested her shoulder against the battlements of the gatehouse, knowing herself barely visible to any outsider, and stared down.

Behind her, an abbey bell rang for Sext. The midday sun cast a pale, slanting southern light. The crowd of men and women standing aimlessly on the cold earth seemed small, truncated by perspective. One man beat his hands together against the bitter wind. No one else moved. Breath went up in mist-white puffs. Most of them stood together, in ruined clothes, huddling for warmth; most looked to be barefoot.

“Dear God,” Jonvelle said, beside Ash. He pointed. “I know that man. That’s Messire Huguet. He owns all the mills between here and Auxonne; or he did. And his family: his wife and child. And there’s Soeur Irmengard, from our hospice in St Herlaine’s.”

“You’re better off not thinking about it,” Ash advised.

It was not the dirt that moved her, or the other evidences of their living rough, but their faces. Under the blank expressions that long experience of pain gives, there was still a bewilderment; an inability to understand how and why this destitution should have happened at all, never mind happened to them.

“Is the King-Caliph serious, Captain?” Jonvelle said.

“I see no reason why he shouldn’t be. Roberto told me they crucified several hundred refugees in sight of your walls here, back in October, when they were trying to force a quick surrender.”

Jonvelle’s face assumed a blank severity. “I was in the hospice,” he confessed, “after Auxonne. There were stories of massacres. Knights act sometimes without honour, in war.”

“Yeah … tell me about it, Jonvelle.” She squinted north-east, at the trenches and fortifications of the Visigoth camp; saw the wooden shielding that would shelter mangonels and arbalests. “They won’t even need engines. Longbows and crossbows will do it at this range.”

“Christ defend us.”

“Oh,
we’re
fine,” Ash muttered, absently trying to count heads. The estimate of six hundred would not be far off: it might even be a few more. “It’s them you want to worry about… Captain Jonvelle, let’s have as many hackbutters and crossbowmen up here as we can manage. Make it look like we’re concentrating our forces here. Then get some units by the postern gate.”

“You will get a very small number of hunger-weakened women and children to that gate,” the Burgundian said. “Never mind through it.”

“If it comes to it, that’s what we’ll do. Meanwhile…” Ash moved back from the crenellations, walked a few yards down the wall to her own herald’s white pennant, and leaned out over the hoarding. “Below there!”

Two of the stone messenger-golems stood a little way out from the foot of the wall. In front of them, under his gold-and-black embroidered white banner, Agnus Dei stared upwards. A dozen of his own mercenaries were with him; and a few more under a red livery that Ash did not recall until she saw Onorata Rodiani standing beside the Italian condottiere.

“Hey, Lamb.”

“Hey, Ash.”

“Mistress Rodiani.”

“Captain-General Ash.”

“They still dealing you out the shitty jobs, then?”

Onorata Rodiani’s face was unreadable at the distance. Her voice sounded taut. “Boss Gelimer was going to send your own men, Mynheer Joscelyn van Mander’s men, to do this. I persuaded him it might not be in his best interests. Do we have a deal here?”

“I don’t know. I’m still checking it with my boss.” Ash leaned her plate-clad arms on the stonework. “Your man serious, is he?”

Agnus Dei tilted his armet’s visor up, a straggling coil of black hair escaping. His red mouth made a mobile space in his beard, far below; his voice coming up clearly to Ash:

“The King-Caliph gave us orders to demonstrate his commitment here. These golem will go over and tear one of those peasant women or children apart, at the word of command. Madonna Ash, I wish we might deem that to have been done, I have no great wish to do it. But we stand where my master sees us.”

The dull light flashed off the flutings of his German gauntlet as he raised his hand.

The sandstone-coloured figure of the golem trod towards the refugees. Even from the walls, Ash could see the depth of its footmarks in the churned earth; could guess at the weight of each limb. Women screamed, pressing back against the Visigoth spearmen, hauling their children as far back into the press of people as they could; one or two men made as if to move forward, most fought to get away.

The golem reached forward with a smooth precision, bronze gears glimmering. Its metal and stone hand went past one spearman’s shoulder – Ash couldn’t see if the soldier reacted – and closed on something. The arm pulled smoothly back. A woman of about fifty kicked and clawed and screeched, hauled forward by the grip on her biceps. Two small children were pulled through the spear-line, clinging to her thighs.

A sharp
snap!
bit through the winter air.

The woman drooped and hung awkwardly from the golem’s hand, her arm and shoulder the wrong shape. Shaken loose, the two children raised square-mouthed squalls. One of the spearmen kicked them back into the refugee-crowd. Ash found herself muttering “thank you!”, knowing that it was, for once, a gesture towards safety.