Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  If this delay goes on much longer, I confidently expect that Isobel and I shall next devise a theory about how such a ‘non-scientific alteration in the fabric of reality’ or ‘miracle’ might be caused. We are no longer nineteenth-century Materialists, after all; the higher reaches of theoretical physics have taught us that all our Laws of Nature and apparently solid world are probability, fuzzy logic, uncertainty. Yes, about another two hours should do it! We shall produce the Ratcliff-Napier-Grant Theory of Scientific Miracles. And begin to pray, doubtless, for a change of heart among the local politicos, so that we have something real to do!

  I hope you are duly amused.

  – Pierce

  * * *

  Message: #102 (Pierce Ratcliff)

  Subject: Ash manuscripts

  Date: 23/11/00 at 03.09 a.m.

  From: Longman@

  Pierce –

  Pierce, I have GOT something for you!

  I had to go to a book-launch tonight. While I was swanning around the party, networking like mad, I met up again with a dear friend of mine, Nadia – I told you about her – a bookseller from Twickenham – she has one of those independent bookshops which are fast dying out now in favour of chains, in which everything is welcome except customers. (When I asked her what she was doing there, she replied, ‘The shop’s full of people; I’ve come AWAY!’)

  However – there was a house clearance at some place in East Anglia, and she bid at an auction for several cases of books. One of them is Vaughan Davies’ ASH: A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY BIOGRAPHY, and it’s *complete*!

  Nadia suspects that the house clearance was either from Davies’s own house, or a relative’s house containing Vaughan Davies’s belongings. I’ve asked her to find out more, tomorrow morning.

  I haven’t had time to read the thing yet (we had to go back to her shop, and I’ve only just come in!) but I’ll do that while I’m scanning it in for you. Shall I send it through now?

  – Love, Anna

  * * *

  Message: #174 (Anna Longman)

  Subject: Ash, archaeological discoveries

  Date: 23/11/00 at 07.32 a.m.

  From: Ngrant@

  Anna –

  Yes. YES. Scan it and send it to me NOW!

  Good grief. A copy of Vaughan Davies, after all this time.

  Anna, do you realise what this means? Please get your friend to contact the house-clearance people immediately. There may be UNPUBLISHED papers.

  I know that my work is superseding Davies, but still – after all this time – even for pure interest’s sake, I want to know what the missing half of the Introduction is. I want to know his theory.

  – Pierce

  * * *

  Message: #175 (Anna Longman)

  Subject: Ash, archaeological discoveries

  Date: 23/11/00 at 09.24 a.m.

  From: Ngrant@

  Anna –

  HOLD THE PRESSES!

  (I always wanted to say that.)

  Still nothing going on here, on site, but we’re MOVING, tomorrow, Friday! Isobel received a radio communication from the expedition’s ship. It’s been examining the seabed north of Tunis, between Cap Zebib and Rass Engelah, around Bizerte (and the Lac de Bizerte, an enclosed sea-inlet south of the city). We’re going to move to the sea-site while Isobel’s manager handles the ongoing problem here.

  Apparently it’s unsafe to dive up there, but the cameras on the ROVs (remote operated vehicles) have been sending back pictures.

  As soon as she allows me to, I’ll be in contact with you.

  – Pierce

  PART SEVEN

  7 September–10 September AD 1476

  Engines and Devices

  I

  The Visigoth captain all but dragged Ash out and along narrow corridors, his squad forcing a way between crowds of running freemen and slaves; the whole house in an uproar.

  Ash stumbled, aware of almost nothing, able to think only I betrayed them, all of them, I didn’t even think about it! Anything to stay alive—

  She became aware of being manhandled; lifted bodily. The sides of a wooden tub burned hot against her skin. Ash flinched back as slaves lowered her into water. They leaned her against sponges.

  “I advise, as hot as you can bear it,” a fat, cheerful young man observed, in Italian, unwinding the bindings from her left knee.

  His voice echoed in the long hall, muffled only slightly by the sheets that hung, perfumed with flowers and herbs, from the ceiling of the lord-amir’s household bath-house. The hall has steel grills at the windows and bars on the doors.

