Ash: A Secret History (71 page)

Ash shivered, cold deep in her gut. From somewhere she dragged up a grin, showing all her teeth. “What’s the matter, you decided I’m the one you don’t want? Hey, I could have told you that at Dijon! Or maybe this is where you tell me you want a contract with my company? Consider me softened up, you’ll probably get a good deal!”

She could tell she stunk from the expressions of the guards near her, and the more distant glances of the one or two men who might be King-Caliph Theodoric’s freeborn subjects, but her own nose was insensible of it. She limped with Alderic on the cold tiles. Her mouth ran on:

“I always thought it was warm enough, in the Eternal Twilight. This is fucking freezing! What’s the matter, the Penance getting too heavy for you? Maybe God’s pissed off with waiting for the Empty Chair to be filled. Maybe it’s a portent.”

“Be quiet.”

Fear makes one voluble. Ash cut herself off.

Doors opened off the narrow passage. Alderic opened one, bowed, said something, and pushed her through in front of him. Her eyes were dazzled by more light.

Ash heard the door slam to behind her.

A thick voice said, “Is it her?”

“Perhaps.” Another, drier voice.

Ash blinked her vision clear of dazzles. The dado of the room was lined with pipes and glass-covered lamps, hissing with Greek Fire. Oil burners stood in the room’s corners, and their sweet scent both cleared her head and took her back with startling immediacy to being in a tent, in the field, some year in Italy, with Visigoth mercenaries.

No tent, this. The floor under her feet was tiled red and black, old enough that her bare feet felt every worn dip in it. Mosaic tiles winked back at her in the light of twenty lamps.

The walls glittered, covered in quarter-inch square colours from floor to vaulted ceiling. The images of saints and icons glared down: Catherine, with her wheel, Sebastian with his arrows, Mercurius with his surgeon’s knife and thief s cut purse, George and dragon. Gold robes and liquid dark eyes stared down at her.

Shadows lost themselves in the ribbed ceiling. Under the pungent controlled jets of Greek Fire she detected a smell of earth. The entire wall at the back of the room was one huge mosaic of the Bull and the Tree, Christ watching her from where He hung, Saint Herlaine at his leaf-pierced feet, Saint Tanitta
⁶
observing.

It was oppressive enough that she missed what was next said, only managing to concentrate again as the echoes of voices died in the cold, cold room. She looked towards the room’s heavy, polished, square-cut settle and tables. Two men confronted her. A thin, white-robed man of about fifty, in the dress of an
amir
, watched her with lined eyes. Crouched by the foot of his chair, a man with the pasty fat face of an idiot watched her and dribbled.

“Go.” The
amir
gently touched the retarded man’s arm. “Go and eat. You may hear later what we say. Go, Ataulf. Go. Go…”

The idiot, who might have been anything between twenty and sixty, passed her with a glance from slant bright eyes, under thick fair brows and thinning hair. His wide-lipped mouth dribbled wetly.

Ash took a step aside as he went out, using it as an excuse to look back. No windows opened into this room. There was only the one double door. The ’
arif
Alderic stood in front of it.

“Have you eaten?” the
amir
asked.

Ash looked at the fair-bearded man. She could distinguish some slight physical resemblance to the retard, but his intelligence shone out of his lined face.

Knowing where his kindness came from – that it was an effort to break her by contrast – she nonetheless answered meekly in her best Carthaginian Latin, “No, Lord-
Amir
.”

“ ’
Arif,
have food brought.” He pointed to a second carved chair, lower, that stood beside his own; as Alderic leaned back out of the doors to give orders. “I am the
amir
Leofric. You are in my house.”

That’s right. That’s the name. She mentioned you.

You’re her not-quite father.

“Sit down.”

Her feet became warmer the instant she stepped on to the carpets that covered the brick-red tiles. An ash-blond man entered and moved past her, placing a shallow ceramic dish of hot food on a low table, and retreating out of the room without a word. He was about Ash’s own age, she judged; he had a metal collar around his throat, and neither Alderic nor the lord-
amir
Leofric took any more notice of him than they did of the lamps. A slave.

