by Mary Gentle
She let her gaze rest on the general’s face, trying to detect any emotion. An impassive face looked back at her, chiaroscuro shadows shifting across it from the light of the golems’ torches.
“Intended for Burgundy, Daniel de Quesada said, but I expect that means France as well. And then the rosbifs? You’re going to be overextended, even with the numbers you’ve got. I know what I’m doing, I’ve been doing it for a long time, let me get on with it. Okay? And then some time in the future, when I’m not under contract to you, I’ll let your Lord-Amir Leofric know exactly what I think of him breeding bastards.”
—And this would probably work with anyone else, Ash concluded in the privacy of her own mind. How like me is she? Is she going to spot when I’m lying? For all I know, this would sound like bluff to anyone, let alone a sister I didn’t know I’d got.
Fuck me. A sister.
The Visigoth general bent down and picked up the Brazen Head from where it dented the turf, shook it, shrugged, and placed it back on the trestle table beside Ash’s sallet. “I should like to keep her as my sub-commander here.”
Ash opened her mouth to reply, and registered the ‘her’. ‘Her’, not ‘you’. That, and the precise diction, and the woman’s unfocused eyes, brought a sudden stab of realisation to her gut: She is not talking to me.
Fear flooded her body.
Ash took two steps back, skidded on the frosty grass, and stumbled backwards down the grassy bank, barely keeping her footing, falling, ramming her back hard into the marble surround of the fountain. She heard the metal of her backplate creak. A copper taste flooded her mouth. She blushed, blushed red as fire, as hot with shame as if she had been publicly discovered having sex; feeling in the one second It was never real until now! and in the next, I never expected to see someone else doing this!
Golems stared down from the top of the bank. The nearest one to Ash now had a spider’s web linking its arm to the hedge, a frost-rimed white strand running from trimmed privet leaves to the shining brass mechanism of its elbow. She stared at the featureless oval face, the hen’s-egg shape of the head delineated by guttering torches.
The Faris’s voice protested, “But I would prefer to use her and her company now, not later.”
She is not talking to me. She is talking to her voices.
Ash blurted, “We’re under contract! We’re fighting for you here. That was the arrangement!”
The general folded her arms, now with her head raised, watching the southern constellations in the sky over Basle. “If you order me to, then I will.”
“I don’t believe you hear voices at all! You’re a bloody heathen. This is all play-acting!” Ash made an attempt to climb back up the steep bank. The soles of her riding boots glided over the cold grass, and she slid down, pitching forward in a rattle of metal; catching herself on her hands, and gazing up from on all fours at the Visigoth woman. “You’re putting me on! This isn’t real!”
Her protests were verbal floodwater. She stuttered, jabbering, and in the most private part of her mind, thought I must not listen! Whatever I do, I mustn’t speak to my voice, I mustn’t listen, in case it is the same—
—In case she’ll know if I do.
Between keeping up a continuous protest and the clamped-shut determination in her mind, she neither heard nor felt anything as the Visigoth woman continued to speak aloud into empty air.
“Yes. I’ll send her south on the next galley.”
“You will not!” Ash got quickly and carefully to her feet.
The Visigoth general lowered her gaze from the night sky.
“My father Leofric wants to see you,” she said. “You’ll reach Carthage within a week. If he doesn’t keep you long, I’ll have you back here before the sun moves into Virgo.22 We shall be some way further north, but I can still use your company. I’ll send your men here back to your camp.”
“Baise mon cul!”23 Ash snapped.
It was pure reflex. In the same way that she had played camp’s-little-mascot at nine, so she knew how to play bluff-mercenary-captain at nineteen. Her head swam.
“This wasn’t in the contract! If I have to take my people out of the field now, it’ll cost you – I’ve still got to feed them. And if you want me to go all the way to fucking North Africa in the middle of your war…” Ash made an attempt at a shrug. “That wasn’t in the contract either.”
And the second you take your eye off me, I’m out of here.
