by Mary Gentle
“Relieved?”
“The Visigoths having taken the Italian cities, and the cantons, and south Germany, they must either turn east and strike at the Turk Empire, or west at Europe.”
“If they turn west, then the Turks might face a Visigoth rather than a Christian Europe, but otherwise no change; well,” Ash said, “since Sultan Mehmet16 must have thought all this was intended for him, he will be relieved!”
There were present, Ash saw, a few nervous men of Savoy and France, as yet untouched, desperate to know which way the Visigoth invasion was aimed next.
“I hate cities,” she said absently. “They’re a fire hazard. You can’t buy oil or tapers here for gold. I give it two days before this city burns itself from wall to wall.”
She expected some comment on her grumpiness, given with ease based on their long knowledge of each other. What Godfrey said, in a thoughtful tone, was, “We talk as if the sun will never shine again.”
Ash stood silent.
“It’s still getting colder. I rode through fields on my way in. The wheat is being blighted, and the vines. Such a famine is coming…” Godfrey’s voice rumbled in his resonant chest. “Perhaps I was wrong. Famine is coming, and pestilence with it, and death and war are already here. These are the final days. We should be looking to the state of our souls, not picking among the ruins.”
“I want the general of the Visigoths,” Ash said speculatively, ignoring him. “And the general of the Visigoths is looking for me.”
“Yes.” Godfrey hesitated, watching her survey the town hall. “Child, you are not about to send us away from here.”
“I am, too.” The flicker of a grin. “You and Florian. Take her. Ride with Michael and Josse, out to Roberto at the camp, and stay there unless you hear from me. Can’t you feel your hackles rising here? Go.”
One thing about the habit of giving orders is that others fall into the habit of obeying them. She could see, under his hood, Godfrey Maximillian smooth his face to a pious unconcern. He made his way deceptively fast through the crowd, to the doors.
That leaves me and an escort of four men, Ash concluded. Yippee. Now we’ll see who’s a mistrusting bitch.
One could stay standing around at the back of the hall, not being offered basin and cloth to wash one’s hands, never mind any meat or the strange foreign dishes spilling on the yellowing linen tablecloths. One could keep waiting, Ash thought, until the sycophancy attendant on Daniel de Quesada’s installation lost its first fervour. That might be days. Weeks.
She watched the men from France and Savoy gathering in tiny groups, nittering anxiously.
“I wish I had the French king’s intelligence service. Or the Flemish bankers’.” She turned to Thomas Rochester. “Guido and Simon, to the buttery, see what you can hear; Francis and you, Thomas, as and when the shit hits the fan here, we ride like hell for Anselm, got that?”
Rochester looked doubtful. “Boss, this is dodgy.”
“I know. We ought to leave now. But… There might be some privilege in being a bastard from the Faris’s family. We might get more money.” Ash shook her head. The white scars on her face stood out dark, by virtue of her pale skin. “I just want to know.”
She worked the hall for a time. She cornered a merchant, and argued a price for goods to make up losses of mules and baggage outside Genoa. The cost of replacement wagons shook her, until the man quoted her his price for broken and schooled horses. Stealing may be better than buying, she reflected, not for the first time.
A flurry of servants went past her, replacing burned-down candles and exhausted lanterns, and she stepped back against the wall out of their way, catching her scabbard across someone’s knees.
“Pardon—” She turned, stopped; staring up at Fernando del Guiz. “Son of a bitch!”
“How is mother?” he inquired, mildly.
She snorted, thought: He meant to make me laugh.
That realisation shocked her into silence. She stood out of the crowd, staring up at his face: Fernando del Guiz in Visigoth military mail and surcoat, the cropped hair making him look oddly younger.
“Christus fucking Imperator! What do you want?” Ash saw Thomas Rochester, still finalising delivery with the merchant, look over at her inquiringly; she shook her head. “Fernando— no: what? What? What can you possibly have to say to me?”
“You’re very angry,” he remarked. His voice came from above her, where he stared out across the heads of the crowd; and then he suddenly dropped his gaze, impaling her. “I don’t have anything to say to you, peasant.”
