Ash: A Secret History (73 page)

“I’m going to take some of you with me, I am going to
mark
you, maim you, mark you for life—!”

Saliva dripped out of her mouth, damp-spotting the baked tiles. She saw every crack at the edges of the squares where the clay crumbled, every black spidering mark of ingrained dirt. Her head and stomach throbbed, half blinding her with pain. A hot flush ran over her bare body. “I’ll fucking kill you, I’ll fucking
kill
you.”

Theudibert bent down to scream into her face. His saliva sprayed her as he laughed. “Who’s a fucking warrior-woman now?
Girl?
You gonna fight us, are you?”

“Oh
yeah,
I’m going to try and take on eight men when I don’t even have a sword, never mind any mates.”

Ash was not aware, for a second, that she had spoken aloud. Or in such a tone of adult, composed contempt – as if it were completely obvious.

Theudibert’s eyes narrowed. His grin faded. The
nazir
remained bending over, hands splayed on his mail-covered thighs. His frown indicated confusion. Ash froze.

“Like, I’m going to be
stupid
” she whispered scornfully, hardly daring to breathe in the moment of stillness. She stared up at faces: men in their twenties who would be Barbas, Gaina, Fravitta, Gaiseric, but she could not know which was which. Her stomach wrenched with pain. She sat back up on her heels, ignoring a hot trickle of urine down her inner thighs as she pissed herself.

“There aren’t any ‘warriors’ on a battlefield.” Her scornful voice ran on, trembling, in rough Carthaginian, and she let it: “There’s you and your buddy, and you and your mates, and you and your boss. A
lance.
The smallest unit on the field is eight or ten men. Nobody’s a hero on their own. One man alone out there is
dead meat.
I’m no fucking volunteer hero!”

It was the sort of thing she might have said every day, nothing especially perceptive.

She looked up in the yellow light at swinging shadows on the walls, and the rose-tinged faces staring down at her. Two men shifted back on their heels, a younger one – Gaiseric? – whispering to a mate.

But it’s the sort of thing
they
might say.

And no civilian would.

Not man versus woman. Military versus civilian.
We’re on the same side.
Come on, see it, you must see it, I’m not a woman, I’m one of you!

Ash had sense enough to rest her palms flat on her bare thighs and kneel there in complete silence. She appeared as unaware of her bare breasts and bruised belly as if she were back in the wooden baths with the baggage train.

Sweat poured unnoticed down her face. Salt blood from her cheek ran over her split lip. A rangy woman, with wide shoulders, and hair cropped boy-short, head-wound short, nun-short.

“Fuck,” Theudibert said. His thick voice sounded resentful. “Fucking cowardly bitch.”

A sardonic voice came from one of the eight men; a fair-haired man standing towards the back. “What’s she gonna do,
nazir
, take us all out?”

Ash felt a definable cooling to the emotional temperature in the cell. She shivered: all the fine hairs on her body standing upright.
They’re on duty. They
could
have been drunk.

“Shut your fucking mouth, Barbas!”

“Yes,
nazir
.”

“Ah, fuck it. Fuck her.” Theudibert swung around on his heel, shoving between his men to get to the cell door. “I don’t see none of you shits moving.
Move!
”

A thickly muscled soldier, the one she had seen get hard, protested sullenly, “But,
nazir
—”

The
nazir
thumped him in passing, hard enough to double him over.

Their hard heavy bodies cluttered the cell door for seconds, longer seconds than she had known at any period of time that wasn’t on the field of battle: seconds that seemed to last for ever, them muttering discontentedly to each other, elaborately ignoring her, one spitting on the floor, someone harshly, cruelly laughing, a fragment of speech: “—break her anyway—”

The iron grating that formed a door clanged shut. Locked.

In that split second, the cell was empty.

Keys jangling, mail rustling. Their bodies moved away down the corridor. Distant booted footsteps loping up stairs. Fading voices.

“Oh, son of a bitch.” Ash’s head fell forward. Her body expected the flop of long hair over her face, awaited the minute shifting of its weight. Nothing obscured her vision. Literally light-headed, she gazed up at narrow walls lit by the lantern beyond the iron grating. “Oh, Jesu. Oh Christus. Save me, Jesu.”

