by Mary Gentle
And if we’re actually alone now, I’m the Queen of Carthage.
Armour is a weapon: she considered using it, and as rapidly abandoned the idea. Ash let her gaze stray around in the dark, trying to pick out the points of light that would be reflected by steel arrow-heads or crossbow bolts. The cool night air shifted across her face.
“This place reminds me of the gardens in the Citadel, where I grew up,” the Faris said. “Our gardens are brighter than this, of course. We bring the light in with mirrors.”
Ash licked her lips, attempting to moisten a dry mouth. As required by the castle’s ladies, little of the outside world could enter this garden. The hedges baffled sound. Now it was true night, and the darkness genuine, and the armed presence for the moment withdrawn, she found herself (despite the golems) insensibly more at ease; felt herself becoming the person who commands a company, not a frightened young woman.
“Were you baptised?”
“Oh yes. By what you call the Arian heresy.” The general held out an inviting hand. “Sit down, Ash.”
One does not commonly say one’s own name, Ash reflected; and to hear it said in what was almost her own voice, but with a Visigothic accent, sent the hairs on the nape of her neck prickling up.
She reached up to unfasten the strap and buckle of her sallet, easing the helmet off. The night air felt chill against her sweating head and braided hair. She placed the visored sallet carefully on the table, and lifted her tassets and fauld with the ease of long practice to seat herself on the stool. Breast- and back-plate kept her posture absolutely upright.
“This isn’t the way to get your employee’s co-operation,” she added absently, settling herself. “It really isn’t, General!”
The Visigoth woman smiled. Her skin was pale. She had a mask of darker skin around her eyes, tanned honey-brown from long exposure to the sun, where neither steel helm nor mail aventail shielded her face. The mail mittens dangling from her wrists disclosed her hands: pale, with neatly trimmed nails. While it is true that mail sucks on to a human body, clinging to the padded clothing underneath, leaving her looking podgy, Ash judged the woman to have a very similar build to her own; and she was consumed, for a moment, with the sheer reality of the living, breathing, warm flesh sitting opposite her, no more than arm’s reach away, looking so alike—
“I want to see Thomas Rochester,” she said.
The Visigoth general raised her voice very slightly. The wicket-gate opened. A man held up a lantern for long enough for Ash to see Thomas Rochester, hands bound behind him, his face bloodied, but well enough apparently to stand without help – the gate closed.
“Happy?”
“I wouldn’t describe myself as happy, exactly… Oh fuck it!” Ash exclaimed. “I didn’t expect to like you!”
“No.” The woman, who could not be much above her own age, pressed her lips flatly together. An irresistible smile tweaked the corners up. Her dark eyes glowed. “No! Nor did I! Nor did the other jund, your friend. Nor your husband.”
Ash confined herself to growling, “Lamb’s no friend of mine,” and left the subject of Fernando del Guiz well alone. A familiar exhilaration began to fizz in her blood: the sheer balance required when renegotiating a trustworthy arrangement with people always more powerful than oneself (or they wouldn’t be hiring mercenaries); the necessity of knowing what must be said, and what left unsaid.
“How did you come to have scars?” the Visigoth general asked. “A battle injury?”
Not negotiation, but pure personal curiosity, Ash judged. And as such, probably a weakness to be exploited.
“There was a saint’s visitation when I was a child. The Lion came.” Ash touched her cheek, something she did not often do, feeling the dinted flesh under her gloved fingertips. “He marked me out with His claws, thus showing I should be a Lioness myself, on the field of battle.”
“So young? Yes. I was trained early, too.”
Ash repeated, using the term quite deliberately, her earlier question. “Whose bastard am I?”
“Nobody’s.”
“N—?”
The Visigoth general looked as though she were appreciating how taken aback Ash felt. We should read each other very well, Ash thought. But do we? How would I know? I could be wrong.
She let her tongue run on:
“What do you mean, nobody? You can’t mean I’m legitimate. Whose family is it? What family do you come from?”
“No one’s.”