“That’s fucking good. Being noble didn’t stop you going over to the Visigoths, did it? You are a traitor. I thought it was a lie.” Anger, fuelling her, ran out; drained away with the flinch of his eyes. She was silent for a second.
He began to turn away.
“Why?” Ash demanded.
“‘Why’?”
“You— I still don’t understand. You’re a lord. Even if they were going to take you prisoner, they’ve have ransomed you back. Or kept you safe in a castle somewhere. Hell, you had armed and armoured men with you, you could have broken out, run—”
“From an army?” Humour in his expression, now.
Ash put a steel-covered arm in front of his body, so that Fernando del Guiz would have to push past her to get out into the body of the hall. “You didn’t run into an army. That’s just rumour. Godfrey bought me the truth of it. You ran into a squad of eight men – eight men. You didn’t even try to fight. You just surrendered.”
“My skin’s worth more to me than your good opinion.” Fernando sounded sardonic. “I didn’t know you cared, madam wife.”
“I don’t! I— Well, it got you a place at this court. With the winners.” She nodded at the hall. “Devious. And you were taking a real chance. But then, the Emperor’s nobles are all politicians – I should have remembered that.”
“It wasn’t—!” Fernando glared down into her face. The candlelight showed his upper lip beaded with damp.
“Wasn’t what?” Ash asked, more quietly.
“Wasn’t political treason!” Some odd expression crossed his face, in the deceptive light of the candles. He held her gaze. “They killed Matthias! They stuck a spear into his stomach and he fell off his horse, screaming! They shot Otto with a crossbow bolt, and three of the horses—”
Ash forced her voice down to a hoarse, outraged, whisper:
“Jesus Christ, Fernando, you’re not like fucking Matthias. They’d have given you quarter. And what about all your fancy kit – you were fully armoured, for Christ’s sake; up against Visigoth peasants in tunics! You can’t tell me you couldn’t have fought your way out! You didn’t even try to bang out of there!”
“I couldn’t do it!”
She stared at him: at the sudden, stark honesty on his face.
“I couldn’t do it,” Fernando repeated, more quietly, and with a smile that made his face seem older, distressed. “I filled my hose, and I fell off my horse, and I lay in front of the peasant sergeant and I begged him not to kill me. I gave him the ambassador in exchange for my life.”
“You—”
“I gave in,” Fernando said, “because I was afraid.”
Ash continued to stare. “Jesus Christ.”
“And I don’t regret it.” Fernando wiped his face with his bare hand, bringing it away wet. “What’s it to you?”
“I—” Ash hesitated. She let her arm drop, not blocking his way now. “I don’t know. Nothing. I suppose. I’m a mercenary, I’m not one of your retainers or your king, I’m not the one you’ve betrayed.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” Fernando del Guiz did not move away from where they stood. “There were men with crossbows. Steel arrow-heads as thick as my thumb – I saw a bolt go through Otto’s face, straight through his eye, bang! His head exploded. Matthias was holding his entrails in his hands. Men with spears, like spears I’ve hunted with, gutting open animals, and they were going to gut me. I w
as surrounded by madmen.”
“Soldiers,” Ash corrected automatically. She shook her head, puzzled. “Everybody craps themselves when there’s going to be a fight. I do. Thomas Rochester over there has; so have most of my men. That’s the bit they don’t put in the chronicles. But fucking hell, you don’t have to surrender when there’s still a fighting chance!”
“You don’t.”
His intense expression aged him: a young man grown suddenly old. I’ve been to your bed, Ash thought suddenly, and it seems I don’t know you at all.
He said, “You have physical courage. I never knew, until that moment – I’ve done tournaments, mêlées … war’s different.”
Ash looked at him with complete incomprehension. “Of course it is.”
They stared at each other.
“Are you telling me you did this because you’re a coward?”
For answer, Fernando del Guiz turned and walked away. The shifting light of candles hid his expression.
Ash opened her mouth to call him back, and said nothing; could think of nothing, for long minutes, that she wanted to say.
