Ash: A Secret History (39 page)

Maybe the Lion never came at all.
No.
No – our clerk made the miracle: the Lion did come.

But maybe nothing happened to
me,
there.

Maybe I just told the story of the chapel that way so often, I remember it like it did happen.

Ash’s body shuddered, hands and feet cold, until she huddled up, tucking her hands into her armpits.

The Faris. She was bred to hear her tactical machine.

It
is
the same voice.

I’m – what? Sister. Cousin. Something.
Twin.

Just something they discarded, on the way to breeding her.

And all I do is … overhear.

Is that all I’ve ever done? A bastard brat, outside the door, listening in to someone else’s tactical war-machine, sneaking out answers for brutal little wars that the Visigoth Empire doesn’t even notice…

The Faris is what they wanted. And even she’s a slave.

After that she sat alone without food or drink and watched the candle-flame pouring a line of blackness up to where it suddenly broke and squiggled, playing sepia smoke over the low plaster ceiling, merging with the shadows. Her heart ticked off minutes, hours.

Ash rested her arms across her knees, and buried her face in her arms. There was a hot wetness against her face. Shock comes after wounds in the field, sometimes a long while after; and here in this narrow room she feels it now: Fernando del Guiz is not coming.

She wiped her nose on her sleeve. What opportunities there might be, to talk herself out of the prison for a ransom, or pity, or by violence, would not present themselves now.

This was the Emperor’s marriage, and he’s got out of it at the first opportunity that came along. No, that’s not it—

Ash’s chest aches. The hollow breathlessness wants to become tears, but she won’t let it; raises her face and blinks in the candlelight.

—He’s not here now because it was no coincidence he was in the town hall before I got captured. He was there to confirm where I was. For them. For her.

Well, you had him; you fucked him; you got what you wanted; now you know he’s a weaseling little shit. What’s the problem?

I wanted more than fucking him.

Forget
him.

The wax candle melted down to a stump.

I’m prisoner here.

This is no Romance of Arthur or Peredur. I’m not about to scale the walls, fight off armoured men with my bare hands, ride off into the sunshine. What happens to valueless prisoners taken in war is pain first, broken bodies second, and an unmarked, unchristian burial afterwards. I am in their city. They own it now.

A hot thread of disquiet rumbled her bowels. She rested her arms on her knees, and her forehead on her arms.

They might expect a rescue by my company. Soon. An attack, men-at-arms, not on war-horses in these streets, so probably on foot.

I’d better have got this right.

The sharpest and loudest noise she had ever heard shattered the house.

Her body froze in the instant of the sound. Her bowels moved. She found in the same second both that she lay on shattered oak floorboards, and that she knew what the noise was.
Cannon fire.

That’s
ours!

Her heart leapt up as she heard. Tears ran down her stunned face. She could have kissed their feet for gratitude. Another roar went up. The crack and thud of the second explosion echoed off the bare rafters of the roof.

For long heartbeats she was back in the alpine crags, where water falls down so loud that a man cannot hear himself speak, until out of the darkness and dust, torches flamed and men walked – men walking in over the remnants of lath and plaster and bloody rags of soldiers.

Black air swirled, dust clearing. Her room ended in broken beams and blackened limewash.

The back of the house gaped, blown away.

A great beam creaked and fell, like trees falling in the wildwood. Plaster sprayed her face.

Outside the breach, in the torchlight in the open, stood two carts and two light cannon dismounted, smoking from their touch-holes still; and she squinted her eyes and made out the bright blaze of Angelotti’s curls, the man himself striding up to where she lay, hatless, grinning, and speaking – shouting – until she heard:

“We’ve blown the wall! Come on!”

With the back of the house, the city wall was down too; these houses, all fortified at the backs, themselves forming the wall around this part of the city.

Beyond them lay black fields, and the shrouds of forests on moonlit hills, and men moving in armour, calling “
Ash! Ash!
” both as a battle call, and to be known by their fellows. She stumbled out of the rubble, ears ringing, her balance gone.

Rickard tugged the sleeve of her arming doublet, Godluc’s reins in his other hand. She made a grab for the big grey gelding’s bridle, face momentarily pushed against his warm dappled flank. A crossbow bolt buried itself in old Roman brick and sprayed the wreckage of the house with fragments, men shouted, a rush of newcomers in mail and white tunics scrambling over the fallen oaken beams.

Ash got one foot into Godluc’s stirrup, swung herself up, loose points and mail flapping from her arming doublet, too light without her armour; and a little lithe man flew at her and caught her by the waist and bore her bodily onwards right over her war-horse’s back.

She fell, felt no impact—

Something happened.

I have bitten my tongue, I am falling, where is the Lion?

The picture behind her eyes was not of the Blue Lion banner, but of something flat and gold and meat-breathed, and a chill struck her fingers, her hands, her feet; dug deep into her sprawling body.

Feet stood to either side of her. Calves encased in shaped steel plate. European greaves, not Visigoth armour. Something flicked a glint of light past her face, into the air. Liquid spattered her cheek. An appalled shriek deafened her: the shriek of a man ruined in a second by the swipe of a sword, all life to come wrecked and spilled out on rubble; and a man close by her screamed, “My God, my God, no, no—” and then, “Christ, oh Christ, what have I done,
what have I done,
oh Christ, it
hurts,
” and screams, on and on and on.

