Ash: A Secret History (93 page)

‘
WHAT SPEAKS TO US
?’

The vibration in her mind and in the world met, became one. Another section of the roof fell. The stars of the south shone between racing clouds.

The tiles on which she stood buckled.

Earthquake,
Ash thought, with complete calm. She stood and stepped back, at the same time reaching out and grabbing the sleeve of Godfrey’s robe, hauling him towards her. A stench of faeces and urine filled her nostrils: she choked. Buffeted by stampeding soldiers – Theudibert, Saina – and deafened by Alderic shouting, “To Leofric! To
Leofric!”;
and another ’
arif
screaming “
Evacuate the hall!”,
Ash flashed a shaky grin at Godfrey.

“We’re going!” She started to move backwards as she spoke.

A shatter of plaster fell, exploding on the floor not twenty feet away. Two great chunks of masonry tumbled down, seemingly slowly, through the air. Her gut curdled.

“The doctor!” Godfrey bawled.

“No time! Oh shit – get him!” Ash let go of Godfrey’s robe. The falling stone struck somewhere to her left, with a noise like cannon-fire. Fragments shrapnelled through the crowds. The sheer mass of people between her and the impact saved her. Stone slashed through flesh. Shrieks and cries deafened her. An eddy of motion pushed her forward.

She braced herself, and knelt down. Men’s bodies knocked against her, all but trampling her. A body in a mail hauberk sprawled at her feet. The boy-soldier Gaiseric, moaning, semi-conscious. She ruthlessly rolled Gaiseric over, unbuckling his sword-belt. “
Godfrey!
Move! Go, go, go!”

Kneeling, she lifted her head in time to see Godfrey Maximillian staggering back across the tilted floor, a man’s struggling body slung over his shoulder – Annibale Valzacchi, his face all one bloody bruise.

I hear
more than one
voice
—!
Who? What
—
?

If they speak again, we’ll all die
—

Sure-fingered, Ash buckled belt and scabbard around her, settling the sword on her hip as she sprang up, reaching to try and take some of the Italian man’s weight from Godfrey. Men struck against her, pushing past.

“We’re out of here!” she shouted. “Come on!”

The noise of stonework tearing drowned out her voice.

She has a moment to stare around her, through dust and flying mortar-powder – the throne and dais gone, buried under raw-edged marble cladding and granite masonry. No sign of King-Caliph Gelimer. A glimpse of a white head, far over: Leofric being hustled between two soldiers; Alderic behind him, a flash of his drawn blade in the smoky air.

A carved, curving block of stone crashed to the floor thirty feet ahead of her. Instantly she dropped, pulling Godfrey and the injured doctor down with her.

Stone splinters whistled over her head, which she buried in her arms. Stone fragments ricocheted, stinging her legs.

“Sweet Christ, if I only had a helmet! This is more dangerous than combat!”

“There’s no way through!” Godfrey Maximillian bellowed, his big body pressed up close to hers where they lay.

Terrified clawing crowds of men blocked every near archway. The hall had no lights now, no candles, no torches. Red flames flickered up from one wall: embroidered hangings flaming into fire. Someone screamed, above the tumult. Two voices bellowed contradictory orders. Over to the left, blades rose and fell: a squad of soldiers from some
amir
’s household attempting to cut their way through and out into the open.

“We can’t stay here! The rest of this place is coming down!”

A cold wind blew dust into her eyes. Ash coughed. The stench of sewerage grew stronger. She nodded once to herself; got up on to hands and knees, and grabbed Annibale Valzacchi’s arm again. “Okay, no problem. Follow me.”

Any decision is better than no decision.

Valzacchi’s dead-weight body jolted as they pulled it over rubble, Godfrey Maximillian crawling beside her, his robes blackened with stone-dust. The chape of her scabbard scraped a groove in the mosaic tiles beside her.

“Here!”

The tilting floor fell away, ahead of her, down into darkness. The crust of tiles had broken like the pastry crust that coffins a pie. She wiped her streaming eyes, let Valzacchi’s arm fall, and knelt up, looking for a fallen torch or candle. Nothing but the dim light of fire flickered across the hall.