Over the hubbub of talk and rattle of papers being signed, she heard Basle’s town clock strike four of the afternoon.
“That’s long enough.” She signalled Rochester; resolutely put del Guiz out of her thoughts. “Wherever the Faris-General is, she’s not coming here. Get the lads.”
Thomas Rochester retrieved the men-at-arms from (respectively) the stables, the kitchens, and a maid’s dormitory bed. Ash sent Guido out for the horses. She stepped out of the town hall between Rochester and the other crossbow-man, Francis, two yards tall, a burly man who looked as if he might not need a crank to cock a bow: he could probably do it with his teeth. The sky above the courtyard was empty. Black. All the shouting of grooms and horses’ hooves on stones couldn’t cover the silence that seeped down from above.
Francis crossed himself. “I wish the Christ would come. The tribulation first, that scares me. Not the Last Judgement.”
Ash caught sight of orange dots all down her vambraces, where sleet falling on her arms had turned to rust spots during her time within the warm civic hall. She muttered an obscenity and scrubbed at the steel with a linen-covered finger, waiting for the horses.
“Captain,” a man’s accented, Visigothic Latin said. She looked up. She saw in rapid succession that he was an ’arif commander of forty, that he had twenty men, that all of them had their swords out of their sheaths. She stepped back and drew, screaming at Thomas Rochester. Six or seven mail-hauberk-covered bodies hit her from behind and slammed her down on her face.
Her sallet and visor hit the cobbles, slamming her forehead against the helmet’s padding. Dazed, she closed her left hand and swung her gauntlet back. Her thick metal fist thunked into something. A voice screamed above her, on top of her. She bent her left arm. Armour is a weapon. The great butterfly-plates of the couter that protect the inner elbow joint flow, at the back, to a sharpened spike. She slammed her bent elbow back and up and felt the spike punch through mail to flesh. A shout.
She thrashed, struggled to bend her legs, searingly afraid of a hamstring cut across the back of her unprotected knee. Two mail-clad bodies lay full-weight across her right arm, across her hand that gripped her sword-hilt. Men shouted. Two or three more bodies hit her in rapid succession, slamming down against her backplate, holding her motionless, pinned, unhurt, a crab in a padded steel shell.
Their hard-breathing weight pinned her absolutely. So I am not to be killed.
Weight across her armoured shoulders kept her from raising her head. She saw nothing but a few inches of stone, straw and dead cold bees. About a yard away, there was a soft impact and a scream.
I should have made them let me bring a larger escort! Or sent Rochester away—
She tightened the grip of her gauntleted right hand on her sword. With her left hand unnoticed for a moment, she folded her fingers under, so that the sharp edge of the plate on the back of her hand jutted forward, and shoved the edge out to where she guessed a man’s face to be.
No impact. Nothing.
A heel in a mail sabaton came down on her right hand, trapping her fingers and flesh around the sword’s grip, between the steel plates of her gauntlet, between the man’s full weight and the hard cobblestones.
She shrieked. Her hand released. Someone kicked the blade away.
A dagger-point stabbed down and into her open visor and stopped a quivering inch away from her eye.
IV
The waning moon cast a faint light, setting over Basle’s castle. Far off, away and high over the city walls, the same silver light glimmered on the snow of the high Alps.
The tall hedges of the hortus conclusus shone with frost. Frost in summer! Ash thought, still appalled; and stumbled in the near-darkness. The sound of a fountain plinked out of the dimness, and she heard the shift and clatter of many men in armour.
They have left me my armour, therefore they intend to treat me with some respect; they have only taken my sword; therefore they do not necessarily intend to kill me—
“What the fuck is all this?” Ash demanded. Her guards didn’t answer.
The enclosed garden was tiny, a small plot of grass surrounded by an octagon of hedges. Flowers climbed frames. A cropped grassy bank ran down to a fountain, the jet falling into a white marble basin. The scent of herbs filled the air. Ash identified rosemary, and Wound’s-Ease individually; underneath their smell was a stench of decaying roses. Died from the cold, rotting on the stalk, she surmised, and continued to walk forward into the garden, between her ’arif’s guards.
