Ash: A Secret History (190 page)

She leaned forward between the merlons and bellowed: “You don’t have to—”

The golem did not lift its head. Alone in some solipsistic world, in which flesh is no more significant than any other fabric, it dragged the semi-conscious woman with the broken shoulder around until she faced the north-east gate. Her ankles, under her long kirtle, were brown with mud, yellow with shit.

Gears of bronze slid and glinted. As she scratched and clawed at stone arms with the ripped fingers of one hand, the golem reached down and closed his huge hand around both her thighs. A sharp screech shattered the morning. Ash saw stone fingers buried to the second knuckle in flesh.

The golem lifted the woman up between its two hands. It grasped her at neck and thigh, front and back.

It wrung her body, like washing.

All noise stopped. Pink intestines slid and steamed, in the chill air. The golem released the twisted flesh. In her own mind, Ash tabulated broken back, broken pelvis, split body-cavity, broken neck –
don’t be stupid: you
can’t
smell it
from up here!

She blinked and looked away.

As far as she could see, in the cold air that made her eyes run, Agnus Dei’s gaze was fixed on the grey frost-haze over the Ouze river.

“Christ.” Ash let out a long breath. “Shit. How long have I got to come back with an answer?”

Onorata Rodiani, apparently unaffected, called up, “You’ve got as long as you like.
They
—” She pointed with one steel-clad, flashing arm at the refugees “—have got until Boss Gelimer loses patience. You have the woman who, until today, was his Empire’s first general and commanded his troops in Christendom. How long? Your guess is as good as mine, Captain-General Ash; probably better.”

“Okay.” Ash drew herself up, resting her palms flat on the battlements. “I’m on my way. You can tell your man, we’ve got the message.”

Floria del Guiz said, “If I kill her, six hundred people die.”

Ash followed the Duchess of Burgundy through the cloisters of St Stephen’s – six streets back from the north-east gate – which Jonvelle’s men had judged a safe place for keeping the Faris under guard.

“If you don’t kill her,
everybody
dies.”

“I’m not dead yet,” Florian snarled, as the large group of armed men entered the main buildings. “If I
do
get killed, it may be under circumstances where the Burgundians can hunt again – I’m thinking about six hundred people out there. They’re the ones I’ll have to watch die.”

“No reason for you to
watch
it,” Ash observed pragmatically. She caught the look on Florian’s face; sighed; her pace slowing. “But you will. Because the first time this happens, everybody thinks they have to. Trust me, you’re better off staying away from the walls.”

At Ash’s shoulder, Jonvelle said, “And this from you, Captain-General, who are planning to sally out of the postern gate and rescue who you can of them?”

Momentarily embarrassed, Ash glanced back to check that her own men, as well as the Burgundians, were following her towards the refectory.

“It’s worth a try,” she muttered. “You ask those poor bastards outside.”

The cloisters behind her rang to the boots of soldiers, on flagstones striped white with frost. Even at noon, frost still lay where each shadow of a pillar was cast. Inside, entering the great whitewashed refectory, there was at least the heat from the kitchens. Ash ignored the monks, scurrying in the background; and the sounds from the dormitories, taken over for nursing the sick.

“Look, Florian, I’ll put it this way – do you want to order the Faris’s execution now, so the Burgundians are happy with it, or do you want to watch me and my lord Oxford and the company get killed by the army, trying to reach her?”

Florian made a spitting sound; gave Ash a look of frustrated, contemptuous anger. “You mean that, don’t you.”

The exiled English Earl gave her a quizzical look, but what he said was, “Madam, I also agree.”

A woman stood up in the crowded refectory.

Winter sunlight bounced back from the white walls. It illuminated motes of dust; the woman’s hacked-off silver hair. A woman, standing up between Visigoth slaves in short tunics; a woman wearing European doublet and hose that were plainly not made for her, were far too big. The chopped-off hair threw her cheeks into sharp relief. No smeared dirt could give the impression of scars. She looked very young. She wore neither armour, nor sword.

Across the few remaining wooden benches and tables, Ash found herself facing the Faris.

The child-slave at the Faris’s left was Violante, shivering in the cold. A grey-haired fat woman sat on the floor, half hiding under the long table: Adelize.