  “ ’Arif Alderic, what have you been doing to this one?”

  Alderic shook his head. “Don’t waste too much skill, dottore. She’s one of the amir’s. She only has to live a few days.”

  Ash looked dizzily up. Two women with iron collars around their necks, chained together with a span of links about six foot long, bent over the tub and began to sponge and soap her body. If she could have stopped the handling, she would have. She could only stare through the steamy air, hot for the first time in weeks. Tears began to leak from under her eyelids.

  I thought I would have more courage.

  Other bathers’ voices echoed outside, in the vast tubs that stood in cubicles all down the hall; and a woman’s high laughter sounded, and the clink of glasses.

  “Whatever you do to her later, she must eat now. And drink!” The Italian man pinched the back of Ash’s hand. Ash watched the ridge of skin stand up proud for a moment. “She is, I know only the Latin, dehydrated. Dried up.”

  Alderic took off his helmet and wiped his forehead. “Feed and water her, then, she’d better not die yet. Nazir!”

  He stomped off, to give orders. As the sheets were brushed back, she glimpsed other tubs, occupied by pairs of bathers, plates set on planks above the water, and jugs of wine standing on marble surrounds. A slave was playing a stringed instrument.

  “You should not treat me,” Ash protested. Only as she automatically spoke in Italian did she begin to realise the surgeon was not a Visigoth. She looked up, roused out of blank misery by surprise. A fat young man with straggling black hair, in red hose, stripped to shirt and pourpoint and still sweating in this steaming, echoing chamber, looking down at her.

  He nodded, as if he guessed her confusion.

  “We are a commonwealth, madonna; doctors and priests pass freely across borders, even in wartime,” the fat young man said, his accent Milanese, now she thought about it. He raised a dark brow. “And, not treat you? Why?”

  Because I don’t deserve it.

  Ash looked down at her brown, blood-dried skin. She submerged her hands under the surface of the hot, misty water. The heat sank in, sank into her muscles, into her bones. A great wave of warmth went through her, and relaxation. She had not known how cold she was. Just the animal comfort brought her back to herself, sore and aching and beaten: still alive.

  I would have betrayed them – I still might – but I haven’t yet.

  Nothing more than luck! – Call it Fortuna. It’s a chance. It’s days. Two, three, four days, maybe. It’s a chance.

  It’s helplessness I can’t stand. Give me even the shadow of a chance, and I’ll find a way to take it. Fortune favours the bold.

  “Why?” the Italian insisted.

  “Take no notice of me, dottore,” Ash said.

  The chained slaves put a plank across the tub. Another male slave brought a plate, and a narrow-necked pot topped with a pie-crust. As Ash pushed herself upright, he knocked the crust off and emptied the pot into the plate: a rush of meat, chopped hot herbs, pickerel,1 and spiced wine. Its strong scent brought her to the point of vomiting. Almost instantly, the nausea went off, succeeded by a griping pain that she recognised from her childhood: complete hunger. Carefully, she picked out a small piece of meat and nibbled, her tongue curling up at the sensuous taste of the sauce.

  “Ash,” she said.

  “Annibale Valzacchi.” The physician flung away
soaked bandages, bending over the tub and manipulating her knee-joint. She grunted, in pain, through a mouthful of food. The Italian exclaimed, “God be good to us, madonna, what do you do in life? Pull a plough?”

  Ash licked her fingers and stared down at the steaming stew, forcing herself to wait before she ate again.

  “The King-Caliph died,” she said suddenly. “That old man died.”

  She half-expected Annibale Valzacchi to deny it, or to ask her what she meant: all of it could, she felt, have been her own delirium. Instead the Italian nodded, thoughtfully.

  “Of natural causes,” Valzacchi observed, in his thick Milanese north Italian. “Yes, well… A cup of belladonna is ‘natural causes’, in Carthage!”

  Rumours of assassination go around after every death of a powerful man. Ash gave an answering nod, and merely said, “He was too sick to live long anyway, wasn’t he?”

  “A canker, yes. We – doctors, surgeons, physicians, priests – we are here in Carthage in such numbers because he sought a cure, any cure. There is no cure, of course: God disposes.”