“What is this?” Godfrey wiped his beard, choked at the foetid air.

“The sewers.” Ash, in the stink and faint light, grinned at him. “Sewers, Godfrey! Think! This is
Carthage.
There had to be Roman sewers. We can’t go out, we go
down!
”

A
creaking groan filled the air. For a moment she was not certain where it came from. She glanced up. Torn clouds raced across a black, starry sky. The moist air stank.

What remained of the dome groaned. She could almost swear she saw, in the light of burning banners, the stone masonry sag inwards.

Ash picked up a fragment of granite the size of her fist and tossed it into the black gap in the floor in front of her. The rock bounded once on the sloping floor and disappeared.

“One – two—”

A splash, from the darkness below.

“That’s it! I’m right!”

A straining groan of masonry filled the air. Ash met Godfrey’s eyes. The bearded priest smiled at her, with a sudden, surpassing sweetness.

“I only wish this were the first time you’d landed me in the shit!” He reached for Valzacchi, rolling the unconscious man forward, and poised his body at the top of the tilting slab of tiles. “All the saints bless you, Ash. Our Lady be with us!”

Godfrey pushed Valzacchi. The Italian, his face black with blood in the dim light, rolled over and over and vanished into the cleft.

“One … two…”

Ash heard the heavier splash of a man’s body hitting liquid.

Deep, or shallow?

No solid sound, that would indicate rock beneath.

She nodded once, decisively, tucked her scabbarded sword up under her left arm, and crabbed forwards on her hands and knees. “Better not let the bastard drown, I guess –
let’s do it!
”

A
hollow crackling roar grew louder. Fire. The light flickered redly across the terracotta tiles. The cleft, some six or seven feet across, split the hall each way as far as Ash could see. Nothing penetrated the darkness of the hole: light stopped at the fractured edges of tiles. The faint illumination showed fresh, raw broken stone on the far side of the gap. Nothing of what lay below down in the darkness.

She hesitated.

Water? Rubble? Broken rock? Valzacchi might have landed luckily, the next one might break their neck—

“Ash!” Godfrey whispered. “Can you?”

“I can. Can you?”

“There’s a hurt man down there. I knew I could do it, if there was. Follow me!”

She was suddenly looking at his robed rump as Godfrey Maximillian crawled rapidly forward, slid himself sideways over the edge, hung by his hands, and dropped.

Displaced air blew across her face.

Instinct took her. She threw herself forward. The tiled floor battered her. The hilt of the Visigoth sword dug into her unarmoured ribs. The floor suddenly wasn’t there. She dropped into void and darkness—

—an immense weight struck the floor of the dome above her. A
boom!
as loud as a siege bombard deafened her. The darkness filled with rock, with flying fragments, with dust. She dropped into something freezing cold, in a shock that nearly drove her heart to stop and battered the air from her lungs.

She clamped her mouth shut. Water stung her eyes. Water enveloped her. She beat her arms, kicked her legs. The water swallowed her down, her lungs straining for air. She thrashed her legs, disorientated; certain for a split second that she would see sunlight to guide her to the surface, that she would splash up under the stone arches of a river bridge in Normandy, or in the valley by the Via Aemilia—

Something sucked her down.

The force of the water swirled her, bodily. Something passed, taking her down with it. A hard shock broke against her thigh, numbing all her right leg; and her right hand would not move. Ferociously, she thrashed her numb arms, kicked; her chest burning; her eyes wide open and stinging in the black water.

Redness shone, to her right and below her.

I am diving,
she realised. She twisted her body in the water, kicked herself up towards the light.

Her mouth opened of its own accord. Head back, face slapped with frozen air, she sucked in great sobbing breaths. She kicked again with her legs: found herself standing, crouching on rock, her head just above water, thick with filth; her body numb.

The stench of an open sewer forced her gorge to rise. She straightened, vomiting weakly.

“Godfrey?
Godfrey!
”

No voice.

The noise of fire echoed down from above. Red light limned the edges of the gap. A thin warmth drifted down, and smoke, and she coughed, choking again.

“Godfrey! Valzacchi! Here!”