Floria’s voice said “Christ!” very precisely and distantly. Ash felt the tall woman handling her head, warm fingers on her hair. Half her skull was numb. “No helmet, no armour—”

And another voice, male, saying above her, “—ridden over in the mêlée—”

Ash felt conscious through everything that was happening, although somehow she could not bring it to mind a moment later. Armoured horses galloped; hand-gunners banged off their charges, and then ran in the moonlight. She was tied with ropes to a truckle bed – how much later? – while she screamed, and others screamed; and the bed tied to a wagon; the wagon one among many, moving down frozen, muddy, deep-rutted roads.

A flapping cloth across her eyes blacked out the moon. All around her, wagons moved, oxen lowed; and the screeches of pack mules mixed with the shouting of orders, and a trickle of warm oil ran into her eyes, dripping down her forehead: Godfrey Maximillian, in his green stole, pronouncing the Last Rites.

It was too much to hold. She let it slip from her: the armed company men riding outrider, the whole camp packed up and moving, the clashes of steel from behind, far too close.

Floria knelt above her, holding Ash’s head wedged still between dirty-fingered hands. Ash had a moment’s sight of the grease of unwashed skin blackening the woman’s linen cuff.

“Stay still!” the husky voice breathed above her. “Don’t move!”

Ash leaned her head to one side, vomiting, and then screamed, and froze: held herself as still as possible, pain flaying her skull. A strange new drowsiness possessed her. She watched Godfrey kneeling in the cart beside her, praying, but praying with his eyes open, watching her face.

Time is nothing but vomiting and pain, and the agony of the cart rocking and jolting in the ruts of the roads.

Time is moonlight: black day cloud-obscured moon: darkness: night again.

What roused her – hours later? days later? – into a dreaminess in which she could at least see the world, was a mutter, an exclamation from one man to another, from woman to man and child, all down the lines of her company. She heard shouting. Godfrey Maximillian grabbed the sides of the cart and leaned out of the front, past Rickard driving the beasts.

What they were shouting, she finally made out, was a name, a place. Burgundy.
The most powerful of princedoms,
she voiced in her mind; and at a level of voicelessness knew that she herself had intended this, had ordered it, had made Robert Anselm privy to this her intention before ever going inside the walls of Basle after the Visigoth commander.

Trumpets sounded.

A brilliance dazzled her eyes.
This is the pass to purgatory, then.
Ash prayed.

Light broke on her, over the canvas roof of the ox-wain, sifting down through the white coarse cloth. Light brought out the grain of the wood, the wagon’s thick oak-plank flooring. Light manifested from the darkness the drawn cheek of Floria del Guiz, crouching over her wicker pack of herbs, retractors, scalpels and saws.

Not the colour-leeching silver of the moon. A harsh yellow light.

Ash tried to move. She groaned with a mouth thick with saliva. A man’s broad-fingered hand pressed flat on her breast, holding her still on the low bed. Light brought out the dirt in the whorls of his fingertips. Godfrey’s face was not turned to her, he stared out of the back of the wagon.

A warmth gleamed on his pink flesh, under the road-dust, and on the acorn-colour of his shaggy beard; and she could see, reflected in his dark eyes, a growing of this mad brightness.

Suddenly, a sharp line divided the rush-cushioned floor of the wagon and the strapped bed. Darkness over her body – shadow. Brightness over her blanket-covered legs, a line of light moving with the rocking motion of the wagon – sunlight.

She struggled, but could not raise her head. She moved her eyes only. Through the open back of the wagon glowed colours: blue and green and white and pink.

Her eyes teared. Through flooding water her eyes focused on distance – on green hills, and a flowing river, and the white walls of an enclosed town. The smell rose up and hit her, like a blow under her ribs from a quarterstaff: the smell of roses and honey, and the pungent warmth of horse- and ox-dung with the sun on it.

Sun
light.

Nausea flooded up. Ash vomited weakly, the stinking liquid running down her chin. Pain fractured around the bones of her skull, brought more water to her eyes. Agonised, terrified of what the pain might mean, still she could only think,
It’s day, it’s day, it’s the
sun!

Men with ten years‘ service cutting flesh on battlefields climb down to kiss the dirt ruts, bury their faces in dew-wet grass. Women who sew men’s clothes and wounds alike, fall to their knees beside them. Riders pitch down from their horses’ saddles. All, all falling on the cold earth, in the light, the light, singing “
Deo gratias, Deo adiuvante, Deo gratias!
”
²⁶

  Message: #47 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash, archaeological discoveries

Date:    09/11/00 at 12.03 p.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna –

Anna, I apologise, for being out of contact for two days. It hardly seems like minutes, here! So much is going on – we’ve had television crews trying to get in. Dr Isobel has thrown what amounts to a security cordon around the area, with the local government’s permission. So you may or may not have seen anything about this on non-terrestrial television. If I were Isobel, I wouldn’t be so keen to have soldiers around an archaeological dig; when I think of what they could carelessly destroy, my blood does run cold, it is no mere figure of speech.

Before I do anything else, I *must* apologise for the things I wrote on Tuesday about Dr Napier-Grant. Isobel and I have been old friends, in a rather spiky way, for so many years. I’m afraid I let my complete enthusiasm over the discoveries here reduce me to a babbling idiot. I hope you will regard everything I wrote as being in confidence.