Ash: A Secret History (215 page)

Ash said, “I won’t change it.”

There is sorrow, confusion, regret in her mind; some of it hers, most of it theirs.

“Whatever I am,” she said, “whatever happened to me, this is what I am. I won’t change it. Not for a ghost-love. I have—”

She strokes Angelotti’s hair.

“I have had love.”

She stands, stepping back, letting Richard Faversham touch oil to the dead man’s forehead. The freezing, bitter wind dries the tears on her face. This time she does not try to put sorrow away: looks out of the dazzle of the torchlight at the ruined walls, the men hacking at granite war-machines – Robert Anselm swinging an axe that scores a line of golden sparks from a granite limb, Ludmilla Rostovnaya dropping her bow, hauling out her blade-heavy falchion and chopping; John Burren and Giovanni Petro shoulder-to-shoulder beside her. Confusion, darkness; and the eyeless heads of golems dazzle in the last torchlight.

Ash walked quite calmly back to where Richard Faversham, under the ruined wall by the altar, held Florian del Guiz in his arms. Rickard stumbled at her back.

‘
IN THE FUTURE WE HAVE CALCULATED
,
ALL WILL CHANGE
,
THERE WILL BE NO SELF YOU CAN RELY ON
,
NO IDENTITY THAT LASTS FROM DAY TO DAY
.
AND YOU WILL SPREAD THAT CHAOS TO A UNIVERSE BIGGER THAT YOU CAN YET CONCEIVE
.’

“Here they come!”

In the morning dark, she cannot see half the crowd; can only hear a wave of yelling come up the slope, glimpse a few men’s backs. Two or three billmen stumbled backward into the ruined chapel building. A riderless horse – a Janissary’s mare – caught her as it stumbled, broken-legged, across the rubble.

“Ash!”

Rickard. Dragging her. She gets up on her knees and a dozen or more men pound over the snow and rubble, past her, on into darkness.

“A Lion!”

The battle-cry is shrill above her, ends in a shriek. She rolled, came upright in a clatter of steel plate and padding; swung round looking for her banner—

In a split second, she saw the banner falling, Rickard’s hands going up to his head, a Visigoth spearman sprawled backwards over the wall, mail hauberk ripped, Ned Mowlett striking down twice with a bastard sword; leaping off the snow-covered masonry and vanishing—

The Lion Azure banner tipped into the snow. Ash saw a jagged, thick splinter jutting out of Rickard’s helmet. A spear-point has hit, glanced off, the shaft shattering at the collar, and a white, razor-sharp fragment of wood sticks out of the sallet’s eye-slot.

Blood welled up in the torchlight, gushing, blackening the wood. Rickard’s hands scrabbled at the steel. He fell over backwards, screaming behind the helmet, arching, lying still.

“Rickard!”

She stood. Looked down.

“I … yes. If I could, if I lived, now – I’d change that. Go back and wipe out— people will do it. You’re right. For whatever reason – people will use God’s grace, if they have it. If a miracle can bring someone back from death—”

‘
AND THEN
,
THERE IS NO END TO CHANGE
.’

“No.” She is cold, from hands to feet, from heart to soul; chill with more than the blackness and the massacre a few feet away. The torchlight glimmers on yellow silk, a blue lion: Thomas Rochester, face bleeding, hauling the banner up again. She stumbles on numb feet the tiny distance between herself and the snow-covered wall where Florian lies. Richard Faversham is gone.

‘
IT IS TIME
,
NOW
.’

Caught between grief and nightmare, between this slaughter and the revelation of the future, she is dumb.

It is dark.

She kneels beside Florian, awkward in her armour. The woman’s breath still moves her chest.

Desperation in her voice, she pleads: “Why change everything? Why not—” She fumbles for Florian’s hand. There is another fallen body, momentarily left behind the tide of fighting: it may be the Faris, it may be another of her men.

Anselm will hold them here,
she thought,
and de Vere will win it. Or not. Nothing I can do about that. About this
—

Her mind works, as in panic emergencies it has always worked; it is the one thing above all else that qualifies her for what she does.

“Why change everything? Why not change
one
thing?” Ash demands. “What you bred, in me, for a wonder-worker – take it out. Take that out of us! Leave us what we are, but take
that
away.”

Their lament is strong in her mind.

