Ash: A Secret History (168 page)

Ash reached out, twitched the sleeve down over Florian’s shoulder, and turned towards the curtain that masked the tunnel leading to the chapel. Leaving her page and escort behind, she stepped forward and held back the coarse cloth.

“Duchess takes precedence, I believe…”

Florian did not laugh.

Torches in cressets lit the low passage, their smoke making the air acrid. Ash found her fingers automatically going to her belt and her dagger. The relief of being in civilian clothes and out of armour for an hour made her body blissful, but chill; and she swung her cloak around her shoulders as she walked into the tunnel after Florian.

Florian came to a dead halt in front of her. Without turning, she said, “I had someone ordered out of the council room this afternoon.”

Ash let the hessian curtain fall behind her. It cut off sound: left them isolated under the low granite roof. She stepped around the motionless woman.

“And they went.” Florian raised her head. “If I’d wanted to, I could have had men throw them out.”

“If you wanted, you could have more than that.”

Ash glanced up ahead: the further curtain did not stir. No priests yet.

“That’s the problem.” Floria’s voice fell flat and muffled, deadened by the ancient stone.

“Ah, you wait,” Ash said reflectively, linking her arm through the surgeon’s; beginning to pace towards the far end of the corridor. “You wait till you want someone thrown out
real
bad. Then, you start cutting corners…”

“You mean, I make some illegitimate use of this power I’ve been stuck with?” Under the demand, Florian’s voice had a tone of panic.

“Everybody does it at least once. Every lance-leader, every
centenier.
Every nobleman.”

“And yours was?” Floria snapped.

“Mine?” Ash shrugged, letting her arm drop out of the crook of the woman’s elbow, maintaining her easy pace towards the far curtains. “Oh, that’s got to be … the first time I got six of my men to cripple the living shite out of somebody. Back in – I don’t remember – some northern French town.”

She was conscious of Florian’s face in profile as they walked, the glowing torches casting red light on her cheekbones. A tightly controlled shiver went through the older woman.

“What happened?”

“Some civilian said, ‘Hey, girlie, you can wear hose, and you can wave a sword around, but you’re still a cunt who has to squat down to piss’ – he thought that was very funny. I thought, okay, I have six hefty guys here, wearing mail that I paid for, and my livery… They kicked the crap out of him; smashed his face and both knees.”

The face Florian turned was desperate. As if she searched for an excuse, she asked, “And how long would your authority have lasted, if you’d allowed him to say that without reprisal?”

“Oh, about five minutes.” Ash raised a brow. “But then, I didn’t have to have them cripple him. And I didn’t have to go into town that afternoon looking for trouble.”

She was unaware of her own expression: part hooligan-enjoyment, part shame and regret. “I was pretty young. Fourteen, maybe. Florian, you’re going to get this. The first time five hundred guys stand there and cheer you to the echo, and then go piling into combat because
you
say so … you start feeling you can do
anything.
And sometimes you will.”

“I don’t want to find out if I will.”

Ash put out her hand to draw aside the second curtain.

“Tell me that if we’re still here in six months. Once you taste it, you can’t go back. But it isn’t worth chucking your weight about.” She tugged at the heavy cloth. “After a while, if you do too much of it, people stop listening to you. You’re not in charge. You’re just out in front…”

Florian huddled her gown more tightly over her white robes. “Don’t you find it terrifying? You’re in charge of an
army!?
”

Ash flashed her a quick grin. “Don’t for fuck’s sake ask Baldina about my laundry.”

Florian, her expression fixed, glanced away without responding.

She needs a serious answer, and I’m too scared to give it.

Ash raised her voice. “Hey, come on! Aren’t there any fucking priests
in
this chapel? Where’s your bloody bishop?”

A disapproving older female voice said, “He’s consecrating the chapel, young demoiselle. Do
you
want to tell him to hurry up?”

Ash stepped into the antechamber expecting, for a second, to see Jeanne Châlon; but the woman facing her looked nothing like the surgeon’s noble aunt. Only the voices were similar. Torches smoked in the cold air, and Ash squinted at the fat, round-faced woman in wimple and looped-up kirtles, and at the man behind her, whose face seemed naggingly familiar.

