Ash: A Secret History (196 page)

Ash touched Robert Anselm’s arm. “I’ll be up at St Stephen’s.”

He frowned, but nodded assent; too busy celebrating with two women from the baggage train.

Once outside the tower, the cold moved her to uncontrollable shivering. She huddled a cloak and hood over her gown, and walked, head down, shoulders hunched, at a pace brisk enough that her escort – who had been moderately warm in the guardroom – swore quietly to themselves. Black ice covered the cobbles; she almost fell four times before she reached the abbey.

Yellow light shone warmly through the high Gothic windows. As she stepped inside, the bells began to ring for Lauds. The men-at-arms crowding in with her, she knelt at the back as the monks filed into the main chapel to sing the office.

You said I was a heathen,
she mentally apostrophised Godfrey Maximillian.
You’re right. This means nothing to me.

She caught herself waiting for his answer.

With the office done, she made her way to the abbot’s house.

“No need to disturb his reverence,” she told a deacon who did not look as though he were about to. “I know where to go. If you have food in the almonry, my men will be grateful.”

“That is for the poor. You soldiers have the best rations as it is.”

One of Ludmilla Rostovnaya’s men muttered, “Because we’re keeping them alive!” and subsided at Ash’s glare.

“I won’t be more than a few minutes.”

Climbing the stairs, she did not ask herself why she had come. As soon as the monk on guard outside the room gave her a lamp to take in, and she saw the Faris’s face in its light, she knew why she was there.

The Faris stood by the window. The northern stars wheeled in the sky behind her. Her face in the golden light showed tired, drawn, but relieved.

Neither Violante nor Adelize was asleep. The child seemed to be soothing the woman, as if there had been an outburst. The piebald rat scuttled across the pile of blankets, raised itself up on its hind feet, whiskers quivering, and niffed at the chill air that came in with Ash.

Ash pushed the door closed behind her.

The numbness in her mind felt colder than the winter outside.

“My voice is gone. There is no
machina rei militaris.
As if an explosion, in my mind—” The Faris came forward across the room. Boards creaked under her feet. Her steps were unsteady. “You heard it too.”

“I gave the order.”

The Visigoth woman scowled. She put her hand to her head. Ash saw comprehension come.

“Your confessor. Your Father Maximillian.”

Ash dropped her gaze. She took a few steps closer to her mother, where Adelize sat in the blankets. She did not touch her, but she squatted down and held out her fingers to the piebald rat. It stood up on its hind legs and licked, twice, very rapidly, at her fingers.

“Hey, Lickfinger. You can tell which are the boys, can’t you? Balls as big as hazelnuts.” Ash’s tone changed. She said, “I’ve lost my friend.”

The Faris came to kneel on the blankets beside her, putting her arm around Violante. The child’s thin body was shivering. “I thought I was dying. Then – silence. The blessed, blessed quiet.”

The liver-and-white rat elongated his body, stretching up to sniff at Adelize. She flicked a frightened glance from the rat to her daughter the Faris.

“I frightened her, I think.” The Faris met Ash’s gaze. “It’s over, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Oh, the war’s not over.” Ash jerked her head at the night sky beyond the window. “We could be dead tomorrow. But unless someone builds another Stone Golem before the armies of Christendom get to Carthage, it’s over. The Wild Machines can’t use you for anything. They can’t reach you.”

The Faris rested her head in her hands. Cut silver hair flopped over her brow. Muffled, she said, “I do not care how it was done. I am sorry for your friend. I only knew his voice. But I do not care how it was done. I thank God for it.”

She straightened. Her familiar features, in the lamp’s light, are blurred with tears; incongruous on that face as water on a knife-blade.

I had to be the one to bring you the news, Ash realised.

I had to see you realise that Florian has no reason, now, to have you killed. And every useful reason to keep you alive.

“You’re safe,” Ash said. To Adelize, and to Violante, she repeated: “You’re safe.”

The child stared at her uncomprehendingly. Adelize, reassured, picked up the rat and began to pet him.

“Well. I say ‘safe’. Apart from the fact that there’s a war on.” Ash grinned crookedly.

“Apart from that,” the Faris echoed. She smiled. “It’s over. My God. I still don’t know what you’re doing with my face.”

“It looks better on me.”

The Visigoth woman laughed as if laughter had taken her by surprise.

A cold, very deliberate, and multiple voice said in Ash’s head, ‘
THE FACE IS NOTHING
.
THE BREEDING IS EVERYTHING
.’

Ash said, “Bollocks,” automatically, and froze.

A spurt of sickness went through her, sinking from her belly to her gut. Dizzy with it, she said, “
No
…”

‘
THE SECRET BREEDING IS ALL
.’

“
No!
” Her protest is squealing outrage.

‘
SOME HAVE THE QUALITY WE NEED
,
SOME DO NOT
.’

“Godfrey!”

Nothing.

In the part of her mind that is shared, that has been numb, only the voices of the Wild Machines sound – like a muttering of distant thunder; far off at first, and now perfectly distinct.

‘—
SOME DO NOT
.
AND SOME HAVE MORE
.’

“He didn’t do it. No. No:
I felt
it. I felt the machine die. He didn’t destroy it
all—?
”

Ash became aware of the Faris shaking her arm. The Visigoth woman was staring at her in alarm.

“What are you saying?” the Faris demanded. “Who are you talking to?”

