Ash: A Secret History (170 page)

The rich colours of the mosaics behind him glinted, in the shifting light. Now that he was next to her, Ash realised that Bishop John stood an inch or two shorter than Floria.

“What you are is our Duchess.” He shook both her hands in his grip, for emphasis. “God save us, Floria del Guiz, you’re my brother’s successor. If God lets you take the ducal crown, it isn’t for any of us to disobey His will.”

“Crown? The
crown
doesn’t matter. What does a piece of carved horn matter!” Florian freed her hands and took a step forward. She made a fist; thumped it against her chest. “I know what I am, but I don’t know
why
I am, or how! Suppose you tell me? You expect me to come back to a city I haven’t seen since I was a child, and do this? You expect me to come back to strangers, and do this? You tell me what’s going on!”

Her breathless voice fell flat against the walls, the mosaics deadening the acoustics. A whisper of sound went up the brick-lined shaft, towards the grating and the air. As if they stood in the bottom of a dull, soundless well.

When John of Cambrai did not answer, the surgeon became icy.

“I haven’t taken communion since I left the Empty Chair. I don’t intend to start now. There’s not going to be a mass tonight; you can tell the acolytes to go home and get some sleep.” Florian shrugged. “If you want a vigil, tell me why the Dukes of Burgundy are like they are. Tell me what I’ve been stuck with. Otherwise I’ll just curl up in the corner and sleep. I’ve slept worse places on campaign: Ash will tell you.”

“Yeah, but you were drunk then,” Ash said, before she thought.

“Madame Duchesse!” the Bishop protested.

Florian said something to him. Ash took no notice. The shifting light on the shrine caught her eye, under the far barrel-vault, and her vision finally adjusted enough to let her make out the dim, painted carvings.

She turned away from the bishop and surgeon, walked straight past the plain altar, to the shrine. Marble, painted and gilded, glowed in the light of thigh-thick beeswax candles.

“Christus Viridianus!” she blurted out. And then, as both of them looked at her, startled, she pointed. “That’s the Prophet Gundobad!”

“Yes.” Bishop John’s demure features showed no expression that might not be a trick of the shifting light. “It is.”

Florian stared. “Why do you have a shrine to a heretic?”

“The shrine is not Gundobad’s,” the bishop said, moving forward. He pointed to one of the minor figures. “The shrine is Heito’s. Sieur Heito was Duke Charles’s ancestor. And will have been yours, your Grace, it now becomes apparent.”

“I didn’t expect to find him here.” Ash reached up and touched the cold carved marble of Gundobad’s sandal and foot. “Florian, the Duke was going to tell me before he died. I suggest you ask the bishop, now… ‘
Why Burgundy?
’”

Turning, she caught an expression on Bishop John’s world-weary face – something approaching excitement. Mildly, he said, “The Duchess brought you, demoiselle, but it is her decision as to how she spends her vigil. Remember that, and show due respect.”

“Oh, I respect Florian.” Ash put her fists on her hips, mentally closing ranks without a second thought. “I’ve watched her puke her guts out, outside the surgeon’s tent, and come back in and take a longbow arrow out of a man’s lung—”

Of course, it would be better if she hadn’t got drunk in the first place.

“—I don’t need a gang of Burgundians to tell me about Florian!”

“Quiet,” Florian said, with something of the blurred chill in her eyes that she had, covered in hart’s blood, at the end of the hunt. “Bishop – you told me what Charles of Valois brought here. You told me what Duke Philip brought. You didn’t ask me what
I’ve
brought.”

“Questions,” Bishop John said. “You come with questions.”

“So do I,” Ash muttered, and when the bastard son of Philippe le Bon looked at her, she jerked her thumb at the shrine. “Do you know what you’ve got there?”

“That is Gundobad, prophet of the Carthaginians, at the moment of his death.”

“Gundobad the Wonder-Worker,” Ash said steadily. “I know about Gundobad. I know a lot about Gundobad, since I went south. Leofric and the Wild Machines, between them – I know what really happened, seven hundred years ago. Gundobad made the land around Carthage into a
desert.
He dried up the rivers. How the hell…” Ash’s voice slowed. “How the hell did the Pope’s soldiers manage to burn him alive?”

She ignored Florian’s quick shudder: it might have been the older woman feeling the cold.

“You have a point,” the surgeon said, her voice steady.

“He was the
Wonder-Worker
” Ash said again. “If he could do that to Carthage, to the Wild Machines: he shouldn’t have died just because some priest ordered it!”