“Demoiselle,” the elderly man pulled off his coif. His scalp shone pink in the torchlight. “You won’t remember me, I daresay. You might remember Jombert here. He’s a fine dog. This is my wife, Margaret. I’m Culariac; Duke’s huntsman.” He turned watery eyes to Floria del Guiz. “Duchess’s huntsman, I should say; pardon me, your Grace.”

A cold nose pressed against Ash’s fingers. She reached down, and scratched behind the ears of a white lymer sniffing at the fur-trimmed skirts of her demi-gown under her cloak.

“‘Jombert’!” she said. “I remember. It was you that came out to the Visigoth camp at the truce, to ask if the hunt could ride.”

The man’s face broke into a smile at her recognition. His wife continued to scowl. After a few seconds, Ash recognised the look.
Well, I’m not learning to fight in skirts to please her.

“We’re here as your witnesses, your Grace,” the old man added, with another bow. What self-importance there might have been in his expression vanished as the lymer abandoned Ash, gave a quick sniff to the surgeon-Duchess, and padded back to nose at his master’s thigh. Culariac gazed down in pure affection.

Which is he more proud of, Ash wondered; his hound, or his position here? He’ll be drinking on the strength of both, tomorrow night.

If the town isn’t taken by then.

“‘Witnesses’?” she belatedly queried.

“Just to see her Grace does stay in there, all night.” The woman jerked her thumb at the further side of the anteroom, where a curtain masked another doorway. Woven in green and gold thread, it shimmered heavily in the dull light.

“We’ll stay out here,” the woman Margaret said. “No, don’t you worry, your Grace; I’ve brought some sewing with me; Culariac will wake me if I sleep, and I’ll wake him.”

“Oh.” Florian looked blank. “Right.”

A faint, almost imperceptible vibration ran through the stone floor. Ash identified it as a trebuchet strike, not far from the palace itself. The old woman touched her breast, making the sign of the Horns.

Falling in beside Florian as she walked towards the far doorway, Ash murmured, “Where the fuck did they find
her?
”

“Chosen by lot.” Florian kept her voice equally low.

“God give me strength!”

“That, too.”

“Your damn bishop had better give us some answers.”

“Yes.”

“You picked a real worldly priest there.”

“Why would I want a devout one?”

Jolted by the answer, Ash shoved aside the curtain embroidered with oak leaves. The granite facing of the walls and ceiling gave way to natural limestone. The floor of the passage dipped, so that they walked down a long series of very wide and shallow steps. Ash saw that the torch-holders spiked now into undressed, grey-white stone; the marks of chisels still plain in the walls. Smoke wavered in the draught from air-vents carved into living rock.

“Won’t be so cold if we’re underground,” she remarked pragmatically.

Florian hauled up the train of her gown, where it scraped along the limestone floor, and bundled the cloth up in her arms in front of her as she walked. “My father had his knighthood vigil here. I remember him telling me about this, when I was very young. It’s almost all I can remember of him.” She glanced up at the vaulted ceiling, as if she could see through stone to the ancient palace above. “He was a favourite of Duke Philip. Before he changed his loyalties to the Emperor Frederick.”

“Hell. I knew Fernando had to get it from somewhere.”

“My father was married in Cologne cathedral.” Florian turned her head; smiled briefly at Ash’s evident shock. “We got the news, in the end, from Constanza. Another good reason for me not to have come to your wedding.”

Ash caught her shoe on the uneven stone, stumbling over the threshold in Floria’s wake, and for a second she did not see the smoky, tiny chamber that they entered, but the soaring pillars and gothic arches of the cathedral, the shafts of light, and Fernando reaching out to touch her and say
I smell piss…

Worse than a whore! she thought fiercely. He wouldn’t have
laughed
at a whore.

Ash made the sign of the Horns automatically, aware that Florian was standing stock-still in front of her now, her head raised, staring. The chapel’s terracotta tiles felt uneven, worn by centuries of men walking to the iron grille to celebrate the blood-mass. Ash shivered, in a room barely twenty feet square: claustrophobia not eased by the torchlight falling from above, through the ceiling-grating.

“My feet are cold,” Florian whispered.

“If we’re in here all night, more than your feet will get cold!” Ash kept her voice low with an effort. As her vision adjusted, and filled with dully glittering luminescence, she added, “Green Christ!”

