Ash: A Secret History (118 page)

Subject: Ash/Carthage

Date:    04/12/00 at 09.57 a.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

I want to know what’s going on! Are you still on the ship? What else have you found???

Are you sure – no, of course you’re sure. _Visigoth_ Carthage!!! No wonder the existing site on land didn’t match the description in ‘Fraxinus’!

I don’t expect you to answer lots of questions right now, but I’ve got to have _some_ information if I’m going to stop the book/ documentary project being suspended.

Just ask Dr Isobel: _when_ can I pass on the news about her discovery to my Managing Director?

Oh my _God_, what a book we’re going to have.

Oh, yes – is this the last of the ‘Fraxinus’ manuscript? Or is there one more section to come? Do hurry up and finish the translation! I swear I won’t let it out of my hands!

– Anna

  Message: #150 (Pierce Ratcliff)

Subject: Ash/Carthage

Date:    04/12/00 at 04.40 p.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

I’m stalling people.

Please get Dr Isobel to mail me. Just a sentence. Just ‘we’ve found something amazing that verifies Dr Ratcliff’s book’. Just something I can show Jon Stanley!

I may be out for a few hours tomorrow, as Nadia phoned me, but I’ll take the satellite notebook-PC and check regularly.

We’re probably okay till the end of the week, since I successfully managed to fudge everybody today – but if I go in Friday morning and find the plug’s been pulled, I’m going to need convincing evidence that I can _show_ them.

It’s been nearly a whole day, I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT WHAT YOU’VE FOUND ON THE SEABED. PLEASE!!!

Love, Anna

  Message: #256 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Carthage

Date:    04/12/00 at 05.03 p.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Ms Longman,

>>Just ask Dr Isobel: _when_ can I pass on the news about her
>>discovery to my Managing Director?

If _absolutely necessary, to the survival of Dr Ratcliff’s book, you may disclose his 3/12/00 mailing to your Managing Director. This is on condition that it goes no further, until I am ready to put out a press release.

You may tell him that I endorse every word Dr Ratcliff has written. We have Visigoth Carthage.

I. Napier-Grant

PART TEN

15 November AD 1476

Siege Perilous
¹

I

Ash came down off the foot of the bluff in a clatter of clods of earth, into the exposing light of the moon.

Her eyes adjusted from night vision in the forest. The cold moon, clear of clouds, shone down on the road where she crouched.

Shit! I’m surrounded by bodies!

A clear sky brought lower temperatures: frost glittering on the mud; cat-ice forming a skin on puddles, water-filled holes, and expanses of quagmire. Around her, crammed together in the slopping impassable mud ruts, horse-drawn carts and people – horses with bony, arched spines, heads hanging down in sleep or exhaustion. And men, men and women bundled up on the ground, filthy, careless of the mud that froze around and on them as they slept, or sprawled dead in the night.

Ash froze, squatting down in the bitter cold, listening for shouts.

Nothing.

She rubbed the wind’s cold tears from her eyes, thought: No; it only
looks
like a field of battle – but there’s no dead bodies piled up man-high, no scavengers looting, no crows and rats, no drying blood; it doesn’t
smell
like a skirmish, an ambush, a massacre.

These men are sleeping, not dead.

Refugees.

Sleeping, exhausted, wherever they were when darkness fell tonight.

She remained perfectly still, alert for any movement of men waking, orienting herself. The Lion camp behind her; this, the road running south from Dijon to Auxonne. Dijon a mile ahead, across water meadows and an invading army.

A thought invaded her mind.
But, of course, I could just keep going. Stay clear of Dijon.

Keep going: leave Floria and the Faris, the company and the Wild Machines, behind me: leave everything, because it’s all different now; I only ever wanted to be a soldier—

That ended on the beach at Carthage. That ended when something
made
me start walking towards the pyramids; towards the Wild Machines.

South of her, she heard the distant bugling of a wolf’s call. Another; two more; then, silence.

Still want to run?

She felt her mouth move, wryly.

I
am
a soldier. I have a couple of hundred living, breathing reasons behind me for why I need answers
right now.

Of course, I could fuck off and leave Tom Rochester in charge. Go someplace else. Sign on as a grunt. Stop trying to hold all this
together
—

A twist of unease in her bowels made her aware of the extent of her fear. Greater than she expected.

Is that because going to the Visigoths now is lunatic? It
is
lunatic. Some damn guard can hack me down without a question asked. The Faris can have me executed. Or on a ship back to Carthage – what’s left of it. I think, after Basle, I know her – but do I? It’s stupidly dangerous!

And that’s
before
I get my questions answered.

Lose the armour, lose the sword; Ash thought. Lie down to sleep beside one of these women, get up in the morning, and carry on walking. I’d keep my face hidden, but no one’s going to recognise me; not among this lot.

There must be hundreds of thousands of refugees in this war. I’d just be one more. Even if they manipulated the Faris’s army, the Wild Machines wouldn’t find me. I could get out of Burgundy. I could stay hidden for months. For years.