With a glance at Floria del Guiz, Bishop John demurred, “He cursed Pope Leo
²⁶
and brought about the Empty Chair.”

There are side-panels in the chapel, one of which is the death of Leo – blinded, hunted, torn into scraps of flesh – but she knows that story too well to look.

“Any man who could turn half of North Africa into a desert,” Ash said steadily, “shouldn’t have died at the hands of the Bishop of Rome. Not unless there’s something we don’t know about Pope Leo!
No
—” she corrected herself abruptly. “Not Leo. Is it?” And she turned back to the stonework. “Who is this Heito?”

There was a silence broken by nothing but the odd drip of condensation.

Florian’s voice sounded harsh and sudden. “I expected to pray tonight. I prayed when I was a girl. I was … devout. And if there were going to be answers, I expected them to be about Burgundy, about what
happened
to me out there, on the hunt.”

Floria sighed.

“When I left Carthage, I thought we’d left the desert demons behind. But here they are.” She pointed to a detail in the back of the shrine: the heretic Gundobad, preaching from a rock in a verdant southern landscape, and in the background, the tiny distant shapes of pyramids.

“Florian…”

“I thought we’d come where they couldn’t reach you.” Florian’s eyes were dark holes, in the candles’ shadows. “I saw you walk away, remember? I saw them
make
you do it!”

“They couldn’t do it when I spoke to them two days ago. This isn’t about me,” Ash said. “I didn’t hunt the hart. You did. Now I want to know, why Burgundy? And the answer’s Gundobad. Isn’t it?”

Bishop John, as she turned on him, continued to look not at Ash but at Florian. At Florian’s small nod, he spoke.

“This is the square of St Peter,” he said, touching key points on the painted stonework. “Here, at the cathedral door, is where great Charlemagne was crowned. He had been dead a year when his sons, and Pope Leo, put on trial the Carthaginian prophet Gundobad, for the Arian heresy. Here is Gundobad, in the Papal cells, with his wife Galsuinda, and his daughter Ingundis.”

“He
married?
” Ash blurted. “Shit. I never thought about that. What happened to them?”

“Galsuinda and Ingundis? They were made slaves; they were shipped back to Carthage before the trial – I believe Leo used them to carry a message to the then King-Caliph.” Bishop John steepled his fingers. “Although I believe the King-Caliph of that time was not sorry to be relieved of such a prophet, darkness and desert having come to his lands all in one year.”

“But it wasn’t! It wasn’t one year!” Ash hears in her head the voice of the
machina rei militaris,
when she was prisoner in Carthage: impassive, impersonal; retelling an undeniable history. “The darkness didn’t come until the ‘Rabbi’s Curse’, four centuries later. That’s when the Wild Machines drew down the sun, to feed them the strength to speak through the Stone Golem. Gundobad was long before that!”

“Is it so?” Bishop John nodded. “We tell it differently. Stories of ages past become confused. The memory of man is short.”

The memory of the Wild Machines is longer. And a damn sight more accurate.

“Nevertheless,” he added, “it was in that year that the lands about Carthage ceased to be a garden, and became a desert, and Gundobad fled north to preach his heresy in the Italian states.”

“How much of this is true?” Florian demanded. “How much is old records and guesswork?”

“We know that Leo died the year that Gundobad cursed him. We know that no Pope thereafter lived more than three days in Peter’s Chair. And the great empire of Charlemagne was overthrown among his quarrelling sons that year, or not long after.
²⁷
Christendom became nothing but quarrelling Dukes and Counts; no Emperor.”

“And this Heito?”

“My ‘ancestor’?” Florian said dryly, on the heels of Ash’s question. “Clearly, if he was alive in Pope Leo’s day, he’s probably the ancestor of half of Burgundy by now!”

“Yes.”

John of Valois looked as if that simple acknowledgement was some significant piece of knowledge.

“And that’s why everybody rides with the hunt,” Ash filled in, with a sense of cold inevitability: fact fitting into fact. “Everybody you can get
with Burgundian blood…
Florian, it’s another bloodline. Only it isn’t Gundobad’s child. It’s this Heito’s descendants. Heito’s children.” She turned on the bishop. “Aren’t I right?”