Floria del Guiz walked past Ash and put herself between them.

“Have some sense,” she said. “We have to send her back, to save lives. Right now! She’s no danger while I’m alive.”

Ash glared at the woman blocking her way. She thumbed her sword loose from the scabbard’s tension. “You might not have noticed, but there’s a fucking war on. While you’re alive, yes; but that might not be for long!”

Floria made a wry mouth, and flapped her hand as if pushing the gesture with the sword away. When she spoke, it was not a plea, but irritable scorn:

“For Christ’s sake, Ash! If you won’t save the people out there, here’s another reason to keep her alive for a few hours – think about this, if nothing else:
up until today, she’s been the Visigoth army commander.
”

“Shit.” Ash looked away from the Faris, to Floria. “You
have
been paying attention while you’ve been company doctor.”

The surgeon-Duchess, dishevelled and oddly dignified, repeated, “Visigoth army commander. Think how much she knows about this siege. She knows what’s happened
after
she stopped reporting through the Stone Golem! That’s
weeks!
She can tell us what it’s like out there
now!
”

“But the
Wild Machines—
”

“Ash, you’re going to have to talk to her. Debrief her. Then we send her out again, to Gelimer. And we pray,” Floria said, “that he doesn’t start a massacre out there before we do it.”

The immediate rush of people into the room behind them slowed. Ash became aware of men-at-arms spreading out: her units, and Burgundian army units, and Jonvelle talking urgently to the just-arrived Olivier de la Marche. She caught the eye of Robert Anselm; held up a warning hand.
No action yet.

“Do you know what you’re risking?”

Floria’s brows went up. She looked momentarily very like her younger half-brother. “I know I’m risking six hundred people’s lives out there, if King-Caliph Gelimer decides to start killing them in the next few minutes and not the next few hours.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“No, but it’s true, too.”

“
Shit.
” Ash gazed around.

She registered Angelotti’s presence at the refectory door: the master gunner talking excitedly to Colonel Bajezet. Apart from the Burgundian troops surrounding the Visigoths, there was a woman in green there – Soeur-Maîtresse Simeon – obliviously and waspishly trying to coax Adelize out from under the table.

The fat, drooling, white-haired woman wept and flapped her hands, slapping the nun’s hands away.

At Ash’s side, Fernando del Guiz tried to conceal an expression of disgust. She looked away from him, feeling heat, knowing her cheeks were reddening.

“Fucking Christ!” she exclaimed bitterly, fists on hips. “We’re going to have the whole bloody
town
in here. Roberto! Seal this room off!”

Anselm did not look to the surgeon-Duchess for permission. Jonvelle moved to intercept him, and only stepped back at Floria’s acerbic order: “No one else in here – unless it’s the Abbot!”

“This is a Michaelmas Fair,” John de Vere sighed. “Captain, an enemy commander in one’s hands is not to be despised; this might turn the siege. And though the matter concerns more men than there are in Dijon, we have men here whom we command, whose lives should not be spent needlessly.”

Fernando del Guiz folded his arms, regarding the monastery room with bewildered confusion. He shook his head; laughed with an expression that plainly said
What else can one do?
“If I could see the King-Caliph’s face, now—!”

Ash gave an order. Two of Jonvelle’s men came to escort him outside. He went with no protest.

Ash turned back to face the Faris.

“
Why?
” she said.

The light from the refectory windows fell clearly on to the Faris’s face. With this second look, Ash saw at once how drawn she was: her skin a bad colour, her eyes red-rimmed. Her left hand kept feeling for something at her thigh. The mirror-image of Ash’s own gesture: hand resting down on her sword. When she finally spoke, it was quietly, to Ash, in the version of Carthaginian that one hears most often in the military camps:

“Don’t forget that I permitted the hunt.”

“What?” Floria moved to stand at Ash’s side, staring at the Visigoth woman. “I didn’t catch that.”

“She’s reminding me that she let the hunt go ahead. And that, if not for her, there wouldn’t be a Duchess now.”

Catching Florian’s eye, Ash had no need to speak to confirm that they were sharing a moment of grim amusement.

“It’s true,” Ash said, “she did.”

The Faris swallowed. Her voice came out taut. “Tell your Burgundian woman that. She owes this to me.”

“‘This’?”

