Ash: A Secret History (193 page)

“She says, Adelize is frightened of people in numbers, and in war-gear.” The Faris at last got to her feet. “The child is correct. Adelize will have seen few men other than those my father Leofric bred to her, and few people in number at all.”

Ash stared at Adelize in the poor light.
Do I look like her?
The woman was heavy around the jaw, and her eyes were sunk in puffy flesh; she might have been anywhere between forty and sixty. Or even older: there was something naive about the unlined softness of her cheeks.

A wrenching pity moved her, overlain by disgust.

“Christ!” Ash said again. “She’s retarded.
²
She really is.”

Adelize’s blankets moved. In the lantern light, Ash caught a brief glimpse of something wriggling back into the folds; and the faint smell in the room made sense to her. Rat. Violante spoke, unintelligibly.

“What?”

The Faris bent to pick up a blanket and wrap it around her own shoulders. Her breath huffed white in the air. “She says, show respect for her mother.”

“
Her
mother?”

“Violante is your full sister. And niece,” the Faris added, with a quiet smile on her face at Ash’s disturbance. “My father Leofric bred our brother back to our mother. Violante is one of the children. I brought two of the boys away with me.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!
Why?
” Ash burst out.

The woman ignored that. Ash had a moment to muse,
You would think, when she has my face, that it would be easy for me to read it;
then the Faris said, “Why are you here?”

“What?”

“Why have you come here?” the Faris demanded. At some time in the past few hours, she had washed her hands and face; the skin was pale in the guttering lamp’s light. Dark-eyed, clear-skinned; and now with hair that barely covered her ears. She spoke in a voice hoarse with long explanations. “Why? Am I to be executed now? Or do I have as long as to tomorrow? Have you come here to tell me what your Duchess Florian decrees?”

“No,” Ash said, shaking her head absently, ignoring the hard edge to the Faris’s tone, “I came to see my mother.”

It was not what she intended to say. Certainly it was not what she intended to say in front of other people. Her hands chilled with shock. She stripped off her gauntlets, re-buckled the straps, and hung them off the grip of her sword. Crossing the floor, she squatted down in front of Adelize. Her scabbard’s chape scraped the floorboards.

“She doesn’t know who I am,” she said.

“She does not know me, either,” the Faris said. “Did you expect her to recognise you as a daughter?”

Ash did not answer the Faris immediately. She squatted close enough to Adelize to smell the old-urine-and-milk stench from her skin. An unguarded,. wild lurch of the idiot-woman’s arm had her up on her feet, automatically, combat reflexes triggered, hand gripping her dagger.

Adelize reached out. She stroked the muddy leather of Ash’s boot. She looked up. “Not to be afraid.
Not
to be afraid.”

“Oh, Jesu.” Ash wiped her bare hand across her face. It came away wet.

One of the rats, a curly-pelted white one, ran up to Adelize. Delighted, the woman forgot everything else in petting it with heavy fingers. The animal licked her.

“Yes.” Ash looked away, bewildered. She stepped back, finding herself standing beside the Faris. “Yes, I thought she’d know me. If I’m her daughter, she
ought
to know me. I ought to feel she’s my mother.”

Very tentatively, the Faris put her hand into Ash’s and gripped it; clasping her with cold, identical fingers.

“How many children has she had?”

“I looked in our records.” The Faris did not remove her hand. “She littered every year for the first fifteen years; then three more litters after that.”

“Christ! It almost makes me glad I’m barren.” A flick of her gaze to the Faris, Ash’s sight blurring. “Almost.”

Another of the rats – patched fur dim in this light, but she was almost sure it was Lickfinger – ran up Adelize’s arm to her shoulder. The woman cocked her head, chuckling as the rat’s whiskers tickled her face. She paid no attention to Ash.

“Does she even
know
she’s had babies?”

The Faris looked affronted. “She knows. She misses them. She likes small, warm things. What I believe she does not know is that babies grow. Since hers were taken away at birth to wet-nurses, she does not know they change to become men and women.”

Blankly, Ash said, “Wet-nurses?”

“If she nursed, it would hinder conception. She has given birth eighteen times,” the Faris said. “Violante was her next-to-last. Violante does not hear the Stone Golem.”

“You do,” Ash said sharply.