The Visigoth woman picked up Ash’s sallet from the table, stroking her bare palm over the curve of metal from visor to crest to tail. Ash automatically winced, anticipating rust on the mirror-finished steel. The woman knocked her knuckles against the metal thoughtfully, and pushed the visor down until it clicked.
“I’m giving some of these to my men.” A brief glitter of laughter, her eyes meeting Ash’s. “I didn’t order Milano razed until I’d cleared it out first.”
“You can’t get better than Milanese plate. Except for Augsburg – and I don’t suppose you’ve left much of the south German foundries, either.” Ash reached up and took her helmet from the woman’s hands. “You send word to me out at the camp when you want me to board ship.”
For a whole second, she was convinced that she had done it. That she would be allowed now to walk out of the garden, ride out of the city, put herself squarely in the middle of eight hundred armed men wearing her own livery, and tell the Visigoths to go straight to whatever might be the Arian version of eternal damnation.
The Visigoth general asked, aloud, “What do I do with someone my father wants to investigate, and I don’t trust not to escape if I let her leave here?”
Ash said nothing aloud. In that part of herself where voice was potential, she acted. It was no decision, it was gut-level reflex, taken in despite of any risk of discovery. Passive, Ash listened.
A whisper – the merest whisper of a whisper – sounded in her head. The quietest, most familiar voice imaginable—
‘Strip her of armour and weapons. Keep her under continuous close guard. Escort her immediately to the nearest ship.’
V
A nazir24 and his guards kept a literal grip on her, walking from the castle garden down through the streets, to a long tall row of four-storey houses that Ash recognised from her scouts’ reports as the main Visigoth headquarters in Basle. Mail-covered hands held her arms.
Above the lime-washed plaster and oak beams of the gables, the stars were being swallowed up in darkness. Dawn coming.
Ash made no effort to break their hold on her. Most of this nazir’s unit were young, boys no older than her, with tan-creased faces, tight bodies, and long legs with calves thin-muscled from being so much on horseback. She gazed around at their faces as they hustled her into the nearest building, through an oaken door. If not for the Visigoth robes and mail, they could have been any men-at-arms from her company.
“Okay, okay!” She stopped dead in the entrance, on the flagstones, and shaped her mouth into a smile for the nazir. “I have about four marks in my purse, which will buy you guys drinks, and then you can come and tell me how my men are doing.”
The two soldiers released her arms. She felt for her purse and realised that her hands were still shaking. The nazir – about her age, half a head taller, and male, of course – said, “Motherfucking mercenary bitch,” in a fairly businesslike tone.
Ash mentally shrugged. Well, it was either that or she’s our boss’s double! and I get treated like the local demon…
“Fucking Frankish cunt,” he added.25
House guards and servants came out into the hall, carrying candles. Ash felt a hand jerk at her belt as she was shoved forward, knew her purse would be missing when she looked for it; and then in a clatter of boots and shouted orders in Carthaginian, she found herself bustled towards the back of the house, through rooms full of armed men, down stone-floored passages, into a tiny room with an iron-barred door made of two-inch-thick oak, and a window about a foot square.
Two solemn-faced pages in Visigoth tunics indicated they were to help her off with her armour. Ash made no protest. She let herself be stripped down to her arming doublet and hose, with its sewn-in mail at armpits and crutch; her request for a demi-gown brought nothing.
The oak door closed. A sound of iron grating down into sockets told her that bars had been secured in place.
One candle guttered, its holder placed on the floor.
By its light she examined the room, padding around it in bare feet. The oak floorboards felt chill. The room was bare, containing neither chair nor table nor bed; and the window-slot had thumb-thick iron bars set into its walls.
“Fuckers!” Kicking the door would hurt: she hit it with the heel of her hand. “Let me see my men!”
Her voice bounced back flat from the walls.
“Let me out of here, you motherfuckers!”