‘
WE HAVE CONSIDERED IT
.
YET WHAT AROSE AS A SPONTANEOUS MUTATION MAY ARISE AGAIN
.
OR YOU MAY
,
IN CENTURIES TO COME
,
DEVISE SOME DEVICE TO MAKE MIRACLES FOR YOU
.
AND WHAT DO WE HAVE THEN
,
TO PREVENT YOU
?
YOU WILL BE GONE
,
THERE WILL BE NO WONDER-WORKERS
,
AND WE ARE ONLY STONE
–
VOICELESS
,
IMMOBILE
,
THINKING STONE
.’

“You don’t have to wipe us out—”

‘
WE HAVE BRED A WEAPON
,
AND WHEN YOU ARE USED
,
ASH
,
THERE CAN NEVER BE ANOTHER WEAPON FOR US TO USE
.
BECAUSE YOUR RACE WILL NEVER HAVE EXISTED
.
WHAT WE DO
,
WE
MUST
DO NOW
.
WE BEAR NO HATRED FOR YOU
,
ONLY FOR WHAT YOUR SPECIES WILL DO
–
AND YOU WILL DO IT
.
BUT WE WILL PREVENT IT
,
NOW
.
FORGIVE US
.’

“I’ll do
something,
” Ash muttered.

Her mind races. Their linked pressure dazzles her, she feels the blood tingling in her veins, and something in the shared depth of her soul begin to move. She senses her mind expand; realises that it is their immense, vast intelligence that begins to merge with her. She perceives a vast cognitive power.

“I can do this,” Ash said baldly. “Listen to me. I can take the wonder-workers out of history. Take miracles out of us, now and in the past. Take out the
capacity.
You can hold all of human history in your minds for me – all the past – and I can
do
it.”

She holds the warm body of Florian in her arms. The woman is still breathing. In appalled realisation, before they can respond, she says aloud:

“But Florian has to die before I can do this. Before this change.”

‘
IT IS OUR SORROW
,
TOO
.’

“No,” Ash says. “
No.
”

There is confusion among the inhuman multiple voices:

‘
YOU CANNOT DENY US
.’

“You don’t understand,” Ash said. “
I don’t lose.
”

The morning of the fifth of January is as black as midnight without a moon. Maybe no more than half an hour since Frederick of Hapsburg’s troops made their attack? Do they fight on, in the unnatural pitch-darkness? Men shout, scream, yell contradictory orders. Or is it just the golems: mindless, brutal killing machines, that don’t see where she kneels behind the wall, everyone else running or dead?

“I don’t lose,” Ash repeated. “You bred me for what I am. You need me to be a fighter, whether you know it or not. I can take the decision to sacrifice other people. It’s what I do. But I do it through choice, when it’s necessary.”

‘
YOU HAVE NO CHOICE
.’

A very weak voice said, “I never liked cities. Nasty unhealthy places. Do I have the flux?”

Florian’s eyes were open. She seemed unfocused. Her speech came as a bare whisper, blue lips moving only a fraction.

“Someone … should kill you. If I order it.”

The weight of the woman across her knees kept Ash still. She said, gently, “You won’t.”

“I – fucking will. Don’t you realise I love you, you stupid girl? But I
will
do this. Nothing else left.”

Ash cupped her hand and laid it against Florian’s cheek. “I will not die and
I
will not lose.
”

The Wild Machines shout grief and triumph, in her head. She felt power, beginning to peak. It moved in her below conscious thought, deep in the back of her soul, in the strongest of her reflexes, appetites, beliefs.

“I can find survival and victory where there’s no chance of one,” she says, smiling crookedly. “What do you think I’ve been doing all my life?”

‘
AS A SOLDIER
.’

“Long before
that
…”

She touches the woman surgeon’s brows, smoothing them with a feather-touch. Where her skin touches Florian’s scalp, the woman shivers with a deep, intense pain. Blood has matted in her straw-gold hair, with no fresh flow; but Ash can feel the skull swelling under her fingers.
She should be in a hospital; she
should be back at the abbey.

“Long before you, even,” she said, deceptively light. “Come on. Hold on. Good girl. When I was raped. When the Griffin-in-Gold were hung, to a man, as a defeated garrison. When Guillaume left me. When I whored so that I could eat.
Then.
Hold on. That’s it.”