“I do. Still.” The Visigoth woman sighed. “None other of Adelize’s children were – successful, except for me. And for you, of course.” She frowned; and Ash thought
Do I look like that? Older, when I frown?
The Faris went on, “Our father Leofric wonders now, how many others he culled too young. He has kept all of Leovigild’s siring, now, and all of Adelize’s children born this spring. We have two living brothers, and another sister.”

Ash became aware that she was gripping the Faris’s hand tightly enough to hurt. Embarrassed, she stared down at the crooked floorboards. Her breath came short, her chest burned.

“Fucking hell, I can’t take it in.” She lifted her gaze to the Faris’s face, at her side; thought,
She’s nineteen or twenty, the same as I am,
and wondered why the Visigoth woman should suddenly appear so young.

“It need not be twenty years before there’s another Faris,” Ash speculated, voice flat in the cold room. “If Leofric weren’t mad as a March hare now, and if Gelimer believed even half his intelligence about the Wild Machines… Maybe, if they looked at what they’ve got, there’d be another one of you in a few months: next spring or summer.”

The Faris said, “I will tell you what my lord Caliph Gelimer would do, if he credited what we say of the Wild Machines. He would think them a superior kind of Stone Golem. He would think them wise voices of war, advising him how to spread the Empire to all civilised lands. And he would be seeking a way to build more Stone Golems, and breed more of me, so that he could have not one general and not one
machina rei militaris
but dozens.”

“Sweet Christ.”

The Faris’s hand was warm and slick in her own. Ash loosened her grip. She said, her eyes still on Adelize, “
Could
House Leofric build another Stone Golem?”

“It is not
impossible.
In time.” The Faris shrugged. “If my father Leofric lives.”

“Oh, Jesu,” Ash said, aware of the chill air freezing her fingertips, of the stars outside the window, of the smell of unwashed bodies subdued by the cold. “The Turk won’t like that. Nor will anyone else. A machine for talking to the great war-demons of the south – they wouldn’t rest until they had one too. Nor would the French, the English, the Rus…”

The Faris, watching Adelize, said absently, “Or if our knowledge were lost, and Leofric dead, and the House destroyed, so that there were still only the one Stone Golem – they will not let us keep it.”

“They wouldn’t rest until they’d taken Africa, taken Carthage, destroyed it utterly.”

“But Gelimer does not credit it. He thinks it all some political plot of House Leofric.” The Faris shivered under her blanket. She said thickly, “And I have nothing more to do with the fortune of the Visigoth Empire, do I? Nothing more to do, myself, than sit here and wonder if I am to be killed, come morning.”

“Shouldn’t think so. What you’re telling de la Marche is far too useful.”

It rang false as she said it. Ash took her eyes off Adelize and finally let herself realise,
I am standing in the same room as this woman, she is unarmed, I have a sword, I have a dagger; if her death were a
fait accompli,
Florian would just have to wear it. There probably
wouldn’t
be a civil war.

She expected agonising indecisiveness.

Kill her. In front of her mother, her sister? My sister? She is my sister. This, for all of what it is, is still my blood.

What she felt was a warm relaxation of tension.

Ash said with rough humour, “Sweet Green Christ! Haven’t you got enough troubles without worrying if your sister’s going to kill you? Faris, I won’t. Right now, I can’t. But I know I should.”

She rested her hand across her face again, briefly; and then looked up at the Visigoth woman.

“It’s Florian. You see. The danger to Florian. I can’t let that carry on.” The words stuck on her tongue; sheer weariness tripping her up. She found herself waving her arms as excitedly as an Englishman. “
Can you keep them out?
”

“The Wild Machines?”

“Keep them out. Not listen.”

The expression on the Faris’s face, dimly visible now in the lamplight, shifted between fear and confusion. “I –
feel
– them. I told the King-Caliph I did not hear the Stone Golem, and I do not; I have spoken no word to it in five weeks. But I feel it. And through it, the
Machinae Ferae
… there is a sensation—”

“Pressure,” Ash said. “As if someone were forcing you.”

