by Mary Gentle
“I am sorry,” Alderic repeated. “I’ve commanded loyal men, I know how badly you need to hear news of yours. I am forbidden from telling you, on pain of my own death—”
“Well, fuck King-Caliph Theodoric!” Ash muttered to herself.
“—and in any case, I do not know.” The ’arif Alderic looked down at her. She saw him note, by a glance, where the nazir Theudibert was, and if he was in earshot or not. Not. “I don’t know your liveries, nor what part of the field you fought, and in any case I was with my own men, keeping the road to the north clear of the reinforcements from Bruges.”
“Reinforcements!”
“A force of some four thousand. My amir’s cousin, Lord Sisnandus, defeated them; I think in the early hours before you joined battle at Auxonne. Now: enough. Sit there, be silent. Nazir!” Alderic straightened. As Corporal Theudibert ran up, Alderic ordered, “Keep your men with you, and guard this woman. Never mind the other prisoners. Don’t let her escape while we dock.”
“No, ’Arif!” Theudibert touched his hand to his heart.
Ash, hardly listening, found herself sitting on the deck that throbbed to the rowers’ change of beat, surrounded by the legs of armed men in mail shirts and white robes.
Reinforcements! What else didn’t Charles tell us? Hell, we’re not mercenaries, we’re mushrooms – kept in the dark and fed on horse-shit…
It was the kind of remark she could have made to Robert Anselm. Tears pricked at her eyes.
Above, the night sky darkened, familiar stars fading with moon-set. She prayed, by habit and almost without realising it: By the Lion – let me see dawn, let the sun come up!
A settled blackness lay across the world.
The wind bit cold, sieving through her old linen shirt as if she wore nothing. Her teeth began to chatter. But Angeli told me how hot it is, under the Eternal Twilight! Voices shouted, lanterns were lit – a hundred iron lanterns, strung from every rail and all up the mast. Decked out with yellow flames, the ship sailed on; sailed until Ash heard muttering among the soldiers and scrambled to her feet, knee paining sharply, and stood, soldiers’ hands gripping her arms, and saw, for the first time that she remembered, the coast of North Africa.
The last moonlight marked out the lifting swell. A black blob, darker than the sea and sky, must be land. Low. Headlands? The deck jerked under her as they tacked and came around on a different course. Hours? Minutes? She grew cold as ice in their imprisoning hands, and the indistinct land drew closer. She smelled the liminal odour of dying weed, scavenged corpses of fish and bird excrement that is the smell of coasts. The lift and fall of the deck lessened: wood rang and rattled as the sails came down, and more oars dug into the water. Spray hit her numb skin.
A congerie of lanterns shone across the waves – the sea calmer now: she thought Are we sheltered? Is there an isthmus? – and became an approaching ship. No – ships.
Something in the first vessel’s movement took her eye: a snaking, irregular motion. She clenched her arms across her breasts, against the cold, and stared tear-eyed into the wind. The foreign ship beat up towards them, indistinct; was suddenly twenty yards away, clear in its lanterns and their own – a sharp-prowed, long, thin, curving vessel; sides slabbed with wood and some bright substance.
Not metal, too heavy.
It glinted with the exact colour of sunlight on the roofs of Dijon, and she thought suddenly Slate! Thin-split slate, as armour. Christus!
A single great tiller-oar rose at the poop, shifting left and right. The ship snaked a serpentine course, the whole body of it moving in articulated segments; knifing through the black water, a vision in lamplight: gone into the dark. No sails, no oars: what had stood at the tiller, wrenching it with immense power, had been a golem—
“Messenger ship,” Alderic said, behind her. “Fast news.”
She made to answer. Her teeth chattered too much; she gave it up.
Behind the articulated wooden vessel, a much larger ship thunked through the waves. Ash had a second to recognise it as one of the troopships she had seen from the hills of Genoa, before it passed on into the wet darkness. She was too low to see its deck; could only guess at the number of soldiers in the shallow-draught hold – five hundred? More? She had a brief glimpse of the curved sides towering above them, shining wet with spray; saw the great blades of the wheel at the stern canted, dipped down into the troughs of the waves; and she saw the clay bodies of golems inside the paddle-wheel, their weight and strength forcing it to turn, to bite into the cold, deep water. It thunked away north-east, into the Mediterranean.4
And how many ships like that have gone north?