Her eyes adjusting, she made out that she crouched at one side of a great tubular sewer, built of long red bricks, ancient beyond measure. Where the earthquake had cracked the pipe, water was rushing out between the gaps. Tumbled blocks of stone choked the rift, not ten feet away from her, piled up in the water and blocking the flow.

Dust settled over her wet face.

She straightened, the weight of her soaking clothes dragging her down. Her cloak was gone; the belt and scabbard still around her waist, but the sword gone out of it. Her left hand was white, her right hand black. She lifted it. Blood trickled over her wrist. She flexed her fingers, sensation returning. Grazes bled. She stooped to feel her leg, below the surface; aching now, but whether with injury or with the cold of the water, it was impossible to tell.

Realisation came to her with the settling dust.

The roof fell in after me.

“Godfrey! It’s all right, I’m here! Where are you?”

A noise sounded to her left. She turned her head. Her dark-adjusted eyes showed her a lip of brick – an access path, she realised. She reached out, grabbing the edge, and tried to pull herself up out of the water. The scuffling noise increased. In the light of the fire above, she saw a man. His hands were clamped over his face. He ran off, staggering, into the dark.

“Valzacchi! It’s
me!
Ash! Wait!”

Her voice echoed flatly off the brick walls of the sewer tunnel. The man – it must be the doctor, by his build – did not stop running.

“
Godfrey!
” She hauled herself up on her belly on to the platform – a brick ledge a few yards wide, running along the course of the sewer pipe. Grit slashed her palms.

She spat, coughed, spat again; and crawled forward, leaning over the water, staring down.

Flames reflected from the swift-running surface. It stank with a sweetness that choked her. She could see nothing beneath.

An explosion boomed through the tunnel.

She jumped, her head jerking up. Above, the building was still collapsing, broken masonry hitting the floor with a sound of artillery. Warmth fanned down on her face from the flames. In her mind’s eye she pictured what had been left of the dome – two-thirds of the roof poised to fall.

“Well,
fuck.
” She spoke aloud. “I’m not going without you. Godfrey! Godfrey! It’s Ash! I’m here! Godfrey!”

She limped along the brick pathway, quartering the area under the crevasse. The floor of the hall groaned above her. She called out, paused to listen, called again, as loudly as she could.

Nothing.

Wind blew across her wet face, sucked up through the gap to the fire above. Red and gold light shimmered on the running water that carried the Citadel’s sewage. She wiped her streaming nose, turned around, moved back; this time leaning out over the water to stare across at the piled broken masonry under the rift.

Something moved.

Without a second’s hesitation, Ash sat down on the lip of the platform and slid over into freezing water. She thrust her feet against the side. The impetus swirled stinking water across her face, but she managed, with two gasping strokes, to swim across to the fallen masonry.

Her fingers touched wet cloth.

A body rocked, caught under the shattered bas-relief carving of Saint Peredur. She knotted the cloth around her hand, pulled; couldn’t move it. The block stood taller than she did, bedded down into the channel. She braced her foot against it and tugged.

Cloth ripped. The body came away free. She fell back into deep water, out of her depth in mid-pipe; kept her numbed, frozen grip on the wool and swam, dragging him with all her strength, towards the platform. The body floated face down; Godfrey or maybe not Godfrey; about the right build—

Cold limp hands brushed her, under the water. Fravitta?

Splashing water echoed from the broken roof of the pipe. Frenetic, straining, she found rough places in the bricks below the water line. She dug her toes into the holes. She ducked down under the water line; got her shoulders under his chest, and lifted his body up.

For a second she was poised, all his fourteen-stone weight on her shoulders, just above the lip of the platform. Her fingers slipped, losing their cold grip on his thighs. She tilted her body sideways, rolling him; knew as she fell back that she succeeded, got most of his body on to the path; and she surfaced, shaking wet hair out of her face, to see the body slumped and dark on the brickwork above her.

She crawled up and out. Her legs were leaden. Her breath sobbed in her throat. She knelt on all fours.

The soaking robes were no colour, in this gold light; but she knew the curve of this back and shoulder, had looked over at it sleeping in her tent too many times not to know it.

“Godfrey—” She choked, spat filth; thought,
I can’t see him breathing, get him
over on his side, get the water out of his lungs
—