Yeah: lose the armour, lose the sword; get raped and murdered because I still own a pair of boots.

No one stirred out of their exhaustion.

She got carefully to her feet. The demi-gown buckled over her brigandine, and the cloak over all, kept her armour from being obvious. She kept one hand on the scabbard of her sword. Under the hood, and helmet, her face felt naked. The cold wind whipped her hair against her scarred cheeks; hair too short now to get in her eyes.

I’d stay alive, she thought. At least until I starved.

The taste of urine settled into her mouth. The road stank of piss and excrement. She stepped across deep cart-ruts, moving quietly on the sodden earth between groups of slumped bodies.

It was a minute before she realised that she was seeing children everywhere; almost every family with swaddled babies or small brats. Someone far off coughed; a young baby cried. Ash blinked, in the night chill.

At that age, I was one of a slave’s litter in Carthage. Waiting for the knife.

Moving through the mud with the quietness of an animal – and there were no dogs here, few horses; only people on foot, with what they could carry on their backs – she placed her boots with care, avoiding potholes, and crossed the track. She had an impulse to leave her cloak spread over one child, but her automatic stealthy movement carried her past before she could give way to it.

The Faris and me, we have more in common with each other than we do with these people.

Her breath smoked on the chill, moonlit air. Without hesitation, she turned north, trudging towards the crossroads and bridge north of the town.

I’m not going to run. Not with Robert and the rest in Dijon. The company know it, and I know it: that’s why we’ve never had a choice about coming here.

Damn the Earl of Oxford, damn John de Vere; why didn’t he bring
all
my men to Carthage—? I could be half the world away!

Done, now.

I’d still be hearing a dead man’s voice
—

Godfrey – ah, Jesu! I miss Godfrey!

Bad enough to remember him so clearly I think I hear him?

She plodded on, through frozen scrubland, through ground it would have taken her minutes to cross in daylight. She spared a glance for the moon, saw something under an hour had passed; and with that came over a rise and in sight of the bridge, and the great north part of the siege camp.

“Son of a
bitch…
”

Seeing it from the bluff with John Price, she had only seen west of the river: tents spread out across three or four miles of what had been vine-covered hills and cornfields and water meadows. Across the bridge now, north of the town, there was nothing
but
tents, hundreds of them, white in the moon; and, further over, dark structures might have been field-forts, thrown up as winter quarters. And more great siege machinery: trebuchets, and the square silhouettes of hide-covered towers.

No golems visible.

The bridge was dark, only a campfire here and there on the perimeter this side, and the intermittent movement of guards around them. The remains of old crucifixions hung from trees: mute reminder of what happens to refugees. She began to catch snatches of voices, across the cold air: Carthaginian Latin.

I’ve got an hour before John Price does his stuff. I hope. Don’t get it wrong,
rosbif…

It is easy, in the night, the confusion, the lack of timing and command and control, for everything to go to hell in very short order. She knows this, wonders for a moment if she should go back; and on that doubt straightens her shoulders and walks forward, down the muddy slope, on to the road that leads to the bridge, and the perimeter of the Visigoth camp.

“Halt!”

“Okay, okay,” Ash called, good-humouredly, “I’m halting.” She held her gauntlets out from her side, open palms clearly displayed.

“We ain’t got no fucking food!” a despairing voice bawled in French. “Now bugger off!”

Another, deeper male voice said in Carthaginian, “Put a bolt over their heads,
Nazir
, they’ll run.”

“Oh,
what?
” Ash snuffled a laugh. Excitement fizzed in her blood. She found herself grinning so broadly that her mouth hurt, and the night cold stung her teeth. “Green Christ up a fucking Tree!
Alderic? ’Arif
Alderic?”

There was a brief moment of complete silence, in which she had time to think,
No, of course you were mistaken, girl, don’t be such a bloody idiot;
and then, from one of the dark figures at the wagon-gate, the same male voice said, “
Jund?
Is that you,
jund
Ash?”

“Hell’s great gaping gates! I don’t believe it!”

“Step forward and be recognised!”

Ash wiped the moisture off her upper lip with the cold sleeve of her demi-gown, and tucked her arm back under her cloak. She stepped forward, stumbling on muddy ground, night vision gone with having looked into their fire; and came down on to the trodden mud around the wicker gate, between wagons that blocked the bridge.

Half a dozen men with spears came forward, a bearded, helmeted officer at their head.

“Ash!”

“Alderic!” She reached out, at the same moment that he did; they gripped arms and stood grinning at each other for a stunned second. “Keeping an eye on your perimeter guards, huh?”

“You know how it is.” The big Carthaginian chuckled, letting go of her, running his hand over his braided beard.

“So – who’d you upset, to get posted back up here?”

That jolted him, she saw it; made him focus himself again as a soldier, and an enemy. His shadowed face became severe. “Many died in your attack on House Leofric.”

“Many of my men, too.”

A thoughtful nod. The ’
arif
snapped his fingers, muttered something to a guard, and the man set off at a run back into the camp. Ash saw him slow, once away from the guiding firelight at the gate.