The dark eyes danced, without any malice that Ash could detect; and then the other woman heaved a great sigh, rested her mailed arms on the table and leaned forward. The light from the golems’ torches slid over her silver-blond hair and her unmarked face.
“You’re no more legitimate than me,” the Faris said. “I’m slave-bred.”
Ash stared, conscious of a shock too great to recognise; so great that it faded into a mental shrug, and a so what? and a consciousness only that something, somewhere, had come adrift in her mind.
The Faris continued: “Whoever my parents were, they were slaves in Carthage. The Turks have their janissaries, Christian children they steal and raise up as fanatical warriors for their own country. My – father – did something very like that. I’m slave-bred,” she repeated softly, “a bondswoman: and I suppose you are, too. I’m sorry if you were hoping for something better than that.”
The sadness in her tone felt genuine.
Ash abandoned any thought of negotiation or subterfuge. “I don’t understand.”
“No, why should you? I don’t suppose the amir Leofric would be pleased that I’m telling you. His family have been breeding for a Faris for generations. I am their success. You must be—”
“One of the rejects,” Ash cut in. “Isn’t that it?”
Her heart hammered. She held her breath, waiting to be contradicted. The Visigoth woman silently leaned over and with her own hands poured wine from a bottle into two ash-wood cups. She held out one. Ash took it. The black mirror of the liquid shook with the shaking of her hands. No contradiction came.
“Breeding project?” Ash repeated. And, sharply: “You said you had a father!”
“The amir Leofric. No. I’ve become used to … he isn’t my true father, of course. He wouldn’t lower himself to impregnate slaves.”
“I don’t care if he fucks donkeys,” Ash said brutally. “That’s why you wanted to see me, isn’t it? That’s why you came all the way to Guizburg, when you’re running a damn war? Because I’m your – sister?”
“Sister, half-sister, cousin. Something. Look at us!” The Visigoth general shrugged again. When she lifted her wooden cup, her hand was shaking too. “I don’t believe that my father – that Lord-Amir Leofric – would know why I had to see you.”
“Leofric.” Ash stared blankly at her twin. Part of her mind rummaged through memories of heraldry. “He’s one of the amirs at the King-Caliph’s court? A powerful man?”
The Faris smiled. “House Leofric has been, time out of mind, close companions to the King-Caliphs. We gave them the golem-messengers. And now, a faris.”
“What happens to the … you said there were others. A project. What happens to the other people like us? How many—”
“Hundreds, over the years, I suppose. I never asked.”
“You never asked.” Incredulous, Ash drained her cup, not noticing whether the wine was good or bad. “This isn’t new to you, is it?”
“No. I suppose it does seem strange, if you didn’t grow up with it.”
“What happens to them? The ones that aren’t you – what happens to them?”
“If they can’t talk to the machine,18 they’re usually killed. Even if they can talk to the machine, they usually go mad. You have no idea how lucky I feel that I didn’t go insane in my childhood.”
The first thought in Ash’s mind was a sardonic Are you quite sure about that?, and then more of what the woman had said sunk in. Utterly appalled, Ash repeated, “‘Killed’?”
&n
bsp; Before the Visigoth woman could reply, the impact of one single phrase hit home.
She blurted out, without any intention of doing so, “What do you mean, talk to the machine? What ‘machine’? What do you mean?”
The Faris folded her fingers around her wooden cup.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of the Stone Golem?” she inquired, in a sardonic tone that Ash not only recognised but suspected of being a deliberate parody. “When I’ve gone to so much trouble to spread the rumour? I want my enemies too terrified to fight me. I want everybody to know that we have a great war-machine19 at home – and that I speak with it whenever I please. Even in the middle of battle. Especially in the middle of battle.”
That’s it, Ash realised. This is why I’m here.
Not because I look like her.
Not because we’re probably kin.
Because she hears voices and she wants to know if I do, too.
And what the hell will she do if she knows the truth?
Even knowing it to be a long leap to a conclusion, knowing it might be unjustified, panic and uncertainty set her heart thumping, to the point where she was glad to be wearing a mail standard: a pulse would have been clearly visible at her throat.