The thought numbed her as much as the cold. Tranced, in the icy dark, she thought nothing more until the ship’s motion altered. An hour past moon-set: it would be dawn. But not in this Twilight – least of all, here.
Still held prisoned by Theudibert’s men, she looked up.
The starboard rowers rested.
The ship opened the harbour of Carthage.
Bare masts thicketed the darkness, outlined against the thousand lights of the port buildings.
A thousand ships rocked, moored at rest in the harbour. Triremes and quinqueremes; golem-powered troopships loading men and stores; and European galleys, caravels, cogs, carracks. Deep-hulled merchant ships bringing in bullocks and calves and cows, pomegranates and pigs, goats and grapes and grain: all the things that do not grow or thrive, under the Eternal Twilight.
Oars splashed gently in the black water. Their ship glided on between two stark high promontories covered with buildings, each hair-pin street outlined by rows of Greek Fire lights, gaudy and blazing and brilliant. Ash craned her head back, staring up at people on the bastions of the harbour: slaves running, men and women walking in loose, heavy woollen robes; and she heard a bell banging out for mass from a distant church, and still the walls went up—
Nothing was raw rock. All of it was dressed masonry.
She saw the nearer stone dimly in the light from the ship’s lanterns as they steered between half a dozen merchant ships, the drum-beat of their rowers echoing across the water and off the heights. Dressed stone: rising up sheer to battlements, bastions, ravelins, the highest walls pockmarked with row upon row of dark holes: arrow-slits, and crenellations, and stations for gunners to fire their cannon.
Her neck ached. She swallowed, lowered her gaze from the sheer immensity. She smelled the salt sea, overlaid by the stench of the harbour: all kinds of rubbish bobbed on the black waters, between skittering tiny craft. Sellers of fruit, sweetmeats, wine and woollen blankets sculled to keep up with their hull. She noted dozens of cargo ships, grain ships, riding high in the water: holds empty. And the black figures of men on the docks stood out against burning bonfires, and braziers full of hot coals. Chill wind blew into her eyes, making them water. The tears froze on her cheeks.
The sweaty fingers on her arm gripped tight. She glanced rapidly at whoever held her, and met the nazir Theudibert’s bright-eyed, gloating expression. Theudibert slid his other hand up between her thighs. His rough nails snagged her skin and his fingers nipped shut, pinching tender internal flesh.
Ash winced, looked for Alderic, then felt her face burn red with the humiliation of making that appeal. She wanted to reach quickly behind her, grab Theudibert’s wrist, bring his elbow cracking down backward over her knee – too many hands dug into the muscles of her arms, holding her: she could not move. His fingers stabbed up between painfully dry skin. She writhed.
He can’t know – my belly’s not thick. If anything, I’m thinner; I can’t eat for being sick. Maybe if he rapes me that’ll shake it loose, and I’ll end up grateful to this mother-fucking bastard—
“This ain’t the harbour,” Theudibert grated, “that’s the harbour.”
Ash stared ahead. It was all she could do. The rowers were taking them between a multitude of small boats and medium-size cogs and carracks. Now, ahead, four great lanes of black water opened up before
them, crowded with shipping.
Stark masonry separated these junctions of the harbour. Surmounting them, up in the darkness – she moved her head, dazed – in turn a barracks, a fort, a windowless black building … and moored along the quay, great triremes and galleys and black-pennanted warships.
Thousands of people swarmed, everywhere she looked: raising sail on ships, bringing donkey-carts steeply down to the quay ahead of them in the first opening, lighting more lanterns along the heights, calling, shouting, loading crates on to carracks. A dozen face-muffled women stared down from pleasure grounds a hundred and fifty feet away up a sheer cliff.
If I scream for help, who’ll come?
No one.
