Ash: A Secret History (144 page)

“Winter,” the Faris said, and looked straight at Ash. “‘Winter will not cover all the world’.”

“You heard that too.” A tension that she had not been conscious of relaxed. It’s me telling Roberto and Angeli and Florian these things, it’s me staking the company, and Dijon, and a whole lot of lives on being right – and whether it’s true, or a lie, at least
someone else has heard it.

“
If
this is true,” the Faris said, “where do you suggest I take my men – or you take your men, if it comes to that – to be safe? If they want the whole world made into a desert, burned, sown with salt… Tell me, Frankish woman, where we may go to be
safe!
”

Ash hit the wooden table with her gauntleted fist. “
You’re
Gundobad’s descendant!
I
can’t even miraculously light a bloody altar candle! You’re the one that’s going to make this miracle for them!”

The Faris’s gaze slid away. Almost inaudibly, she said, “I do not know this to be true.”

“Don’t you? Fucking don’t you? Well, I’ll tell you what’s true. When I was outside Carthage, the bloody machines just turned me round and walked me towards them, and there wasn’t a Christ-damned thing I could do about it! I didn’t have a
choice!
If Duke Charles dies, we’re all going to find out if
you’ve
got a choice, but by then it’s going to be far too late!”

“And so the answer is that you kill me.”

It stopped Ash as if she had walked into a wall: the Visigoth woman’s abrupt shifts from fear to concentration and back again. Now the Faris, without moving, added:

“I can think for myself. You reason thus: if am I dead, the Wild Machines can do nothing. If you make a move, there are twelve of my sharpshooters who will put bodkin-head arrows through your armour before you get out of that chair.”

An arrow-shaft as thick as a finger; an arrow-head four inches long, four-sided, sharp: able to punch through metal. Ash pushed the image out of her mind’s eye.

“Of course there are archers,” she said equably. “If nothing else, I overhear your communications with Carthage. You’d have shot me before now, except that Dijon will be even harder to take if you go around killing their current heroes. And you still think I might betray the city to you.”

“You are my sister. I will not kill you unless it is necessary.”

In the face of the woman’s intent seriousness, Ash felt nothing but a sudden impulse of pity.
She’s young. She still thinks you can do that.

“I’ll kill you without a second thought,” Ash said. “If I have to.”

“Oh yes.” The woman’s gaze wandered to the child-slave, standing a few paces off with the wine jug; a boy with thistledown-white hair. Ash saw her glance around at other slaves; at Ash herself.

The Faris said, “There is nothing they can make me do. Not a miracle, nothing. I will no longer speak to the
machina rei militaris,
I will not listen! Surely they can do nothing unless I speak with them, and I will not, I will not!”

“Maybe. It’s a hell of a chance to take.”

“What would you have me do?” Her keen expression sharpened. “Kill myself, because voices in my head tell me I’m going to do a hellish miracle? I’m like
you, jund
Ash, I’m a soldier. I’ve never done miracles! I pray, I go to mass, I sacrifice where it’s proper, but I’m not a priest! I’m a
woman.
I’ll wait until we kill this Burgundian Duke, and see if I—”

“It’s too late then!” Ash’s interruption silenced the Faris. “These are creatures who have the power to put out the sun. They did that. When they draw on the sun’s spirit again, when they force it on you, the same way God’s grace comes to a priest, do you think you can refuse it?”

The woman licked her lips. When she spoke, it was without the rising note of hysteria.

“But what would you have me do? Fall on my sword?”

Ash said instantly, “Persuade Lord-
Amir
Leofric to destroy the Stone Golem.”

The Visigoth woman stared, completely silenced, while a man might have counted a hundred. The sound of a war-horse, neighing from the lines, broke the silence. The eagles of the Visigoth legions glinted in the sunlight.

I can’t get to her and kill her before they kill me.

Maybe I won’t have to.

“
Do
it,” Ash urged. “Then they can’t reach you. The Stone Golem is their only voice.”

“My God.” The Faris shook her head in amazement.

“They spoke once to your Prophet Gundobad, and once to Roger Bacon,” Ash said steadily, “and then with the
machina rei militaris,
to us. It’s their only voice. You’ve got an army here. Leofric’s your ‘father’, even if he’s sick. You’ve got the authority. No one can stop you going back to Carthage and breaking the Stone Golem into rubble!”

