Ash: A Secret History (82 page)

Godfrey said, “I’m nothing but an uneducated hedge-priest. You know that. I will pray to Our Lady and the Communion of Saints, I’ll move Heaven and Earth to free you, you know that. But I would be failing you in everything if I didn’t try to bring you to some realisation, some knowledge that you could be dead before you have time to put your soul right. When did you last go to confession? Before the field at Auxonne?”

Ash opened her mouth, shut it again. At last, she said, “I don’t remember. I really don’t remember the last time I was absolved. Does it matter?”

Godfrey gave a small, high chuckle; a noise that rather reminded her of Leofric’s rats. He brushed his hand across his face. When he looked at her, his taut expression had relaxed. “Why? Why do I
bother?
You’re a complete heathen, child. We both know it.”

“I’m sorry,” Ash said contritely.

“No.”

“I’m sorry I can’t be a good Christian for you.”

“I wouldn’t expect it. God’s representatives on Earth have not been entirely kind.” Godfrey Maximillian cocked his head, listening, then relaxed again. “You’re young. You have neither kith nor kin, household nor guild, lord nor lady. I’ve watched you on the outside, child; I know at least one other reason than lust for why you married Fernando del Guiz. Every human tie you have is bound with money, and unbound with the end of a contract. That will never lead you to a tie with Our Lord. I prayed that you would have time to grow older, and to consider.”

A long, harsh male scream echoed between the cell’s stone walls. It took Ash a second to realise that it was not close at hand but far off – far below – and loud enough to echo up from the harbour, over the noise of gulls.

“Carnival, huh?”

“A rough carnival.”

Ash thoughtfully wiped her charcoal several times across her paper, blurring the soft lines. She scrunched it up, knelt up, and threw it out of the window. The charcoal stick she tucked under one end of the pallet.

“Godfrey… How long does it take before a foetus has a soul?”

“Some authorities tell us, forty days. Others, that it takes on a soul when it quickens, and the woman feels the child move within her womb. Holy Saint Magdalen,” he said flatly, “is that it?”

“I was with child when I came here. They beat me, and I lost it. Yesterday.” Ash found herself making the same quick movement of looking at the black window that never showed her a sun, never reassured her that it was day. “No, the day before.”

His hand closed over hers. She looked down at it.

“Are the children of incest sinful?”

Godfrey’s grip tightened on her hand. “Incest? How could it be
incest
between you and your husband!”

“No, not Fernando. Me.” Ash stared at the opposite wall. She did not look at Godfrey Maximillian. She turned her hand over, so that her palm slid into his, and they sat with their backs leaning up against the wall, the heavy-duty cloth of the pallet cold under them.

“I do have family,” she said. “You’ve seen them, Godfrey. The Faris, and these slaves here. The
Amir
Leofric breeds them –
us
– like cattle. He breeds the son back to the mother, and the daughter to the father, and this family’s been doing it since before living memory. If I’d borne a child, it would have been incestuous a hundred times over.” Now she turned her head, so that she could see Godfrey’s face. “Does that shock you? It doesn’t shock me.” And in a pragmatic monotone, she added, “My baby might have been deformed. A monster. By that reasoning, I may
be
a monster. Not just my voice. Not all deformities are things you can see.”

His eyelids fluttered as he avoided her gaze. She thought she had not noticed before how long and fine his brown lashes were. She felt a pain in her hand and looked down. His knuckles were white where he gripped her hand.

“How—” Godfrey coughed. “How do you know it to be true? How did you discover this?”

“
Amir
Leofric told me,” Ash said. She waited until Godfrey looked her in the face again. “And I asked the Stone Golem.”

“
You
asked—”

“He wanted to know whether I was a fake or not. So I told him. If I could, and it was right, then I
had
to be hearing it from somewhere, I
had
to be hearing the voice of the machine.” Ash reached down with her other hand and began to peel Godfrey’s fingers off her. Where he had gripped, her skin was bloodlessly white.

“He bred a general who could hear his machine,” Ash said, “but now – he doesn’t need another one.”