By reflex, she did the thing she had been doing since she was eight: cutting the linkage between herself and her fears. Her voice came out casually dismissive. “Oh, I heard the rumours. But that’s just rumours. You’ve got some kind of a Brazen Head in Carthage – is it a head?” she broke off to ask.
“You have seen our clay walkers? It is their great father and progenitor: the Stone Golem. But,” the woman added, “our defeating the armies of the Italians and the Swiss is not mere ‘rumour’.”
“The Italians! I know why you razed Milan, that was just to cut off the armour trade. I know all about that: I was apprentice to a Milanese armourer once.” This fact having failed to distract either the woman or herself, Ash went rapidly on: “I grant you the Swiss. But why shouldn’t you be good? After all, I’m good!”
She stopped, and could have bitten her tongue hard enough to draw blood.
“Yes. You are good.” The Faris said evenly, “I understand that you, also, hear ‘voices’.”
“Now that isn’t a rumour. That’s a downright lie.” Ash managed to guffaw coarsely. “Who do you think I am, the Pucelle?20 You’ll be telling me next that I’m a virgin!”
“No voices? Merely a useful lie?” the Visigoth general suggested mildly.
“Well, I’m hardly likely to deny it, am I? The more – Godly I sound, the better off I’m going to be.” Ash managed, more convincingly, to sound both smug and ashamed of having been caught out telling fibs in public.
The woman touched her temple. “Nonetheless, I am in contact with our tactical computer. I hear it. Here.”
Ash stared. She must look, she realised dimly, as if she didn’t believe a word the woman was saying and thought she must be mad. In fact she was hardly aware of the woman at all.
The chill air moving into the sheltered garden swept over her sweating face. Somewhere outside a horse snorted, wuffing breath into the night sky. The sound of Visigoth soldiers talking was just audible. Ash clung to what she could see and hear as if to her own sanity. The thought formed itself in her mind with absolute inevitability. If I was bred like her, and she hears voices from a tactical machine, then that’s where my voice comes from.
No!
Ash wiped at her wet upper lip, her breath misting the steel plate of her gauntlet. Numb, she felt first on the verge of vomiting, and then as if she were strangely detached from herself. She watched her wine-cup tip out of her fingers and bounce, spilling liquid across the trestle table, soaking all the papers neatly laid out.
The Faris swore, leaping to her feet, calling out, knocking over the table. Four or five boys – Visigoth pages or serfs – ran into the garden, rescuing the documents, wiping the table, mopping wine from the general’s mail hauberk. Ash sat and stared with oblivious eyes.
Serfs bred as soldiers. Is that what she’s saying? And I’m just some brat that somehow wasn’t killed? Oh, sweet Jesus, and I always thought slaves and bondsmen beneath contempt—
And my voice isn’t…
Isn’t what?
Isn’t the Lion? Isn’t a saint?
Isn’t a demon?
Christ, sweet saviour, sweet sweet saviour of me, this is worse than devils!
Ash gripped her left hand into a fist, under the table, digging steel plates into flesh. Then she could look up, focused by the pain, and mumble, “Sorry. Drinking on an empty stomach. Wine’s gone to my head.”
You don’t know. You don’t know that what she hears is what you hear. You don’t know it’s the same thing.
Ash looked down at her left hand. The gauntlet-glove across her palm showed red blots, soaking into the linen.
The last thing I want to do now is carry on talking to this woman. Oh, fuck.
I wonder what would happen if I just told her? That I do hear a voice? A voice that tells me what tactics I can use in a battle?
If I tell her, what happens next?
If I don’t know the answer to that question, then I certainly shouldn’t ask her!
She was struck, as often in the past, with how time itself slows when life is knocked out of its rut. A cup of wine, in a garden, on a night in August: it is the kind of occasion that passes rapidly and automatically at the time, and falls out of memory instantly. Now she minutely registered everything, from the three-legged oaken stool’s front leg sinking gradually into the daisy-thick grass under her weight, to the slide of plate over metal plate in her armour as she stretched her arm out to take the wine bottle, to the long, long intensity of the moment before the Visigoth general ceased being mopped down by her serfs and turned her bright head again towards Ash.
