Ash: A Secret History (88 page)

“At five days, you may see the markings. These, like the previous litters, have proved to be useless,” the lord-
amir
Leofric observed over her shoulder. His breath smelled of spices. He reached down with trim-nailed fingers, scooping the whole litter up in his palm, and dropped them into the leather bucket.

“Wh—”

They plopped beneath the black surface of the water without a struggle. Her senses, stretched keen, distinguished the rapid succession of fifteen or twenty tiny, heavy, splashes. Ash, staring, met the eyes of Violante, holding the leather bucket. The child’s eyes brimmed over with tears.

“The buck is number four-six-eight,” the elderly man said, oblivious, reaching up to another cage. “It
will not
breed true.”

He reached swiftly in. Ash heard a squeal. Leofric took his hand out, gripping a buck rat around the middle of its body. Ash recognised the liver-and-white patched rat – it squealed, thrashing, all four legs splaying, tail held out stiff, then whipping from side to side in panic. Leofric raised the rat up and brought its head cracking down on the sharp edge of the bench—

Ash, moving before she realised she had the intention, locked her hand around his wrist, arresting his movement before he could strike the animal’s brains out.

“No.” She pressed her lips together, shook her head. “No, I don’t think so – Father.”

It was said purely to jolt him. It did. The elderly man stared at her, skin crinkling around his sclerotic blue eyes. Abruptly he flinched, scowled, and flung the rat straight at her, putting his bleeding finger to his mouth. “Keep it if you want it!”

The flying object thumped into Ash’s chest. She dropped her hands to catch it, momentarily held a bundle of flailing needles, swore, snatched at the rat’s muscular body, and froze, completely, as the animal shot down into the depths of her voluminous cloak.

“What is your
objection?
” Leofric snapped testily.

“Um…” Ash remained perfectly still. A stench of rat droppings was in the air. Somewhere in the folds of her cloak, a small solid body moved.
It’s sitting in the crook of my elbow!
she realised. She did not put her hand into the cloth. She attempted a chirrup. “Hey, Lickfinger…”

The small warm solidity moved. She felt the rat’s body shift into a crouch. She couldn’t help but tense against the stab of razor-sharp chisel-teeth.

No bite came.

Wild animals do not willingly put up with human touch. They panic, confined. Someone has handled this one, Ash thought. Often. Far more often than Leofric, playing the eccentric rat-breeding
amir
…

Ash, very still, shifted her gaze and looked at Violante. The slave-girl had put down the bucket of dead rat-pups and was standing, fists in her mouth, face wet, staring at Ash with appalled hope.

Tameness is a ‘by-product’ of the breeding programme, is it? Bollocks!
Bollocks.
Leofric, you haven’t got a
clue.
I know who’s been petting these beasts. And I’ll bet she isn’t the only slave to do it, either…

“All right, I’ll keep it.” Ash turned back to Leofric. “I think
you’ve
misunderstood.”

“Misunderstood what?”

“
I’m not a rat.
”

“What?”

Ash held herself in stillness. The small, warm, solid body stretched out, under the wool, resting on her forearm. Against her skin –
under
my sleeve! she thought, picturing it sliding between points at her shoulder, wriggling under the neck of her shift. She had a brief lurch in her gut, feeling its furry snake-head and bald, scaly tail in contact with her skin – and realised that what she was feeling was warm fur, no different to a hound puppy; and a rapid, pattering heartbeat.

Ash raised her eyes to Leofric’s face and spoke with care. “I’m not a rat, my lord Father. You can’t breed me. And I’m not one of your naked slaves, either. I come with a history. I have a life, eighteen or twenty years of it, and I have ties, and responsibilities, and people who depend on me.”

“And?” Leofric held out his hands, and one of the male slaves came with a bowl and towel and soap. He spoke without appearing to notice the man who washed him.

I’ve done that with pages, Ash thought suddenly. It isn’t the same. It isn’t the same!

“They come with a history, too,” she added.

“What are you saying to me?”

“If I come from here, you still don’t own me. If I was born to one of your slaves, so what? I’m not yours. You have a responsibility to let me go,” Ash said. Her expression changed. In a quite different voice, she said, “Oh Lord, it’s licking me!”