“You could not withstand them, when they spoke through the Stone Golem to you, in Carthage,” the Faris said softly. “And their power is growing, their darkness spreading, they will reach me, here; use me to change—”

“If Florian dies.” Ash squatted again. She reached out, carefully, and touched Adelize’s greasy grey-white hair. The woman stiffened. Ash began small stroking movements. “It’s Florian. I can’t let you go on being a danger to her. If you live, and the Wild Machines use you…”

“While we besieged you, I tried to break the link with the
machina rei militaris,
” the Faris said. “I used a slave-priest, so he could tell no one and be believed. He prayed, but the voice of the machine stayed with me.”

“So did I.” Ash stopped stroking Adelize’s matted hair. “So did I! And it didn’t work for me either!”

Astonished laughter: she found herself grabbing the Faris’s hands, the two of them laughing, and Adelize looked around, gazing from one to the other, from Ash to the Faris, and back again.

“Same!” she crowed triumphantly. She pointed from face to face. “Same!”

Ash bit her tongue. It was quite accidental; it stung; she tasted blood in her mouth. She thought,
Please say you know me.

The fat woman reached up and stroked the Faris’s face. She moved her fingers towards Ash. Ash’s stomach twisted. The soft, plump fingers touched her skin, stroked her cheek, hesitated at the scars, retreated.

“Same?” Adelize said questioningly.

Ash’s eyes filled. No water spilled down her cheek. She touched Adelize’s hand gently, and stood up.

“There may well be more bred the same as you,” Ash said, “but if you’d gone back and destroyed the Stone Golem – there’s only one
machina rei militaris.
That would have cut you off from the Wild Machines. And it would have cut
them
off. They’d have to wait for another Gundobad or another Radonic, to build them another machine. Harder than breeding brats.”

“Some men would have followed me. The ones I led in Iberia, who’ve known me many years. Most would not. And Carthage is well prepared against its victorious generals returning to overthrow a King-Caliph.”

“You might have tried!” Ash grinned at herself, then, and shook her head ruefully. “Okay. I take your point. But if you’d destroyed the Stone Golem, I wouldn’t be worrying about whether I should kill my sister now.”

“Not kill!” Adelize said fiercely.

Ash glanced down, startled. Violante knelt at Adelize’s side, obviously whispering a translation; the retarded woman glared up, pointing her finger at Ash, and then at the Faris. “Not kill!” she repeated.

A physical pain hurt her.
There is something wrong with my heart,
Ash thought. Her clenched fist pressed against her armour, over her breast, as if that could relieve her. The sharp, hollow pain hurt her again.

She reached out and ruffled Violante’s hair. The child flinched away from her. She touched Adelize’s hand. Stumbling, she turned and walked out of the room, ducking the lintel, striding past the thin monk; saying nothing when she picked up her escort outside the Abbot’s house, nothing until she reached the palace, and the Duchess’s quarters.

“I’m here to see Florian.”

The bead-bright eyes of Jeanne Châlon peered around the carved oaken door. “She is not well. You cannot see her.”

“I can.” Ash leaned one plate-covered arm up against the wood. “Are you going to try and stop me?”

One of the waiting-women, Tilde, peered around Jeanne’s shoulder. “She is not well, Demoiselle-Captain. We’ve had to ask my lord de la Marche to come back tomorrow.”

“Not well?” Ash’s mind sharpened, came into focus. She demanded curtly, “
What’s wrong with her?
”

Tilde glanced at Jeanne Châlon, embarrassed. “Captain-General…”

“I said, what’s wrong with her? What’s her illness?— never mind.” Ash shoved her way past them. She ignored the other servants and waiting-women, shouldering her way through them, leaving them to quarrel with her escort. She crossed to the ducal bed and threw back the hangings.

A stench of spirits made her cough.

The Duchess Florian, fully dressed in man’s doublet, shirt and hose, lay sprawled face-down on the bedding. Her mouth was open, dribbling copiously on the sheet. She breathed out a stink of alcohol. As Ash stood gazing down, Florian began stertorously to snore.

“She was up on the wall this afternoon, wasn’t she?”

Jeanne Châlon’s white face appeared at Ash’s side. “I told her not to. I told her it was not befitting a woman, that she should watch what God Himself turns His face away from. But she wouldn’t heed me. Floria has never heeded me.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” Ash bent down and pulled wolf furs gently over Florian’s legs. “Except in this case. How long was she drinking herself into insensibility?”