She hid the fear chilling her stomach by walking on across the carpet and sitting herself on the low oak chair. It was padded, with a back that came round under her elbows; she was at a loss, for some moments, as to how you sat in it.
Amir
Leofric appeared to be ignoring any likely infestations from this flea-bitten prisoner: he regarded her with a concerned, inquisitive expression.

The food – two or three objects that were yellow, soft and purse-shaped – steamed in the chill air. Ash scooped up one in her bare dirty fingers, bit into warm, brittle pastry, tasted potatoes, fish and saffron.

“Shit!” She slobbered the better part of a raw egg out of the pastry purse, down her wrists and forearms. In one rapid movement she licked yolk and white off, licked her skin clean. “Now, sir—”

She looked up, intent on taking a verbal initiative, and broke off, springing to her feet, careless of the stained shirt barely covering her legs.

“Oh, Christ, it’s a rat!” She threw out an arm, pointing at the
amir
’s lap. “It’s a plague rat!”
⁷

“My dear, nothing of the sort.” The Visigoth
amir
had a surprisingly pleasant smile, much younger than his lined face; teeth gleaming white in his grey-blond beard. He bent his head and chirruped encouragingly.

A pointed furry face emerged from the folds of his white, gold-trimmed velvet robes, pink nose first. Tiny pupil-less black eyes fixed on Ash as the animal froze. Ash stared back, startled at the eye-contact. The animal’s fur shone pure white in the softening lamplight.

Encouraged by stillness it glided out on to Leofric’s thigh, picking its way carefully over his robe. High haunches were followed by a sleek bald tail. Its body alone was ten inches long. It had (she saw in frozen horror as it emerged) a bare scaly tail. And balls the size of walnuts.

“
That’s
not a rat? Get out of here!”

At her voice the rodent froze, back curving into lordosis. Rats are black, are mice writ large. This, she saw with all the clarity of fear deferred, was broad at the rump, narrow in the fore-quarters. The muzzle seemed blunter than a mouse’s. It had small ears, for the size of its broad head.

“A different breed of rat. My family brought them back from a voyage to the Middle Kingdom.”
⁸
The
amir
Leofric murmured quietly. He put one weathered finger down and scratched the rodent behind its ear. The animal stood up on its hind legs, sniffing with a quivering spray of whiskers, and staring into the man’s face. “He is a rat, my dear, but a different kind.”

“Rats are the Devil’s lap-dogs!” Ash moved back two steps on the carpet. “They eat half your stores, all if you don’t have a pack of terriers; Jesu, the trouble I’ve had—! Filthy, dirty— And they give you plague!”
⁹

“Perhaps once.” Again, the Visigoth
amir
chirruped. It was a surprisingly silly sound to come from an adult man, and Ash thought she heard the ’
arif
Alderic snort quietly from the doorway. Leofric’s robe moved.

“Who’s my sweetheart, then…?” he whispered.

Two more rats came out on to his shoulders. One was yellow, marked with a sepia brown at the haunches, toes, and muzzle; the other, Ash would have sworn if the light had been better, was a pale enough slate-grey to appear blue. Two more sets of bead-black eyes fixed on her.

“Perhaps once,” Leofric repeated. “A thousand rat-generations ago. They breed much faster than we do. I have records going back through the decades to when these were plain brown – not half so pretty as you, my dear,” he added to one of the beasts. “These have known no disease for a century or more. I have many varieties. Rats of every colour and size. You must see them.”

Ash stared, frozen, as one of the rats reached its furry snake-head up and bit the Visigoth
amir
’s ear. A rat-bite will bring fever, sometimes death; even if not that, then pain like a needle stabbing flesh. She winced in sympathy. Leofric didn’t move.

The blue rat, delicate paws holding the unblemished lobe of the man’s ear, continued to lick it with a tiny pink tongue. She nuzzled a little in his beard, and then dropped down to all fours, and wriggled instantaneously out of sight in his robes.

“They’re your familiars!” Ash exclaimed, revolted.

“They are my hobby.” The
amir
Leofric switched to talk in French, with a slight accent. “Do you understand me, my dear? I want to be sure than you understand what I say, and that I understand anything you may tell me.”

“I don’t have anything to say.”