The small hot tongue continued to rasp at the tender skin of her forearm, inside her elbow. Ash shivered. She looked up again, delighted; and seeing that Leofric was regarding her with his hands folded in front of his body, she said, “Talk. Negotiate. That’s what real people do, my lord Father. You see, you may be a cruel man, but you’re not mad. A madman could have run this experiment, but he couldn’t have managed a household, and court politics, and all the preparations for the invasion – crusade,” she corrected herself.

Leofric lifted his arms as a slave buckled his belt and purse over his long gown. He prompted quietly, “And?”

“And you should never turn down the chance of five hundred armed men,” Ash said calmly. “If I don’t have my company any more, give me a company of
your
men. You know what the Faris can do. Well, I’m better than her. Give me Alderic and your men, and I’ll make certain House Leofric doesn’t go down in the struggle for election. Let me send messengers and call my captains, and my specialist gunners and engineers, and I’ll make sure things go your way in Europe, too. What’s Burgundy, to me? It all comes down to armed force, in the end.”

She smiled, hand hovering over her elbow, afraid to touch the rat through the damp wool. By the feel of it, the animal could be asleep.

“Things are different, now that Caliph Theodoric’s dead,” she said. “I know what it’s like, I’ve been around enough times when heirs take over from lords, and there’s always the doubts about the succession, about who’s going to follow who. You think about it, my lord Father. This isn’t three days ago, this is
now.
I’m not a rat. I’m not a slave. I’m an experienced military commander
and I’ve been doing this a long time.
” Ash shrugged. “A split second with a poleaxe and these brains go flying out, and end up splattered up someone’s breastplate. But until that happens, I
know
so much that you need me, lord Father. At least until you’ve got yourself elected King-Caliph.”

Leofric’s lined and creased face ceased to have its habitual, blurred expression. He put his fingers through his unbraided beard, combing it tidy. His eyes were bright, and focused on Ash. She thought,
I’ve woken him up, I’ve
got him.

“I don’t believe I could trust you to command my troops and remain here.”

“Think about it.” She saw the fact that she did not plead sink home with him. “It’s your choice. No one who’s ever hired me
knew
I wasn’t going to turn coat and leg it. But I’m neither stubborn nor stupid. If I can come to a compromise that keeps me alive, and means I have some hope of finding out what happened to my guys at Auxonne, then I’ll fight for you, and you can trust me to go out there and die for you – or
not
die,” she added, “which is more to the point.”

She deliberately turned away from his intense, pondering face.

“Excuse me. Violante? I have a rat down my shift.”

She did not look at Leofric for the next confusing few minutes, loosening her laces, the small girl’s cold hands rummaging around her bodice, and the rat’s needle-thin claws scoring red weals down her shoulder as the reluctant furry body was removed. Two red eyes fixed on her from a pointy, furry face. The rat squicked.

“Look after him for me,” Ash ordered, as Violante cuddled the buck against her thin body. “Well, my lord Father?”

“I am what you would call a cruel man.” The Visigoth noble’s tone was completely unapologetic. “Cruelty is a very efficient way of getting what one needs, both from the world and from other people. You, for example, would suffer if I ordered the death of that piece of vermin, and the girl, or the priest that visited you here.”

“You think every other lord who hires a bunch of mercenaries doesn’t try that?”

“What do you do?” Leofric sounded interested.

“Generally, I have two or three hundred men around me who are trained to use swords and bows and axes. That discourages a lot of them.” Ash straightened her puff-shouldered sleeves. The chill, animal-scented room was finally beginning to feel warm, after the blizzard outside. “There’s
always
someone who’s stronger than you. That’s the first thing you learn. So you negotiate, make yourself on balance more useful to them than not – and it doesn’t always work; it didn’t work with my old company, the Griffin-in-Gold. They made the mistake of surrendering a garrison: the local lord drowned half of them in the lake, there, and hanged the rest from his walnut trees. Everybody’s time runs out sooner or later.” She deliberately met Leofric’s gaze, and said brutally, “
Later,
we’re all dead and rotten. What matters is what we do now.”

He took some notice of that, she thought, but could not be sure. What he did was to turn aside and let his slaves finish dressing him, in a new gown, belt, purse and eating-knife; and fur-trimmed velvet bonnet. She studied his back, that was beginning to stoop with age.