The woman in Visigoth mail, with a quick apprehension that Ash read as long, if unconscious, consideration of the subject, said, “Cut these ‘Wild Machines’ off – at the cost of my never taking the field again.”

“It’s you or the machine.” A ghost of humour pulled Ash’s mouth up at the corners. “So: you’re right, finally – here I am with the general of the Visigoth army, asking her to destroy the tactical engine that makes her win wars…”

“I wish, truly, that this was a such a ruse of war.” The Faris linked her fingers, rested her elbows on the table, and her lips against her joined hands.

There is no sound in Ash’s mind of the Faris’s voice speaking to the
machina rei militaris,
appealing to Leofric or Sisnandus. Nothing speaks.

After a moment’s silence, the Faris lifted her head to say, “I could pray, now, for your Duke to stay alive.”

“He’s—”
not my Duke,
Ash had been about to protest. She cut herself short. “He’s my current employer, so I’m supposed to want him to stay alive! Even if there wasn’t so much at stake.”

The Faris chuckled briefly. She reached out for the goblet and drank again, the wine staining her upper lip purple. “Why Burgundy’s Duke?”

“I don’t know. You don’t know either?”

“No. I dare not ask.” The Faris squinted at the sky, and the gathering yellow-grey cloud cover. “My father – Leofric will never destroy the Stone Golem. Even now. He gave his life to it, and to breeding us. And he is sick, and I cannot talk with cousin Sisnandus unless I use the
machina rei militaris
to do it, and am … overheard. Or unless I travel back, over land and sea, to speak face to face.”

“Then do that!”

“It – would not be so easy?”

Ash felt the lessening of tension, heard it in the Visigoth woman’s questioning voice. They sat, either side of the table, staring at each other: a woman in Milanese harness, a woman in a bright cloth-covered coat of plates; scarred and unscarred faces suddenly still.

“Why not?
Extend the truce.
” Ash tapped a finger on the table, the gauntlet’s laminations sliding one over the other. “Your officers would rather hold siege and try to starve us out. They know they’re going to lose a lot of men with constant assaults. Extend the truce!”

“And go south, to Carthage?”

“Why not?”

“I would be ordered back here. Ordered not to leave.”

Ash heaved a great breath of air in, feeling a tension relax, feeling an excitement and expectation. “Shit, think about it! You’re the Faris, no one here has the authority to argue with you. You’d get to Carthage. This siege is good for months.”

The unexpected feeling, Ash realised, was hope.

“But, sister,” the other woman said.

“Better go back to Carthage and have the Stone Golem destroyed, whether Leofric wants it to happen or not. Better that, than sit here knowing you’re the one person that has to be killed to stop this.” Ash jabbed her finger in the air. “This isn’t about war any more! It’s about being wiped out. Hell, take the Visigoth army home and take out House Leofric if you have to!”

A smile curved the other woman’s lips. “That, I think, these men would
not
do. Even for me. The Empire takes certain precautions against that. But… Father might listen to me. Ash, if I leave, and if I fail, then perhaps we are still safe. Perhaps, if I am not in Burgundy, then nothing can happen.”

“We don’t know that, either.”

If you leave here, Ash thought suddenly, there’ll be no one with you who knows that you have to be killed. Shit: I should have realised that. But the chance, the chance that this could work and take out the Stone Golem—

“They are great Devils,” the Faris said soberly. “Princes and Thrones and Dominions of Hell, set loose in the world and given power over us.”

“Will you extend the truce?”

The Faris looked up, as if her thoughts had been elsewhere. “For a day, at least. I must think, must carefully consider this.”

To stop the assaults, the fucking bombardment, for a whole day; is it this easy?

Such a phenomenal concession made Ash dry-mouthed with the fear that it might be retracted. She made herself sit with the confident expression of a mercenary who is used to negotiating the rules of engagement in war; tried to keep the strain and the sudden hope off her face.

“But Duke Charles,” the Faris said. “There have been rumours that he is sick? That he was wounded mortally, at Auxonne?”

Startled, Ash realised from the woman’s expression that she asked the question in all seriousness.
She really thinks I’m going to tell her?