A fit of shuddering took her. She felt her body was shaking like a hound coming out of cold water and, amazed, found nothing she could do would stop it. The lamp in the corridor showed only a few feet of clay-tiled floor and pink mosaic walls. The lock on the iron grating was larger than her two fists together. Ash scrabbled around with shaking hands and found her torn shirt. The fabric dripped wet in her hands. One of the
nazir
’s men had pissed on it.

Cold cut her skin. She wrapped the stinking cloth over as much of her body as she could reach, and curled up in the far corner of the cell. The absence of a door bothered her: she did not feel less imprisoned but more exposed by the steel grating, even if its mesh was not large enough to let her put a hand through.

In the corridor, a Greek Fire jet hissed into life. Intensely white squares of light fell through the iron grating, on to the cracked tiles. Her belly hurt.

The stench of male urine faded as her nose numbed it out. The wet cloth grew warmer with her body-heat. Her breath clouded the air in front of her face. Intense coldness bit at her toes, her hands; numbed the pain of her cut forehead and lip. Blood still trickled down, she tasted it. Her stomach twisted, in a grinding pain, and she wrapped her arms around her body, hugging herself.

All I did was catch them off their guard at the right moment. That won’t happen twice. That was just bad discipline: what happens when they get genuine orders to give me a beating, or a rape, or break my hands?

Ash curled herself tighter. She tried to quiet the yammering fear in her head, bury the word
torture.

Fuck Leofric, fuck him, how could he feed me and then do this to me; he can’t mean torture, not real torture, eyes burned out, bones broken, he can’t mean that, it must be something else, it must be a mistake—

No. No mistake. No point in fooling myself.

Why do you think they’ve left you down here? Leofric knows who you are,
what
you are, she will have told him. By way of a profession I kill people. He knows what I’m thinking, right now. Just because I
know
what’s being done doesn’t mean it won’t
work
—

Another grinding pain went up through her belly. Ash pushed both her fists into her abdomen, tensing her body. A low pain made her stomach cold. It subsided: almost immediately it grew again, cresting at a peak that made her gasp, swear, and sigh a great shuddering breath as it died down.

Her eyes opened.

Sweet Jesu.

She put her hand between her thighs and brought it out black in the lamp’s light.

“Oh,
no.
”

Appalled, she lifted her hand to her face and sniffed. She could not smell blood, could smell nothing now, but the way that the liquid covering her hand began to contract and pull on her skin as it dried—

“I’m
bleeding!
” Ash shrieked.

She pushed herself up on to her knees, left knee screaming at the impact; pulled herself to her feet, and limped two steps to the grating, her fingers locking into the square steel mesh.

“Guard! Help! Help!”

No voice answered. The air in the passage outside shifted, coolly. No voices came from other possible cells. No sound of metal: weapons or keys. No guardroom.

Pain doubled her over. She gritted a high, keen sound out from between clenched teeth. Bent over, she saw the white skin of her inner thighs appeared black from pubic hair to knee, rivulets of blood running down from knee to ankle. She had not felt it: blood is undetectable, flowing over the skin at blood-heat.

The pain grew again, grinding down in the pit of her belly, in her womb, akin to monthly cramps but stronger, harder, deeper. A sweat broke out over her face and breasts and shoulders, slicked wet under her arms. Her fingers clenched.

“Jesu, for Jesu’s sake! Help me! Help! Help! Get a
doctor!
Somebody help me!”

She sank to her knees. Bent double, she pressed her forehead on the tiles, praying for the pain from her grazes to offset the pain and movement of her belly.

I must be still.
Completely still.
It might not happen.

Her muscles cramped again. A sharp, shearing pain cut off thought. She hugged her hands up between her thighs, into her vagina, as if she could hold back the blood.

The lamplight dimmed, gradually going down to a small intense jet. Blood clots blotted her palms. Blood smeared her skin as she held desperately on to herself, pushing up, pushing at the womb’s entrance; warm wet liquid running out between her fingers.

“Somebody help me! Somebody get a surgeon. That old woman.
Anything.
Somebody help me save it, help me,
please, it’s my baby, help me
—”

Her voice echoed down the corridors. Complete silence resumed, after the echoes died, a silence so intense she could hear the lamp hissing outside the cell. Pain died down for a moment, for a minute; she prayed, hands between her legs, and the swooping drag of it began again, a dull, intense, grinding, and finally fiery pain, searing up through her belly as her muscles contracted.