With the thickness of the wood, it was not even possible to tell if there was a guard posted outside; or if he could hear her if there was. She used the same voice she would have used to call orders across a battle-line.
“Cocksuckers! Sweet Christ, I can pay a ransom! Just let me send a message out!”
Silence.
Ash stretched her arms above her head, and then rubbed at the sore spots where her harness had chafed. She missed both her sword and her steel protection so keenly that she could all but feel the shape of the metal between her hands. She backed across the room, slid down the wall, and sat beside the sole light: pale wax and primrose-yellow flame.
Her hands prickled, as if the blood in them was cold as the water in alpine streams. She rubbed her palms together. A part of her mind insisted, no, it’s not true, this is all some weird story, this isn’t real life. You’re a soldier’s brat, that’s all. It’s coincidence. Your father was probably some Visigoth nazir who fought with the Griffin-in-Gold, and your mother was a whore. That’s all: nothing out of the ordinary. You just look like the Faris.
And the other, stunned, part of her mind kept repeating: She hears my voice.
“Fucking hell.” Ash spoke aloud. “She can’t take me prisoner. I’ve got a fucking contract with the woman. Green Christ! I’m not going to Carthage. They might—”
Her mind refused to consider it. This was a new sensation: she tried to force her thoughts to consider being taken overseas to North Africa, and they slid away. Again and again. Like trying to herd eels, Ash thought, with a quick grin, and her teeth rattled together.
Maybe the Lion never came at all. No. No – our clerk made the miracle: the Lion did come.
But maybe nothing happened to me, there.
Maybe I just told the story of the chapel that way so often, I remember it like it did happen.
Ash’s body shuddered, hands and feet cold, until she huddled up, tucking her hands into her armpits.
The Faris. She was bred to hear her tactical machine.
It is the same voice.
I’m – what? Sister. Cousin. Something. Twin.
Just something they discarded, on the way to breeding her.
And all I do is … overhear.
Is that all I’ve ever done? A bastard brat, outside the door, listening in to someone else’s tactical war-machine, sneaking out answers for brutal little wars that the Visigoth Empire doesn’t even notice…
The Faris is what they wanted. And even she’s a slave.
After that she sat alone without food or drink and watched the candle-flame pouring a line of blackness up to where it suddenly broke and squiggled, playing sepia smoke over the low plaster ceiling, merging with the shadows. Her heart ticked off minutes, hours.
Ash rested her arms across her knees, and buried her face in her arms. There was a hot wetness against her face. Shock comes after wounds in the field, sometimes a long while after; and here in this narrow room she feels it now: Fernando del Guiz is not coming.
She wiped her nose on her sleeve. What opportunities there might be, to talk herself out of the prison for a ransom, or pity, or by violence, would not present themselves now.
This was the Emperor’s marriage, and he’s got out of it at the first opportunity that came along. No, that’s not it—
Ash’s chest aches. The hollow breathlessness wants to become tears, but she won’t let it; raises her face and blinks in the candlelight.
—He’s not here now because it was no coincidence he was in the town hall before I got captured. He was there to confirm where I was. For them. For her.
Well, you had him; you fucked him; you got what you wanted; now you know he’s a weaseling little shit. What’s the problem?
I wanted more than fucking him.
Forget him.
The wax candle melted down to a stump.
I’m prisoner here.
This is no Romance of Arthur or Peredur. I’m not about to scale the walls, fight off armoured men with my bare hands, ride off into the sunshine. What happens to valueless prisoners taken in war is pain first, broken bodies second, and an unmarked, unchristian burial afterwards. I am in their city. They own it now.
A hot thread of disquiet rumbled her bowels. She rested her arms on her knees, and her forehead on her arms.
They might expect a rescue by my company. Soon. An attack, men-at-arms, not on war-horses in these streets, so probably on foot.
I’d better have got this right.
The sharpest and loudest noise she had ever heard shattered the house.
Her body froze in the instant of the sound. Her bowels moved. She found in the same second both that she lay on shattered oak floorboards, and that she knew what the noise was. Cannon fire.