“There’ll be rumours that he’s sick, wounded, and dead,” Ash said caustically. “You know what soldiers are like.”

“
Jund
Ash, I am asking you – how much time do we have?”

It was the first time that she truly heard the
we.

“Faris… I can’t tell you things about my employer.”

“You said it yourself: this is not about war. Ash,
how much time?
”

I wish I could talk to Godfrey, Ash thought. He’d know whether I should trust her. He could tell me…

But I can’t ask him. Not now.

She kept the part of her that listens passive, silent, absorbed; offering no chink for a voice to come through. The fear of the ancient voices gnaws at the back of her mind, like a rat.

No one can make this decision but me, on my own.

“You call me your sister,” Ash said, “but we’re not, we’re nothing to each other, except by blood. I know nothing about whether I can trust your word. You’re sitting out here with an army – and I have men who will die if I make a bad decision.”

The Faris said steadily, “And I am Gundobad’s child.”

Now, as she sat back in her chair, the scarlet cloth covering riveted over the metal plates of her armour could be seen to be rubbed, worn, black with dirt under the cuffs. The Visigoth woman’s long hair shone silver-grey with grease. Ingrained mud pencilled fine lines in the skin at the corners of her eyes. She smelled of wood-smoke, of the camp; and Ash, feeling it hit home under her breastbone, leaving her without breath, was overcome with an utter familiar closeness nothing to do with blood kinship.

The woman added, “We neither of us can say for certain what that means, but will you risk waiting to find out? Ash, how much
time
do we have? Is the Duke well and whole?”

Ash remembers a dream of boar in the snow; Godfrey’s whisper of
you are one of the beasts of the world with tusks,
and
it took me so long to gain your trust.

The Faris got to her feet. Ash’s own face looks back at her from between wind-strewn tendrils of white hair; hair that falls in ripples over the rose-head rivets of a coat of plates, down past the waist and the sword-belt with its empty scabbards.

Ash shut her eyes briefly, to blot such a strong resemblance out of her mind.

“More than sisters,” she said, opening her eyes to cold wind and the surrounding ranks of troops; and armed men moving and talking quietly while discussion goes on out of their earshot: strategy, tactics, decisions. “Never mind what we are by birth.
This.
We both do this. We both understand it… Faris, don’t take long to consider your decision. The Duke is dying as we speak.”

The woman’s gaze became fixed: no other change of expression gave away her shock.

Now we shall find out, Ash thought. Now we shall find out how much she really believes of all this, how much she’s actually heard the voices of the Wild Machines talking to her.

How much this is just another war to her – and if I’ve given her Dijon. Because she can hit the city now it doesn’t have a leader. And she may just get in.

Ash watched the Faris’s expression; and missed having her sword ready for use.

The young woman in Visigoth armour put her hands out. The gesture was made slowly, so that watching men might not mistake it. Bare hands held out to Ash, palm-upwards.

“Don’t be afraid,” the Faris said.

Ash looked at the woman’s hands. Dirt was ingrained in the lines of her palms. Small white scars, from old cuts, were visible through the dirt: a peasant’s hands, or a smith’s, or the hands of someone who trains for the line-fight.

“Ash, I will extend the truce,” she said steadily. “A day: until dawn tomorrow. I swear this, here and now, before God. And God send we find an answer before then!”

Slowly, without a page, Ash undid the buckles on her right gauntlet with her gauntleted left hand, and stripped the armour off. She reached out and gripped the Faris’s bare hand in her own. She held warm, dry human flesh.

The cheer that went up from the walls of Dijon shook the snow out of the clouds.

“I don’t have any authority to do this!” Ash grinned. “But if I’ve got a truce, those motherfuckers on the council will ratify it! Can you hold your
qa’ids
to a truce?”

“My God, yes!”

As the noise died down, as the ranked, bored troops of the Visigoth army began to stir and talk among themselves, a shrill bell suddenly cut through the air. About to speak again to the Faris, Ash momentarily did not realise what she was hearing. Loud, hard, bitter, grieving—

A single bell rang out from the double spire of Dijon’s great abbey, within the city walls. Heart in her mouth, Ash waited for the second spire bell to join in.