Blood smeared the tiles, made the floor under her sticky. Artificial light turned it black, not red.

She sobbed, sobbed with relief as pain ebbed; groaned as it started again. At the peak she could not keep from crying out. The lips of her vagina felt the pushing expellation of lumps – black stringy clots of blood, that slipped like leeches over her hands and away, spilling on the floor. Blood hot on her hands and legs; smearing her thighs, belly; plastering in warm hand-prints over her torso as she hugged herself and shook, biting at the inside of her mouth, finally screaming in pain; and then blood drying cold on her skin.

“Robert!” Her imploring scream died, dull against the ancient tiled cellar walls. “Oh,
Robert!
Florian! Godfrey! Oh help me, help me, help meee—”

Her belly cramped, contracted. The pain came now, rose up like a sea swell, drowned her in agony. She wished she could pass out; but her body kept her present, working against it, swearing at the physical inevitability of the process, weeping, filled with a violent fury against – who? What? Herself?

I didn’t want it anyway.

Oh shit no
—

Her ragged nails made half-moon indentations in her palms. The thick stink of blood flooded the cell. The pain shredded her. More than that, knowing what this pain meant broke her into pieces: weeping, quietly, as if afraid now that she would be heard.

Guilt shuddered through her:
If I hadn’t asked Florian to get rid of it, this wouldn’t be happening.

Her reasonably accurate guesses of the north (‘nearly Vespers’, ‘an hour before Matins’) gave way to complete disorientation: it must surely be still black day, not starry night, but she could not be certain of it. Not certain of anything now.

Her belly’s pain loosened and tightened every muscle in her body: thighs, arms, back, chest. The involuntary contractions of her womb died down, slowly. The immensity of the relief drowned her. Every muscle relaxed. Her eyes stared, fixed open wide.

Her breasts hurt.

She lay curled on her side in the lamp’s chequered illumination. Both her hands were full of clots and strings of black blood, drying to stickiness. A flaccid veined thing lay on her palm, half that size, drying. It trailed a twisted thread of flesh no thicker than a linen cord. Attached to the cord’s end was a red gelatinous mass about the size of an olive.

In the square of white light she could clearly distinguish its tadpole-head and curving body-tail, the limbs only buds, the head not human. A nine-week miscarriage.

“It was perfect.” She screamed up at the invisible ceiling. “
It was perfect!
”

Ash began to cry. Great gasping sobs wrenched at her lungs. She curled up tight and wept, body sore, shuddering like a woman in a fit; screaming in grief, scalding tears pouring down her face in the darkness, howling, howling, howling.

IV

Footsteps tiptoed, voices whispered: she didn’t notice.

Gut-wrenching sobs faded to silent tears, running hot and wet over her hands. Grief ceased to be a refuge. Her limbs and body shook, with trauma and with the intense cold of the cells. Ash rolled into a tighter ball, cold palms clasped around her shins. Her lips were dry with thirst.

The world and her body came back. Chill clay walls bit into her bare flank. She shivered, all her body-hair standing up like the bristles on a pig; expected soon to be sleepy, to cease to shiver, as men do in cold high mountain snow when they lie down never to rise again.

The cell’s steel grating slammed to one side. Slaves’ bare feet slapped on the tiled floor; someone shouted, above her head. Ash tried to move. Soreness stabbed her vagina. Quaking shudders wracked her body. The tiles felt frost-cold under her.

A rasping voice shouted, “God’s Tree, don’t you know enough to report to me!”

Ash got her head up off the floor, neck straining, swollen hot eyes blinking.

“Light a fire in the observatory!” a bulky, dark-bearded Visigoth man snapped, standing over her. The ’
arif
Alderic unbuttoned the voluminous indigo wool gown that hung from his shoulders, over his mail. He dropped it to the bloodstained floor, knelt, and rolled her into the material. Ash vomited weakly. Yellow bile stained the blue wool. Thick folds of cloth enveloped her, and she felt him thrust an arm under her knees, her shoulders, and lift. The mosaic walls whirled in the intense light of Greek Fire as he swung her up into his arms.