The voices of the Wild Machines speak in Ash’s head:

‘
WE COULD HAVE NOT DONE THIS WITH THE FARIS
—’

‘—
SHE NEEDED THE
MACHINA REI MILITARIS
—’

‘
GONE
,
NOW
.
GONE
!’

‘
BUT WITH YOU
—’

‘—
AH
,
WITH YOU
!’

‘—
WE HAVE KNOWN SINCE YOU CAME TO US
.’

‘
SPOKE TO THE
MACHINA
,
WHEN YOU WERE IN MIDST OF US
.’

‘
CALLED OUT
,
IN THE DESERT SOUTH
,
ALMOST WITHIN TOUCH OF US
—!’

‘—
ESTABLISHED THE DIRECT LINK WITH US
—’

‘—
WITH YOU
,
WE DO NOT NEED THE
MACHINA REI MILITARIS
.’

‘
WE NEED ONLY THE DEATH OF HER WHO BEARS THE DUCAL BLOOD
!’

Ash yelled, “Can’t you hear them?”

“Hear them?” the Faris repeated.

“The machines! The fucking machines! Can’t you
hear
—”

‘—
US
.
WE
,
WHO HEARD YOU SPEAK WITH THE GOLEM-COMPUTER
,
WHEN YOU RODE AMONGST US
,
IN THE SOUTH
—’

‘—
WHO SPOKE TO
US
.’

‘
WE DID NOT NEED YOU THEN
.’

‘
WE HAD OUR OTHER CHILD
.’

‘
BUT WE KNEW THAT
,
IF SHE FAILED US
–
WE COULD REACH YOU
.’

‘—
SPEAK WITH YOU
—’

‘
COMPEL YOU
,
AS WE COULD HAVE COMPELLED HER
—’

‘
AS SOON AS OUR ARMIES KILL THE DUCHESS FLORIA
,
WE CAN TAKE OUR FINAL STEP
.’

Deafened, appalled, Ash began to repeat aloud the speech that thunders in her head:

“‘Then we will change reality, so that humankind does not exist; never
has
existed, after a point ten thousand years ago. There will only ever have been machine consciousness, throughout all the history that has been and all the history that is to come—’”

The Faris interrupted. “What are you talking about!”

Kneeling on threadbare blankets, in an upper room not warmed by any fire, in the exhausted early hours of the winter morning, Ash studied the face of the woman kneeling beside her. The same face, eyes, body. But not mind.

Ash stared at the Faris. “You’re not hearing this.”

‘
SHE NEEDED THE GOLEM-COMPUTER
,
YOUR SISTER NO LONGER HEARS OUR VOICES
.’

Dry-lipped, Ash said, “But I do.”

“You do what?” the Faris demanded. A shrill note invaded her voice; as if she would wilfully not understand. She sat back on her heels, away from Ash.

Ash began to shake. Winter’s cold bites deep. Violante stared at her. Adelize, as if her daughter’s tone disturbed her, cautiously reached out and touched Ash’s arm.

Ash ignored her.

“I still hear the Wild Machines. Without the Stone Golem,” she said. Immediate realisation hit her. “Godfrey. He did that for nothing. He’s died for nothing. And I told him to do it.”

‘
YOUR BIRTH
:
ONLY LUCK
—’

‘—
A FLUKE
;
A CAST OF FORTUNE
—’

‘
YOU CAN DO NOTHING BUT THIS
,
BUT IT IS ENOUGH
.’

The multiple, inhuman voices whisper in her mind:

‘
ASH
.
YOU ARE THE SUCCESSFUL EXPERIMENT
,
NOT YOUR SISTER
.’

  Message: #423 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash

Date:    20/12/00 at 05.44 p.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna-

Fifty-seven hours straight. I slept twice: once for two hours and once for three. I think I shall be able to get through the last of it (if only in first draft English) in one go. Then we shall see what we have. I’ll send the whole thing through when I get to the end.

My God. Poor Ash.

I woke up actually shouting aloud. DELENDA EST CARTHAGO! ‘Carthage must be destroyed.’

I thought it was the cold that had woken me – nights are bitter here, even with the heating – but no, it was that: words that I can’t get out of my head.

I keep thinking of Vaughan Davies’s metaphor, of human existence in the past picked up and shaken – as if it were all a jigsaw, falling back together again with the same pieces but in a different order. If we find ‘delenda est Carthago’ put by Florus into the mouth of a Roman senator; if we read in Pliny, now, that Cato ‘…cum clamaret omni senatu Carthaginem delendum’ (‘that he vociferated at every [meeting of the] Senate [that] Carthage [was] to be destroyed’), then – where was it before?

Here, with Ash. Who no longer exists, except in what I suppose I must begin to call the First History. A first history overwritten, like a file, with a later arrangement of the data: our ‘second’ history.

Although fragments of the data remain in OUR history, OUR past, I have seen them fading. She has become myth, legend, fiction.

Even though, as I read, I hear her speaking to me.

Blame lack of sleep. If I’m beginning to dream in Latin, it’s no great surprise. I’m eating, sleeping, and breathing the Sible Hedingham manuscript. It is – I am convinced – it IS our ‘previous’ history.

Tami Inoshishi and James Howlett came for another question session. I doubt they got much sense out of me. From what I can tell, they are perfectly happy with the theory that there may have existed, at one time, a genetic mutation which enabled the possible states of the universe to be consciously collapsed into something less probable than an average – into a ‘miracle’, in short. A non-Newtonian alteration of reality.