That’s ours!
Her heart leapt up as she heard. Tears ran down her stunned face. She could have kissed their feet for gratitude. Another roar went up. The crack and thud of the second explosion echoed off the bare rafters of the roof.
For long heartbeats she was back in the alpine crags, where water falls down so loud that a man cannot hear himself speak, until out of the darkness and dust, torches flamed and men walked – men walking in over the remnants of lath and plaster and bloody rags of soldiers.
Black air swirled, dust clearing. Her room ended in broken beams and blackened limewash.
The back of the house gaped, blown away.
A great beam creaked and fell, like trees falling in the wildwood. Plaster sprayed her face.
Outside the breach, in the torchlight in the open, stood two carts and two light cannon dismounted, smoking from their touch-holes still; and she squinted her eyes and made out the bright blaze of Angelotti’s curls, the man himself striding up to where she lay, hatless, grinning, and speaking – shouting – until she heard:
“We’ve blown the wall! Come on!”
With the back of the house, the city wall was down too; these houses, all fortified at the backs, themselves forming the wall around this part of the city.
Beyond them lay black fields, and the shrouds of forests on moonlit hills, and men moving in armour, calling “Ash! Ash!” both as a battle call, and to be known by their fellows. She stumbled out of the rubble, ears ringing, her balance gone.
Rickard tugged the sleeve of her arming doublet, Godluc’s reins in his other hand. She made a grab for the big grey gelding’s bridle, face momentarily pushed against his warm dappled flank. A crossbow bolt buried itself in old Roman brick and sprayed the wreckage of the house with fragments, men shouted, a rush of newcomers in mail and white tunics scrambling over the fallen oaken beams.
Ash got one foot into Godluc’s stirrup, swung herself up, loose points and mail flapping from her arming doublet, too light without her armour; and a little lithe man flew at her and caught her by the waist and bore her bodily onwards right over her war-horse’s back.
She fell, felt no impact—
Something happened.
I have bitten my tongue, I am falling, where is the Lion?
The picture behind her eyes was not of the Blue Lion banner, but of something flat and gold
and meat-breathed, and a chill struck her fingers, her hands, her feet; dug deep into her sprawling body.
Feet stood to either side of her. Calves encased in shaped steel plate. European greaves, not Visigoth armour. Something flicked a glint of light past her face, into the air. Liquid spattered her cheek. An appalled shriek deafened her: the shriek of a man ruined in a second by the swipe of a sword, all life to come wrecked and spilled out on rubble; and a man close by her screamed, “My God, my God, no, no—” and then, “Christ, oh Christ, what have I done, what have I done, oh Christ, it hurts,” and screams, on and on and on.
Floria’s voice said “Christ!” very precisely and distantly. Ash felt the tall woman handling her head, warm fingers on her hair. Half her skull was numb. “No helmet, no armour—”
And another voice, male, saying above her, “—ridden over in the mêlée—”
Ash felt conscious through everything that was happening, although somehow she could not bring it to mind a moment later. Armoured horses galloped; hand-gunners banged off their charges, and then ran in the moonlight. She was tied with ropes to a truckle bed – how much later? – while she screamed, and others screamed; and the bed tied to a wagon; the wagon one among many, moving down frozen, muddy, deep-rutted roads.
A flapping cloth across her eyes blacked out the moon. All around her, wagons moved, oxen lowed; and the screeches of pack mules mixed with the shouting of orders, and a trickle of warm oil ran into her eyes, dripping down her forehead: Godfrey Maximillian, in his green stole, pronouncing the Last Rites.
It was too much to hold. She let it slip from her: the armed company men riding outrider, the whole camp packed up and moving, the clashes of steel from behind, far too close.
Floria knelt above her, holding Ash’s head wedged still between dirty-fingered hands. Ash had a moment’s sight of the grease of unwashed skin blackening the woman’s linen cuff.