“It’s true,” the Faris said conversationally. “I do speak with the war-machine. My men call it the Stone Golem. It’s neither stone, nor does it move like these—” A little shrug, as she indicated the stone-and-brass figures bearing the torches. “—But they like the name.”
Caution reasserting itself, Ash put the bottle down and thought, If I don’t know what the result of telling her I hear a voice will be, then I shouldn’t tell her until I do know.
And certainly not until I’ve had time to think it through, talk it through with Godfrey and Florian and Roberto—
Shit, no! They just think I might be a bastard; how can I tell them I was born a slave?
Her lips stiff with the deceit, Ash said, “What would be the use of a war-engine like that? I could take my copy of Vegetius21 on to the battlefield and read it there, but it wouldn’t help me win.”
“But if you had him there with you, alive, and you could ask the advice of Vegetius himself, then it might?” The Visigoth woman picked at the front of her fine mail with a fingertip, gazing down. “That’s going to rust. This bloody wet country!”
The pitch-torches hissed and sputtered, burning down. Golems stood, cold statues. Trails of pine-smelling black smoke went up into the night sky. The recurved-bow crescent of the waning moon sank behind the hedges of the garden. Ash’s muscles ached. Every bruise from her arrest smarted. The wine fizzed in her head, making her sway a little on the stool; and she thought, If I’m not careful the drink will work, I shall be telling the truth to her, and then where will I be?
“Sisters,” she said, blurrily. The wooden stool lurched forward. She came to her feet, rather than fall sprawling, and halted with one armoured hand outstretched, catching the Visigoth woman’s shoulder for support. “Christ, woman, we could be twins! How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
Ash laughed shakily. “Well, there you are. If I knew the year I was born, I could tell you. I must be eighteen or nineteen or twenty-ish by now. Maybe we are twins. What do you think?”
“My father interbreeds his slave stock. I think we probably all look alike.” The Faris’s dark brows frowned. She reached
up with her bare fingers and touched Ash on the cheek. “I did see some others, as a child, but they went mad.”
“‘Went mad’!” A flush spread up over Ash’s face. She felt the heat of it. Entirely unplanned, entirely genuine: her face grew red. “What am I supposed to tell people? Faris, what do I say? That some crazy lord-amir down in Carthage is breeding slaves like stock, like animals? And that I was one of them?”
The Visigoth woman said softly, “It still could be a coincidence. One shouldn’t let a likeness—”
“Oh, fucking hell, woman! We’re twins!”
Ash looked into eyes exactly the same height above ground as her own, the same dark colour, searching her features for kinship: for the curve of lip, shape of nose, shape of chin; a pale-haired foreign woman with the sunburn and odd scars of military campaigns, and a voice that, while not quite her own, might (she supposed now) be her own voice as others heard it.
“I’d rather not have known,” Ash said thickly. “If it’s true, I’m not a person, I’m an animal. Bloodstock. Failed bloodstock. I can be bought and sold – by anybody – and I can’t say a word about it. By law. You’re a farm animal too. Don’t you care?”
“It isn’t news to me.”
That brought her up short. Ash closed her hand over the woman’s mailed shoulder, squeezed once, and let go. She stood swaying, but upright. The high hedges of the hortus conclusus shut out Basle, the company, the army, the world in darkness: and Ash shivered, despite armour and the padding under it.
“It doesn’t matter to me who I fight for,” she said. “I signed a contract with you, and I suppose this isn’t enough to break it – assuming all my people here are unharmed, and not just Thomas. You know I am good, even if I don’t have your ‘Stone Golem’.”
The lie came with an ease that might have been role-playing, might have been numbness, but in any case, Ash felt, couldn’t delude anybody. She pushed on doggedly:
“I know you’ve razed half a dozen essential commercial cities in Italy, I know the Swiss cantons are wiped out as a fighting force, and that you’ve frightened Frederick and the Germanies into surrender. I also know the Sultan in Constantinople isn’t currently expecting trouble, so your army is intended for Christendom – for the kingdoms north of here.”