“Iesu Christus Viridianus, Christus Imperator,”
⁴
Godfrey said. He looked down at his hands without seeing them. Ash noticed that the cuffs of his robe were frayed. And half the gauntness of his face could be attributable to nothing other than hunger: a poor priest, lodging in some Carthage tenement, dependant on doctors like Annibale Valzacchi for alms, and for information. No information is without its price.

In the silence, she said: “When you pray, Godfrey, do you get an answer?”

The question brought him out of his amazement. “It would be presumptuous to say.”

All her body was tense against the cold, mitigated as it might be by thick stone walls. She shifted on the pallet.

“This,” she touched her temple, “isn’t the Communion of Saints. I used to hope it would be, Godfrey. I kind of hoped it would be Saint George, or one of the soldier-saints, you know?”

A faint smile curled up one corner of his mouth. “I suppose you would hope that, child.”

“It isn’t a saint’s voice, it’s a machine’s voice. Although the machine might have been made by a miracle. If Prophet Gundobad was a real prophet of God?” She looked quizzically at Godfrey, without giving him time to answer. “And when I hear it, I don’t just listen.”

“I don’t understand.”

Ash bounced where she sat, hitting one fist on the pallet. “It’s not just listening. When I hear you speak, I don’t have to
do
anything to hear you.”

“I frequently feel that you don’t have to pay attention,” Godfrey said, with a grave humour; derailing her absolutely. He gave her a smile of apology. “There is something more to this?”

“The voice.” Ash made a helpless gesture with her hands. “I feel as if I’m pulling on a rope, or – you won’t understand this, but, sometimes in combat you can
make
someone else attack you in a certain way, by the way you stand and hold your weapon, by the way you move – you offer a gap, a way in through your defences – and they come in where you want them to, and then you deal with them. I never noticed when it was just a question or two before we fought, but Leofric made me listen to the Stone Golem for a long time. I’m
doing
something when I listen, Godfrey. Offering a … way in.”

“There are acts of omission and acts of commission.” Godfrey sounded rapt, again. Abruptly, he glanced at the door and lowered the volume of his speech. “How much can you get it to tell you? Can it tell you how to leave?”

“Oh, it could tell me. Probably tell me where all the guards are stationed.” Ash flicked her gaze up to meet Godfrey’s. “I’ve been talking to the slaves. When Leofric wants to know what tactical questions the Faris is asking the machine, he asks it –
and it tells him.
”

“And would tell what you ask, too?”

She shrugged. Staccato, she said, “Maybe. If it ‘remembers’. If Leofric thinks to ask. He will. He’s smart. Then I’m caught. They’ll just change duty rosters. Maybe beat me until I’m unconscious and can’t ask.”

Godfrey Maximillian took her hand. His body was still half-turned towards the door. “Slaves do not always tell the truth.”

“I know. If I was going to—” Ash made another unspecific gesture, trying to frame a thought. “To call what it knows to me, I’d ask something else first. Godfrey, I’d ask it
why is it so cold here? Amir
Leofric doesn’t know the answer to that, and he’s scared.”

“Everyone is—”

“That’s just it. Everyone
here
is scared, too. I thought this was something they made happen for their crusade – but they didn’t expect this cold either. This isn’t the Eternal Twilight, this is something else again.”

“Perhaps these are the last days—”

A heavy tread sounded in the corridor.

Godfrey Maximillian leapt to his feet rapidly, brushing down his robe and gown.

“Try and get me out,” Ash said quickly and quietly, “if I don’t hear from you soon, I’ll try any way I can think of.”

His strong hand enveloped her shoulder, pushing her back down as she tried to rise, so that she was kneeling in front of him as the cell door began to open and soldiers came in. Godfrey crossed himself, and lifted the cross from his broad chest, and kissed it devoutly. “I have an idea. You won’t like it.
Absolvo te,
⁵
my child.”

The
nazir
with Alderic was not Theudibert, Ash noted; nor were any of the squad Theudibert’s men. The ’
arif
commander stood back while his soldiers filed out, Godfrey Maximillian between them.

Ash watched impassively.

“You ought to be more careful what you say, Frankish girl,” ’
Arif
Alderic remarked. He put his hand on the steel door and, instead of closing it behind him, pushed it to in front of him, and turned around to face her. “That’s a friendly warning.”