‘
SHE IS DYING
,
BURGUNDY IS PASSING
.’

“We’ve got no time. Don’t argue.” Ash slipped her hand under the cuff of the woman’s doublet, feeling her shock-cold skin, and her pulse. “I’ve seen men hit like this before.”

‘
SHE BREATHES
,
STILL
—’

‘
STILL HER HEART BEATS
—’

The pressure in her head is unbearable.

“And I’ll do – my miracle – not yours.”

‘
NO
—’

Around her, at the walls in the darkness, men are killing each other. In panic, and in controlled fury. The light of the guttering torch shows her – for a second – Robert Anselm grabbing the Lion Azure standard as John Burren goes head-first over the broken masonry. The intense cold numbs her fingers, her face, her body. The fight goes on.

‘
YOU WILL NOT
—’

She feels their power. With the place in her soul that listens, that draws them down to her, she reaches for that power and tries to drain it into herself. They resist. She feels them, their immense minds, holding back.

“
Now!
” she snarls. “Don’t you understand, I need her
alive
for this? She’s
Burgundy.
”

‘
IT WILL BE NO USE
!’ the Wild Machines protest, ‘
WHAT USE TO REMOVE ONLY THE POWER OF MIRACLES
,
AND NOT YOUR RACE
?
IT WILL RETURN
,
AND HOW WILL WE STOP IT
?’

Ash feels history, past and memory, all three, sliding into different shapes. A great hollow hunger grips her, not for this new future, but for her own reality.

Quietly, she says, “You need the nature of Burgundy, to make certain that miracles don’t happen.”

She is dazzled by the world that unfolds in her head and outside it: the Wild Machines, with the calculations of five thousand years, laying all the past and present out in front of her.

And, at the heart of them, faster than anything she can comprehend,
new
calculations happening.

With both hands – one bare, one bandaged; the cold numbing her pain – she rips at the neck of Florian’s doublet, gets a hand down on to her hot skin. And, careless of the filth on it, licks her other hand, and holds the wet skin beneath the woman’s nostrils, feeling the faintest feathering of breath.

She says aloud, “You need Burgundy, in eternity.”

Churned snow and mud are wet under her armoured knees. Blood stains her hose and boots. A wind blows up out of the dark, cold enough to make her eyes run, blind her. The last torch gutters.

She lifted her head and saw burning spatters of Greek Fire on the snow-blotched earth, and a golem striding over the fallen wall and lifting up the nozzle of a Greek Fire thrower.

A helmet-muffled roar sounded. An armoured man in Lion livery ran in front of her, brought the hammer-end of his poleaxe over and down: stone chips flew – and a gout of flame fell down with the golem’s shattered forearms, and licked at its bronze and granite torso.

“
A Lion!
” Robert Anselm’s familiar voice bellowed.

She opened her mouth to shout. The golem waved broken stone stumps. Robert Anselm threw himself face down in full armour in the dirt. The Greek Fire tank on the golem’s back went up in a soundless blue-white fireball.

In stark white light she sees the uneven line of fighting men outside the ruined chapel: the silhouettes of bow-shafts and hooked bills; the Lion standard; Frederick’s eagle-banner beyond; massed men and stone machines.

“Come and ’ave a go!” a male voice bellows, thirty feet away, over sudden local laughter. “If you think you’re hard enough!”

Broken walls cast stark shadows, everything black beyond. Men are shouting now above the noise of fighting, trying to outdo each other with cynical black humour.

“A Lion!” Anselm’s rallying voice: “A Lion!”

The heat of breath touched her. She did not turn her head.

In the corner of her vision, she sees a great needle-clawed paw set down upon the stone.

Under her hand, there is no detectable heartbeat; against her sweating skin, no whisper of a breath. But Florian’s flesh is warm.

She closes her eyes against the majesty of the Heraldic Beast that God’s grace – as reflected by the men and women of the Lion Azure – brings prowling out of the darkness.

“
Now.
”

She draws on them, drains them: the gold at the heart of the sun. She feels the unstoppable change beginning.

“I don’t lose,” she says, holding Florian to her. “Or if I do – you always save as many of your own as you can.”

It is the moment of change:

She is conscious of Floria’s weight. Not until then does she open her eyes again, looking at the snow trodden down black on the old abandoned altar, at snow-lined ruined walls, and see the familiarity.