The scent of spices, dung, and something odd came to her; something that didn’t fit—
Ash wrenched her body. The armed men, taller and stronger, held her tightly; their warm, hard, armoured bodies jostling hers. She flinched, her bare feet among their boots. A pang of fear went through her, rising up from her belly to her throat. The muscles of her thighs and knees loosened. She swallowed, dry-mouthed.
It’s real, now. All the while we were just on a ship, anything could happen, we could have been going somewhere else, I could have escaped, it wasn’t real…
I would give anything now to have a weapon, and even a dozen men…
The sweating soldier who held her, his fingers wet with her body’s wetness, wore mail and carried a sword strapped at his belt; more importantly, had eight mates with him, and a commander whose shout would bring a hundred troops from the docks and warehouses.
“Mouthy bitch not so mouthy now?” his voice whispered in her ear. His breath was sweet with rice gruel: her gorge rose.
The knowledge that rape and mutilation are not inconceivable, are possible and even likely, thumped in the pit of her pregnant belly. A cold, cold sensation ran through her. Her hands prickled. She stared at the inexorably approaching dock.
Terror dried her mouth, tautened her body, strung her out to the highest pitch. Almost absently, she identified the odour that jarred her – the wind smelled almost peppery-cold. It stung her nostrils. In the Swiss mountains she would have thought it the scent of approaching snow.
A sudden eddy of wind across the harbour brought dampness.
Cold dots of sleet kissed her scarred face, and her bare legs under her shirt.
Oars backed and withdrawn, the sailors leaped to prow and stern and slung ropes, and quayside workers hauled them in. Wood grated against stone. The galley docked in a crackle of the ice forming at the foot of the stone quay, and strained hemp cables to a creaking halt.
The nazir’s fist hit her in the kidneys, pushing her forward into the gaggle of the ship’s other prisoners. Ash stumbled. She pitched forward and fell, unprepared, on the gangway, catching herself and grazing her hands on the stone steps that led up to the quay. The first flakes of true snow melted under her palms. A boot caught her in the ribs. She smelled her own vomit.
“Shit!” Her voice came out a dry, high whimper.
No escape from the truth now. I do hear a voice. And I did hear her voice. The same voice. They don’t know it, but they’re right. This isn’t a mistake. I am the person they want.
And what happens to me, now that they’re going to find that out?
II
All the way up the steep, narrow, ruler-straight streets from the dock, marching up steps between iron-shuttered buildings lit by steel-and-glass cages of Greek Fire,5 the Visigoth soldiers still kept her away from the other prisoners.
She had no time to look at the city. She stumbled, bare feet scraping on cobbles, aware of hands gripping her under the armpits. Guards’ polearms clashed as they came up to a thick stone arch – a gateway, that pierced an encircling wall stretching away around the hill as far as lights could show her. The wall was too high for anything to be visible beyond it.
The other prisoners from the ship were herded on past, into the body of the city, away from the gate into the citadel.
“What?” Ash turned her head, stumbling. The ’arif Alderic called something. Two of the soldiers dragged back an old woman, a young fat man, and an older man. Soldiers closed around them.
The arched gateway tunnelled through a defensive wall a good twenty yards thick. She lost her footing in the dark. Theudibert dragged her up with a satisfied obscenity. She flinched back from another wall – no lights, here. A freezing wind blew in her face. She realised she was no longer in the gateway, but in a narrower passage.
None of the buildings to either side had any windows.
Four of Alderic’s men lit ordinary pierced-iron lanterns, carrying them high. Shadows now stalked and jerked in the narrow passageway. A street? An alley? Ash squinted up. The last stars, fading into darkness, let her know this was still outdoors. A sharp fist in the back prodded her onwards.
They passed a black door, barred with seven thick sections of iron. Thirty yards down the street, another door. None of the buildings were built of wood, or wattle and daub: all were windowless stone. Then they turned a corner, turned again, and again; winding through a maze of dark alleys, a pitiless black day dark above their heads.
Ash hugged her arms around her body as she hobbled on. Clad in thin linen, she would have shivered anyway, but this present cold bit at her hard-soled feet on the cobbles, whitened her fingers, and made her breath steam on the air.
The soldiers of the King-Caliph likewise shivered.