The Visigoth woman switched to the language of southern Burgundy, speaking with a perceptible accent. “Refuge. Sanctuary. I gave the orders, I held my commanders back so that you could ride out into the wildwood.”

The Faris stood awkwardly in the European dress she wore, plainly not used to hose, or the short skirts of the doublet that she unconsciously kept pulling down. In the five weeks since they had met across the table in the Visigoth camp, she seemed to have grown thinner; or perhaps, Ash surmised, it was that she wore no armour, had no soldiers with her, seemed a much younger woman altogether.

“That was more than a month ago,” Ash said grimly. “In that time you could have travelled back to Carthage and destroyed the
machina rei militaris.
Now
that
would have been useful.”

A flick of fear on the Visigoth woman’s face.

“Would
you
go back to Carthage? Would
you
go so close to the Wild Machines again?” She met Ash’s eyes, her own red and puffy with long sleeplessness; and Ash had time to think
Is this how
I
look?
before the Faris added, “I would have gone. I could not. Not go so close, not when they’re here—” She touched her temple. “Not when they can … use me, without my consent. You are hearing them too.”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you!” Her voice cracked on a shout.

Adelize began to whoop and roar.

The Faris broke off, reaching down, and stroked the woman’s hair with tentative fingers. Violante gave her a look of contempt and knelt down and took the woman into her thin arms, straining to reach around her shoulders.

“Not to be afraid,” Violante said in the slaves’ Carthaginian that Ash hardly understood. “Adelize; not to be afraid.”

The woman Adelize gently pushed Violante back, stroking the front of the girl’s tunic – no, not the tunic; Ash saw. Stroking the bulge of a body, small and moving, that wriggled itself up to Violante’s neckline.

Ash watched as the liver-and-white rat licked her mother’s fingers.

Adelize stroked it. She spluttered, “Poor, poor! Not to mind. Easy, easy. Not to be afraid.”

“I talked with my father Leofric.” The Faris’s hand did not stop stroking Adelize’s hair.

“He can talk?” Ash asked sardonically.

“He and I, we have tried to persuade the lord Caliph Gelimer that the Stone Golem must be destroyed. He will not do it. Gelimer believes nothing my father says. All this of the Wild Machines is, he says, a political trick of House Leofric’s; nothing that he will act upon.”

“Fucking hell!” Ash said, overriding both Florian and John de Vere. “You’ve got two legions out there, what was stopping you killing Gelimer, going back to Carthage, and hammering the Stone Golem into gravel?
What?
”

Her anger faded with the bewildered look on the woman’s face.

She’s heard the Stone Golem for twenty years, had it as her advisor in combat for as long as she remembers, and everything she’s done in her life has been for the King-Caliph: no, going home at the head of an armed rebellion is something she wouldn’t contemplate
—

“I know that we have been betrayed,” the Faris said, “and my men are about to die, whether they win or not. I have been trying to save their lives. First, by leaving the siege to engines, not assault; second, by letting the Duchess of Burgundy live, to stand in the path of the southern demons. You would have done the same thing, sister.”

“I’m not your bloody sister, for Christ’s sake! We hardly know each other.”

“You are my sister. We are both warriors.” The Faris’s fingers ceased stroking Adelize’s head. “If nothing else, remember this is our mother.”

Ash threw up her hands. She turned on Floria. “
You
talk to her!”

Ash saw Robert Anselm’s gaze on her, realised that he and Angelotti were – quite unconsciously – staring from her to the Faris, and from the Faris back to her. John de Vere murmured something to Bajezet: the Turk also pointing to the Faris.

The surgeon-Duchess asked, “Why are you here in Dijon?”

“For sanctuary,” the Visigoth woman repeated.

“Why now?”

Olivier de la Marche strode forward, with Jonvelle behind him, to take up a place defending their Duchess. Jonvelle spoke, answering Floria’s question. “Your Grace, to infiltrate the city and assassinate you, one would suppose. I am with our Maid, Ash, on this. She will give you no useful information. Have her executed without further talk.”

The Faris, with the first hint of an acerbic humour akin to Ash’s, said, “
Amir
-Duchess, since you ask it, I am here now because now is the hour at which the King-Caliph issued a warrant for my arrest and execution.”