He’s nothing more than any other lord or
amir
.

And nothing less, of course. He can have me killed at any time.

“I wonder,” Leofric’s voice creaked, “whether my daughter would behave so well, if she were captured, and in the heart of an enemy stronghold?”

Ash began to smile. “If I’d been a better military commander, you wouldn’t be having the chance to compare us.”

He turned and continued to watch her assessingly. Ash thought, He doesn’t mind hurting people, he’s ambitious enough to try for the place of power, and the only difference between him and me is that he has the money and the men, and I don’t.

That, and the fact that he has forty or so years of experience that I don’t have. This is not a man to fight. This is a man to come to an agreement with.

“One of my ’
arifs,
Alderic, takes you to be a soldier.”

“I am.”

“But, as with my daughter, you are something more than that.”

The lord-
amir
glanced away as an older, robed slave entered the room, his hands full of parchment scrolls. The slave bowed briefly and began immediately to whisper to Leofric in an intense undertone. Ash guessed it to be a series of messages, requiring – by Leofric’s tone – assent, reassurance, or temporising rejection. It gave her the sense of how, six floors above her head, the stone world of the Citadel buzzed with men seeking allies, to gain power.

Leofric broke off. “I grant you that I will consider this.”

“My lord Father,” Ash acknowledged.

Better than I’d hoped for.

Rats rustled and scuttled, captive in their cages that lined the room. The hem of her kirtle dragged wetly at her heels, and the manacles on her ankles and her steel collar made her wince with their galling.

He hasn’t changed his mind. He may be thinking about changing it, but that’s as far as he’s got. What can I put into the balance?

“I
am
something more,” she said. “Two for the price of one, remember? Maybe you could do with a commander here in Carthage who can use the Stone Golem’s tactical advice?”

“And sometimes needs to use it for a revolt of her own men?” the lord-
amir
. said quizzically, preparing to follow the slave out. “You are not infallible, daughter. Let me consider.”

Ash froze, not attending to his last words.

For a revolt of—

The last time in Dijon I spoke to the Stone Golem, it was the riot, when they almost killed Florian—

She bowed her head as the lord-
amir
Leofric left the room, so that he shouldn’t see her expression.

Jesu Christus, I was right. He can find out from the Stone Golem what questions it’s been asked – by her or by me. He can know exactly what tactical problems I’ve had.

Or will have. If I still
have
a voice. If it isn’t just silence, like it was out in the pyramids. And I can’t ask!
Goddammit.

She thought, furiously, not really attending as a troop of soldiers escorted her back to her cell. The manacles on her ankles were removed, the collar left on her. She sat in the dark of the day, alone, in a bare room with only a pallet and a pisspot, her head between her hands, straining her mind for an idea, a thought,
any
thing.

No. Anything I ask it – Leofric will know. I’d be telling him what I was doing!

A hollow metallic call from outside announced sunset.

Ash lifted her head. Snow, drifting, whitened the stone ledge at the front of the window embrasure, but it did not penetrate far in. Gown and cloak swathed her. Hunger, grinding, made her stomach knot up. The single light, too high up to be reachable, shone down on bas-relief walls, and the worn mosaics of the floor, and the flat black surface of the iron door.

She pushed her fingers up under her collar, easing the metal away from the sores it had already rubbed on her skin.

Something scratched on the outside surface of the door.

A child’s voice came clearly between the junction of door and jamb, where great steel bars socketed into the wall.

“Ash? Ash!”

“Violante?”

“Done,” the voice whispered. More urgently, “Done, Ash, done!”

Ash scrambled to the door, kneeling on her skirts. “What is it?
What’s
been done?”

“A Caliph. We have Caliph, now.”

Shit! The election’s finished sooner than I thought.

“Who?” Ash did not expect to recognise the name. Talking to Leovigild and other slaves had brought her scurrilous rumours about the habits of the lord-
amirs
of the King-Caliph’s court, a passing acquaintance with some political careers, the knowledge of such sexual alliances as slaves witness, and a good deal of gossip about deaths from natural causes. Given another forty-eight hours to persuade the soldiers to gossip, she might have been in a better position to judge military power. Leofric’s name was often mentioned, but that Leofric should gain the throne was neither impossible, nor likely.