A figure in a mail hauberk sat at a low table covered with papers, on top of the grassy bank. Behind her, three stone figures held torches upright in their hands. A trail of hot spitting pitch ran down a torch-shaft as Ash watched, over one figure’s clenched brass-geared hand, but the golem did not flinch.
Torch-flame cast flickering yellow light over the young Visigoth woman’s unbound silver hair.
Ash could not help herself, her soles slipped on the cropped frozen grass and she stumbled. Recovering, she halted and looked at the Faris. That is my face, that is how I look—
Do I really look like that to other people?
I thought I was taller.
“You’re my employer, for Christ’s sake,” Ash protested, aloud, disgusted. “This is completely unnecessary. I would have come to you. All you had to do was say! Why do this?”
The woman looked up. “Because I can.”
Ash nodded thoughtfully. She walked closer, feet dipping into the springy cold turf, until the ‘arif’s hand on her vambrace arrested her progress some two yards away from the Faris’s table. Her left hand automatically dropped to steady her sword-scabbard, and closed on emptiness. Ash planted her boots squarely, getting her balance; ready in any instant to move, and move as fast as armour permits. “Look, General, you’re in charge of a whole invasion force here, I really don’t think I need your power and influence to be proved to me!”
The woman’s mouth quirked up at the corner. She gave Ash what was unmistakably a grin. “I think you do need the point driven home, if you’re anything like me—”
She stopped, abruptly, and sat up on the three-legged stool, letting her papers fall back on to the small trestle table. She weighted them down with a Brazen Head, against the night breeze. Her dark eyes sought out Ash’s face.
“I’m a lot like you,” Ash said, quietly and unnecessarily. “Okay, so you’re making a point. Fine. It’s made. Where’s Thomas Rochester and the rest of my men? Are any of them wounded or killed?”
“You wouldn’t expect me to tell you that. Not until you’ve become sufficiently worried about it that you’re willing to talk openly to me.”
The quirk of an eyebrow, the same as her own – but mirror-image, Ash realised with a shock. Her own self, but reversed. She considered the idea that the general might be a demon or devil.
“They’re well, but
prisoners,” the Faris added. “I have very good reports of your company.”
Between relief at hearing her people were – or might be – still alive, and the shock of hearing that voice just not quite her own, Ash had to brace herself against dizziness that threatened to blank out her vision. For a moment, yellow torchlight wavered.
“I thought you might be amused to see this.” The Faris held out a paper festooned with red wax seals. “It’s from the parlement of Paris, asking me to go home because I’m a scandal.”
Ash snorted despite herself. “Because what?”
“You’ll appreciate it. Read it.”
Ash stepped forward and extended her hand. The ’arif’s men tensed. She still wore her gauntlets, and her gloved fingers only touched the paper; still, coming within scenting distance of her double – a smell of spice and sweat, like all the Visigoth military men around her – made her hand shake. Her gaze faltered. She looked down hurriedly at the paper. “You read it,” she said.
“‘Since that you are unbaptised and in a state of sin, and since that you have received none of the sacraments, and bear no saint’s name for your own; therefore we sternly petition you to return whence you came,’” the Faris read aloud, “‘since we would not have our queens and dowagers have unclean intercourse with a mere concubine, nor our clean maidens, true wives and steadfast widows be corrupted by the presence of one who can be no more than a wayward wench or wanton wife; therefore enter not into our lands with your armies—’”
“Oh my lord! ‘Wayward wench’!”
The other woman gave vent to a surprisingly deep-chested laugh. Do I sound like that? Ash wondered.
“It’s the Spider,”17 Ash murmured, delighted. “Genuine?”
“Certainly.”
Ash looked up.
“So whose bastard am I?” she asked.
The Visigoth general snapped her fingers and said something rapid in Carthaginian. One of her men put another stool down beside the trestle table, and all the armed men, whose boots had been stamping divots back into the enclosed garden’s lawn, filed out through the gate in the hedge.