Every free square foot of the walls was covered in mosaic, each square of the mosaic not glass, but precious gem; cut to glow in the shifting torchlight.

“Look at that. A king’s ransom. More than a king’s ransom!” Florian muttered. “No wonder Louis’s jealous.”

“King’s ransom be buggered, you could equip a dozen legions if this lot’s real…” Ash leaned in close, peering at a mosaic of the birth of the Green Christ – his Imperial Jewish mother sprawled under the oak, half-dead from bringing forth her son; the Baby suckling at the Sow; the Eagle, in the oak’s branches, lifting up his head, depicted about to take wing on the flight that will – in three days – bring Augustus and his legions to the right spot in the wild German forest. And in the next panel, Christus Viridianus heals his mother, with the leaves of the oak.

“Might be rubies.” Ash winced at the wax running from the candlestick over the back of her hand. She held the light closer to the wall, studying the neat squares that delineated a puddle of birth-blood. She felt a sudden nausea. With an effort, she added, “Might just be garnets.”

Florian walked a quick circuit of the walls, glancing at each panel briefly – Viridianus and his legion in Judea, gone native after the Persian wars; Viridianus speaking with the Jewish elders; Viridianus and his officers worshipping Mithras. Then Augustus’s funeral, the coronation of his true son, and, in the background, the adopted son Tiberius and the conspirators, the desire for the oak tree upon which they will hang Viridianus – bones broken, no blood shed – already plain on their faces.

One circuit of the room, back to where Ash stands by the birth; and the last panel is Constantine, three centuries later, converting the Empire to the religion of Viridianus, whom the Jews still consider nothing more than a Jewish prophet, but whom the followers of Mithras have long and faithfully known to be the Son of the Unconquered Sun.

“Doesn’t look like anyone’s held mass yet,” Ash said doubtfully.

In the centre of the room, two stone blocks are set, to chain the bulls. Between them, an iron grate is let into the floor, stiff with old black debris of sacrifices. Featureless darkness showed beneath. The iron bars were not wet.

Ash tried the iron gates that closed off the shallow passage leading up towards the air. The heavy chains hardly rattled. She stared, for a moment, at the ridged stone slope, down which the bull is led into this box-like room.

When she turned back, she saw a glimmer in Florian’s eye – recognisably laughter. Half-frowning, half on the verge of a giggle, Ash muttered, “What?
What?
”

“They bring a bull for the mass,” the older woman said, and snuffled, sounding all herself again. “Wonder what they’d make of a couple of old cows?”

“
Florian!
”

Without any hesitation, the surgeon crossed to the remaining exit: a small wooden door set into the corner of the room. She opened it. The dark stairwell beyond flared with torchlight stirred up by the draught of the door’s opening. One glance over her shoulder, and Florian hauled up her gowns and robe clear of her feet, and sidled through the door. Ash stared for a long minute, watching her coiffed head sink lower, walking down the cramped spiral of the stair.

“Wait up, damn it!”

The narrow stair, set into the thick wall, turned back so swiftly on itself that she could never have come down it successfully in armour. The chill granite left damp marks on her furred demi-gown. Florian blocked the light from below. Ash groped in her wake, feeling the wood of a door jamb, and then came out suddenly into an open space with a vast drop in front of her.

“Shiiit…”

“This is old. Monks’ work.” Florian, beside Ash, also stared out into the brick-lined shaft. “Maybe God’s grace kept them from falling off!”

Torchlight came down from above through the iron sacrificial grille. It barely stirred the shadows on the walls of the shaft. Far below, more lights glowed – the steadier, less smoky glow of many candles.

The door that Ash had come out of opened all but sheer on to the shaft. Now her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she saw that a stair ran down, deosil, along the side of the wall. Descending…

“Let’s go.” She touched Florian’s arm, and slid herself along the tiny platform to put one foot on the first step.

A knee-high wall, studded with mosaic, was the only barrier between the stair and the drop – by no means high enough to be reassuring: one slip, and a body would pivot straight over the stonework.

“Bugger this!” Florian muttered. Glancing back, Ash saw her face shiny with sweat. Her own breath caught in her throat.

“Hang on to my belt.”