Four of the soldiers ran to unbar a door in a featureless wall. Big enough to be a sally-port, she thought. The nazir thrust her through it, into darkness. She banged her injured knee, and screamed aloud. Iron lanterns danced in her dazzled sight, hands shifted her, shoulders and arms banged against her body, hustling her inside, along a long dark passage.
A withered, tiny hand crept into hers.
Ash looked down, and saw that the old woman prisoner had taken her hand. The woman looked up at her. Shifting shadows, and lines and creases, disguised her expression. Her hand felt like cold chicken-bones. Ash tucked the woman’s hand under hers, pressing it to her linen-covered body for warmth.
The old woman’s hand slid down over her belly. The soft voice wailed in French, “I thought so, on the ship. You don’t show, but you’re with child, my heart. I could midwife you – Oh, what will they do to us? ”
“Shut up!”
“What do they want us for?”
Ash felt and heard a mailed fist hit flesh. The woman’s hand went limp and slid out of hers. She made a grab; but the soldiers surrounded her, pushing her on, and she stumbled with them out into a great courtyard.
Back entrance, she surmised, and It’s a manor house! The courtyard was much longer than it was wide, surrounded on all sides by stone-barred windows and arched doorways. The building surrounding this interior courtyard on all four sides went up at least three storeys. Greek Fire lanterns dazzled: she could not see the sky.
The long courtyard was packed full with people. Some house-guards, by their swords. One or two better-dressed. Most of them were men and women of all adult ages, in plain tunics, with iron collars around their necks. Ash gaped at the running slaves, belly cold with familiarity.
Almost all, despite their different faces, had a family resemblance. Almost all had, in the fizzing white light, ash-pale hair.
She looked around for the old woman, missed her in the crowd, and tripped. She landed, hands and knees, on black and white tiles. She groaned, wrapping both hands around her knee. It felt swollen and hot again. Her eyes teared.
Through water, she saw Alderic step forward with the ship’s captain, the two of them speak to a group of house-guards and slaves; and she rolled over and got up. She and the male prisoners were pushed into a huddle. A fountain plashed into its bowl, a few yards away. In the heart of the falling jets, a mechanical phoenix sang.
Ash gripped the hem of her shirt in her two hands, pulling it down over her thighs. Cold sweat ran down between her shoulder-blades. She found
herself mouthing, Oh Christ, help me, help me keep my baby! and stopped, her face stark. But I don’t want it, don’t want to die in childbirth—
When you think you have reached the end of fear, there is always somewhere to go. She knotted her hands into fists to prevent it being seen that they were shaking. Sentimental pictures of a son or daughter would not stay in her mind, confronted with this too-bright courtyard full of men talking in the Gothic dialect they called Carthaginian, far too fast for her to understand. Only the vulnerability of her hardly noticeable belly remained, and the absolute necessity – and impossibility – of secrecy.
“Poor girl, poor heart.” The old peasant woman hung in a soldier’s grip, bleeding. The two male prisoners stood with her, their very different faces frozen in identical expectations of fear.
“Come with me.” The ’arif Alderic was at her side, pulling her onward.
Ash shivered, cold deep in her gut. From somewhere she dragged up a grin, showing all her teeth. “What’s the matter, you decided I’m the one you don’t want? Hey, I could have told you that at Dijon! Or maybe this is where you tell me you want a contract with my company? Consider me softened up, you’ll probably get a good deal!”
She could tell she stunk from the expressions of the guards near her, and the more distant glances of the one or two men who might be King-Caliph Theodoric’s freeborn subjects, but her own nose was insensible of it. She limped with Alderic on the cold tiles. Her mouth ran on:
“I always thought it was warm enough, in the Eternal Twilight. This is fucking freezing! What’s the matter, the Penance getting too heavy for you? Maybe God’s pissed off with waiting for the Empty Chair to be filled. Maybe it’s a portent.”
“Be quiet.”
Fear makes one voluble. Ash cut herself off.
Doors opened off the narrow passage. Alderic opened one, bowed, said something, and pushed her through in front of him. Her eyes were dazzled by more light.