They remained staring at each other for a moment, in the lamplit room. The same slave entered and tended to one lamp, pouring in a different oil. A flower scent gradually imposed itself on the room’s air. Ash glanced over her shoulder at Alderic’s bulk blocking the doorway.

“What do you expect me to say, Lord-
Amir
?” she asked. “Yes, I’m some relation to your general. Obviously. She says you bred her from slaves. I can see that you did. Too many people here look like me… Does it
matter?
I’ve got five hundred men I can answer for, and despite what she did at Basle, I’m willing to negotiate another contract. What else can I say?”

Ash managed to end with a shrug, despite standing dressed in nothing but filthy shirt and braies, her hair cropped and stinking, itching with bites.

“Sweetheart,” Leofric breathed. To the pale blue rat, Ash realised. The Visigoth lord bent his head and the rat now on his knee stood up on its hind feet, stretching up slimly. They were briefly nose-to-nose, then it dropped back to all fours. He cupped his hand and stroked the rodent’s arched back. It turned its head and licked his fingers with a clean pink tongue. “Touch her, gently. She won’t hurt you.”

Anything to put off more questions,
Ash thought grimly, and walked back across the carpet to Leofric’s chair, and reached out an extremely reluctant finger. She touched surprisingly soft, surprisingly dry, warm fur.

The beast moved.

She gasped. Tiny claws fixed into her forefinger – she froze, feeling how light the grip was.

The pale blue female rat sniffed delicately at Ash’s bitten, dirty nails. She began to lick Ash, sat back, sneezed twice – a tiny, absurd sound in the huge mosaic-walled chamber – and sat up on her haunches, rubbing paws over her muzzle and whiskers, for all the world as if she were cleaning away shipboard filth.

“She’s washing her face like a Christian!” Ash exclaimed. She left her hand outstretched, hopeful of the rat investigating it further; and with a sudden jolt of fear to her belly, realised that she was standing so close to the seated
amir
that she smelled his perfume and the underlying odour of male sweat.

Leofric stroked his rat. “My dear, it can take many years to breed a variety. Sometimes the right colour will come, and then faults come bound up with it: retardation, aggressiveness, psychosis, miscarriages, deformed vaginas, deformed guts so that they burst of their own waste products and die.”

The blue rat lay down and curled up nose-to-tail on his lap. He looked back at Ash. “It can take many generations to breed true. To breed daughter back to sire, son to dam and sister. One culls out the unusable, breeding only from what is useful – for many, many years. And sometimes success never comes. Or if it does, it is sterile. Do you begin to understand why you may be important to me?”

“No.” Ash’s tongue stuck to the dry roof of her mouth.

The
amir
Leofric smiled, as if he were simultaneously recognising her badly hidden fear, and thinking of something quite other. He added, “You will note, these are most tame, unlike other wild beasts. That is a by-product of the breeding, and one I did not expect— yes?”

“Sire!” Alderic’s deep voice boomed. She turned her head and witnessed a sudden entry through the double doorway into the room of collared slaves, Arian priests, armed foot soldiers, an Abbot, and a man carried waist-high above the ground in a chair.

“Lord Caliph!”
Amir
Leofric hurriedly stood up, bowing, rats scurrying back inside his clothes. “Sire?”

The back of the room was full of soldiers, Alderic’s men.

Between them walked a man in the green robes of an Arian abbot – something odd about the cross on his breast – and an
amir
richly dressed and (seen at close quarters) rather younger than Leofric.

“I welcome you to my house,” Leofric said formally, in Carthaginian Latin, his voice achieving calmness.

A gesture, and the chair was set down.

“Yes, yes!” An old man sat in the chair, who had obviously once had red hair, but now it was turned dirty white, and who had had the warm freckled complexion that goes with it, which now shone mottled and dark in the lamplight. Skin hung loose at his arms, and stretched tight over his nose, brows, and around his mouth. He wore robes of woven gold tissue. Ash inhaled once and tried to hold her breath: neither of the slaves attending with pomanders could hide the stench of shit and his wasted flesh.

Theodoric,
she realised, appalled,
it’s the Caliph!
and found herself pushed down on to the carpet – trying desperately to favour her left leg – and Alderic’s mail gauntlet forced her down on to hands and knees. She could see nothing but the hems of robes, and richly tooled leather sandals.