  God or Fortune, Ash thought, with a momentary shiver of awe, that shaded off into raw, mordant humour: Haven’t I always prayed before combat? Why stop now? She said thoughtfully, “I should like to see a priest. A Green priest. Is that possible, here?”

  “This lord-amir is no religious fanatic. It should be possible. You are not Italian yourself, madonna, are you? No. Then, there are three English priests, that I room with in the lower city; I know of a Frenchman, and a German, and there is one who might be from Franche-Comté or Savoy.”

  As if she were a beast in a byre, Valzacchi slid his hands up around her shoulders, expertly gauging their irregularity: the muscles of the right more developed than the left.

  From behind, his voice said, “Strange, madonna. I should say this arm has been trained to use a sword.”

  For the first time in fifteen days, Ash couldn’t help a genuine smile: half amazement, half delight. She sat back in the hot sweet-smelling water as his fingers probed her neck under the steel collar. “How the hell did you know that, dottore?”

  “My brother Gianpaulo is a condottiere. I did my initial training with him. Until I discovered that civilian medicine is considerably less dangerous, and pays rather better. This is the muscle development of someone who uses a sword, and perhaps a military axe, right-handed.”

  Ash felt herself chuckle, a soft sound and a quaking body. She wiped her wet hand across her mouth. His hands left her shoulders. His touch of recognition gave her something back; her body, her spirit.

  She rested her arms on her knees, sitting perfectly still in the hot water, and looked down.

  Ash saw, on the still surface, a scarred cheek reflected through pale, rising mist; and a face she barely recognised with its cropped hair. They wouldn’t know me! she thought, amazed; and on the heels of that, What’s happened here is past, I’ve left too many people behind me to give up now, I have responsibilities. She knew it for bravado; knew also that, tended, it might be a seed of real courage.

  “Yes,” she acknowledged, more to herself than to the doctor. “I’ve been a condottiere myself.”

  Annibale Valzacchi regarded her now with an expression compounded of disgust, fear and superstition. It said plainly, A woman? Primly, he shrugged. “I can’t refuse a request for religious consolation. A military priest would suit you best. The German, then. The German is a military priest, a Father Maximillian.”

  “‘Father Maximillian’.” Ash twisted around bodily, and stared up at him out of the hot steaming water. “Dottore, do you know if— Jesus! Do you know if his name is Godfrey, Godfrey Maximillian?”

  She saw nothing of Annibale Valzacchi for twenty-four hours, as near as she could judge the time.

  A different squad of Alderic’s men took her down a hundred stone steps, into the heart of the crag’s corridors and apartments, and left her with slave attendants.

  The room the slaves brought her to was smaller than a field tent, with only a pallet and a blanket on the stone floor. It had walls a yard thick, she could see that from the window – more like a tunnel, with iron bars set halfway down, so that no one could climb up to look out.

  A freezing wind blew in through the unglazed window, from the blackness outside.

  “Can I have a fire?” Ash tried to make herself understood to the five or six men and women, whose Carthaginian Gothic was quick, guttural, local, unintelligible. She went through every word for ‘fire’ that she knew; to blank looks from all of them, except a brawny big woman.

  The fair-haired woman in an iron collar, woollen blankets belted around her waist, shook her head and said something sharp. A small, quick young man with her answered: it might have been a protest. He glanced at Ash. There were crow’s feet around his eyes, his dark eyes.

  “Can I have more clothes?” Ash gripped two fistfuls of the worn-thin linen nightshirt that the bath attendant had thrown at her, and held out the cloth. “More – warm? – clothes?”

  The little girl who had attended on Leofric said, “Why should you? We not.”

  Ash nodded, slowly, looking around at the half dozen or so people, most of whom were openly staring at her. All but the girl had rough woven blankets, with stripe-patterns; the kind of wool that one throws over a pallet for extra warmth in the winter. They wore them wrapped around their bodies, and went barefoot on the mosaic tiled floor. The girl wore only a thin linen tunic.

  “Here.” Ash pulled the striped woollen blanket off the pallet, draping it around the child’s shoulders. She fastened it with a neat fold under the arm. “Take it. Understand? Keep it.”