“One,” Ash held up her hand and ticked it off on her fingers, “what makes you think I don’t know there are always people here listening to me? Two: what makes you think I care what you report to your lord-
amir
? He’s mad. Three, he’s already planning to torture me, just
what
have I got to worry about?”

She managed to end with her fists on her hips, chin up; and more energy in her voice than she thought she could find, given the weakness from hunger that went through her every time she stood up. The big bearded man stirred uncomfortably. Something about her bothered him; it took Ash several seconds to work out that it was the contradiction between her dress and her stance.

“You should be more careful,” the Visigoth captain repeated stubbornly.

“Why?”

’
Arif
Alderic did not answer. He walked past her to the window, leaning up the red granite shaft and peering at the sky. A smell of ripe harbour rubbish drifted in.

“Have you ever done anything you remained ashamed of, Frankish girl?”

“What?” Ash looked at the back of his head. By the set of his shoulders, he was uncomfortable. A chill feathered the hairs on her arms.
What is this?

“I said, have you ever done anything that you stayed ashamed of? As a soldier?” He turned to face her, looked her up and down, and repeated more firmly, “As a soldier.”

Ash folded her arms. She bit back the first smart remark that came to her mind, and studied him. In addition to his white robes and mail hauberk, the Visigoth wore a crude goatskin jacket, laced like a peasant’s tunic; and fur-lined boots, not sandals. He carried a curved dagger at his belt, and a sword with a narrow straight cross. Far too alert to be attacked, surprised.

Moved to truth, she relaxed and said, “Yes, everybody has. I have.”

“Will you tell me?”

“Why—” Ash stopped herself. “Okay. Five years ago. I was in a siege, it doesn’t matter where, some little town on the borders of Iberia. Our lord wouldn’t let the townspeople come out. He wanted them to eat up the garrison’s supplies, so they’d have to give up the siege. The garrison commander didn’t want that, so he evacuated them, drove them out into the moat. So there they were, two hundred people, in a ditch between two armies, neither of whom were going to let them back or through. We killed a dozen before they’d believe us. It went on for a month. They starved and they died. The smell was something else, even for a siege…”

She refocused her gaze on Alderic, to find the older man studying her closely.

“That’s a story I’ve told before,” she said. “Usually to discourage the kind of would-be mercenary recruit who is fourteen and thinks it’s all sitting on horseback and charging a noble enemy. I don’t suppose you have those. What I don’t say, and what I’m ashamed of, is the newborn babies. Our lord said it wasn’t right they should be unbaptised and go to hell, so he let the townspeople pass them up to us. And we passed them to the field-priest, who baptised them – and then we handed them straight back down into the ditch.”

Unconsciously she rested her palms flat against her belly.

“We did.
I
did. It went on for weeks. I know they died of starvation while in a state of grace … but it stays with me.”

The Visigoth ’
arif
nodded an acknowledgement.

“We have the fourteen-year-olds in the household levies.” White teeth flashed in his black beard, and then his expression changed. “Mine is infants, also. I was perhaps your age, no older. My
amir
– my lord, you would call him; Leofric – had me working in the stock pens.”

Ash was aware that she must look puzzled.

“The slave breeding-pens. No larger than this, most of them.” Alderic gestured around the cell. “My
amir
set me and my squad to culling ‘errors’ in the breeding programme, when they were twelve or fourteen weeks old.” The ’
arif
abruptly pulled off his helmet, wiping his white brow, that was sweating despite the cold. “We were the clear-up squad. Nothing I have done since, in twenty years of war, has been so bad as slashing the throats of babies – the big vein, here – and then just … throwing them away. Out of windows like this one, into the harbour: rubbish. No one questions my
amir
. My squad did as we were ordered.”

He shrugged helplessly, and met her gaze.

She looks at Alderic’s face in the knowledge that – if this is the way it happened for her – there is a sporting chance that he almost killed her, casually slashed her throat and dumped her, twenty years ago. And that he knows this.

“So,” Ash said. She grinned at Alderic companionably. “So, Leofric was nuts even back then, huh?”