“Who for the last four generations have been the legitimate sons of the Valois,” the bishop confirmed, “but we have always known, breeding horses and cattle as we do, how characteristics skip a generation, or turn up in a cadet line. When we were the Kingdom of Aries, it was no great matter for a peasant to become king, if he hunted the Hart. We have become complacent, since my great-grandfather’s time. God reminds us to be humble, your Grace.”

“Not
that
fucking humble!” Ash snorted, at the same time as Floria del Guiz objected loudly: “My parents were noble, both of them!”

“My apologies, your Grace.”

“Oh, screw your apologies!” Florian’s voice dropped half an octave; took on the volume that presaged, in camp, a rapid readjustment of the surgeon’s tent. “I have
no
idea what’s going on. Suppose you tell me!”

“Heito.” John laid his hand against the carved figure’s mailed foot, looking up at him. “He was a minor knight in Charlemagne’s retinue; one of Charlemagne’s sons took him into service after Charles’s death. He was appointed guard over Gundobad, after the trial. He was there when Gundobad cursed the Holy Father. And he was there when Gundobad sought to extinguish, by a miracle, the flames of his pyre.”

The bishop flicked a glance at Ash.

“He’d heard the news from North Africa,” he added, more conversationally. “It wasn’t hard for him to realise that Gundobad wanted far more than a mere miraculous escape – that he was desirous of giving us a desert where Christendom now stands. And Gundobad would have, if not for Heito the Blessed.”

“Who did what?” Florian persisted.

“He prayed.”

Ash, staring up at the bas-relief carving, wondered if Heito’s face had had that expression of stilted piety –
whether, in fact,
she reflected,
he wasn’t filling his braies and praying out of sheer terror. But it worked: something worked … because Gundobad
died.

“Heito prayed,” the bishop said. “All men have in them some small part of the grace of God. We who are priests are born with a very little more – a very, very little; sufficient only, if God grants it to us, to perform very minor miracles.”

A sudden memory of Godfrey’s face made Ash wince. She could not bring herself to speak to the
machina rei militaris
, to ask – as she suddenly wanted to –
what do you think of God’s grace
now?

“Heito had the grace of God in abundance, although as a humble knight he had no reason to know this until he met his test.”

They stood in silence, surveying the bas-relief shrine.

“Heito told his sons that, when the fire was lit at Gundobad’s pyre, he heard the heretic praying for escape, and for vengeance on all whom he called ‘Peter’s heretics’, throughout Europe. The story comes down that, when Gundobad prayed, the flames
did
die. Heito was moved to prayer. He begged God’s grace to avert the devastation of Christendom, and to help in kindling the fire again. Heito’s story to his sons is that he
felt
God’s grace work within him.”

Florian’s hands strayed to her mouth. It was difficult to see, in the candlelight, but her skin seemed pale.

“Heito re-lit the pyre. Gundobad died. Christendom was not laid waste… Heito witnessed the death of the Holy Father, not long after; and the death of his appointed successor. He prayed that that Curse of the Empty Chair would be lifted – but, as his son Carlobad tells us, in his
Histoire,
Heito felt a lack of strength within himself. He had not the grace to do it. Nor his son after him, though Heito married his son to the most devout of women.”

“And then?” Ash prompted sardonically. She reached out, tucking Florian’s arm within her own, feeling how the surgeon was swaying very slightly. “No, I can guess. They married holy women, didn’t they? All of Heito’s sons…”

“His grandson, Airmanareiks, was the first who hunted the Hart. You must understand, at that time Burgundy was as full of miracles, and appearances of the Heraldic Beasts, as any other land in Christendom. It was not until later that … as they say: God lays His heaviest burden on His most faithful servant. We had gained grace enough to have our prayers answered. Without some burden, we might have forgot our debt to Him.”

“‘Burden’ be damned,” Ash said cynically. “You can’t pick and choose. If you stop miracles, you stop miracles. End of story. No wonder Father Paston and Father Faversham have been desperate since we crossed the border! And didn’t you have trouble with the wounded the first time we came here, after Basle?”

Florian nodded absently. “I thought it was fever, from low-lying water meadows…”

“We had hoped to grow strong enough, one day, to remove the curse and see another Holy Father ascend to Peter’s Chair. That has not been granted to us. We have, though, done what Heito set out to do. Neither Burgundy nor Christendom have been corrupted into a wasteland,” Bishop John said. “We have been ruled by the Franks, and the Germans, and by our own Dukes; but always we took the holiest of women as brides, and always the Lord of Burgundy was the one who hunted the Hart. Christendom has been safe. We have paid our price for it.”