  The girl looked at the big woman. After a second, the woman nodded. Her frown faded, replaced by vulnerability, confusion.

  Ash put her fingers under her iron collar, lifting it, giving her neck some relief from the weight. She said, “I’m like you. Just like you. They can do what they like with me, too.”

  The woman said thickly, “Slave?”

  “Yes. Slave.” Ash walked across the room and hitched herself up on her hands, peering out of the stone window. Frost sparkled on the surface of the red granite, and on the iron bars. Nothing was visible beyond, not roofs, not sea, not stars: nothing but dark.

  “It’s cold,” she said. She grinned at the slaves, beating her arms exaggeratedly around her body, and blowing on her fingers. “Every time Lord Leofric sits down, his arse gets just as cold as ours do!”

  The little girl laughed. The sharp-faced young man smiled. The big woman shook her head, with an expression of fear, and jerked her thumb; ushering the domestic slaves out. The sharp-faced man and the child lingered.

  “What’s down there?” Ash hooked her arm up and over, in an exaggerated motion of pointing out of the window, and down. “What?”

  He said a word she didn’t understand.

  “What?” Ash frowned.

  “Water.”

  “How far? How – far – down?”

  He shrugged, spread his hands, grinning ruefully. “Water, down. Far. Long. Ahh…” He made a noise indicating disgust, then tapped his chest, looking as though he was sure he would be understood in this, at least. “Leovigild.”

  “Ash.” Ash touched her own chest. She pointed at the girl and raised her brows.

  The child looked up from examining her new blanket. “Violante.”

  “Okay.” Ash smiled, companionably. She sat down on the pallet, tucking her freezing feet under the hem of her nightshirt. The cold made her breath smoke on the air. “So, tell me about this place.”

  When food came, she shared it with Leovigild and Violante. The girl, with bright eyes and a red flush to her face, ate hungrily and chattered on, half-understood; interpreting for the older man where she could.

  From growing up a peasant in a military camp, Ash knows that servants get everywhere and know about everybody. Ash begins – through the cold hours, mitigated when the big woman came in with two worn wool blankets – to ge
t the shape of the amir’s household clear in her mind; how life is lived in the honeycomb chambers of the Citadel; slave and freeborn and amir.

  In the hours when she should have been sleeping, hunger kept her usefully awake. She stayed at the foot of the stone embrasure, staring up out of the window. As her eyes adjusted to night vision she saw bright pin-points: Fomalhaut, and Capricornus, the Goat. The constellations of summer in a freezing, bitter night.

  No moon, she thought, but it could be the dark of the moon now; I haven’t been counting the days—

  She slid her hand along the wall, guiding herself back to the pallet, and sat down, feeling around for blankets. She wrapped herself up. Her hands clasped across her belly. Her body shivered. But only from the cold.

  Let’s say I have three days. Could be four or five, but call it three: if I can’t get out of here in three days, I’m dead.

  A man’s voice outside the steel door said something too muffled to identify. Her hands suddenly shaking, Ash stuffed the sheet of paper and charcoal stick down the bodice of her shift.

  The key turned.

  With her hand against the flat metal door she could feel the mechanism work, bars sliding back between the two steel plates. Warned, she stepped back into the tiny room.

  “I’ll be back here in an hour,” ’Arif Alderic said from the corridor, not speaking to her. His voice sounded unusually compassionate. The single unwinking, pale light above the door shone down into her eyes: Ash blinked, attempting to see who was coming in.

  Fear makes the belly uncomfortable. Ash, who has fought, feels her bowels shift in momentary discomfort that she recognises at last as fear.

  A deep masculine voice said, in German, “Oh, excuse me, I thought that—” and broke off.

  The man standing at the doorway wore a brown wool gown over his green priest’s robes, the puffed sleeves slit, and lined with marten fur. It was the bulk of the gown, perhaps, that made his body look too big for his head. She stepped forward, thinking, No, his face is thinner, staring at the way deep creases cut down beside his mouth, not hidden by his beard. The fragile skin of his eyelids clung close to the balls of his eyes, accentuating their hollow sockets. All his face was clearly shrunken down on to the bone. He looks old.