by Mary Gentle
“Godfrey?”
“I didn’t know you!”
“You look thinner.” She frowned.
“I didn’t know you,” Godfrey Maximillian repeated, wonderingly.
The steel door slammed. The noise of bars sinking into sockets drowned out any words for a long minute. Ash self-consciously smoothed the blue wool bodice and kirtle down over her shift, and one hand went up to touch her shorn hair.
“It’s still me,” she said. “They wouldn’t give me male clothes. I don’t care if I look like a woman. Let them underestimate me. That’s just fine. Jesus, Godfrey!”
She took a step forward, intending to throw her arms around him, and at the last minute flushed from bodice-line to forehead, and reached out and grabbed both his hands, hard. Tears welled up and spilled down her face. She said, again, “Godfrey, Godfrey!”
His hands were warm within hers. She felt him shaking.
“Why did you go!”
“I left Dijon with the Visigoths, I came here, I desperately needed to spy out the Caliph’s court and find out the truth about your voice. I thought it was the only thing now that I could do for you—” Godfrey’s face streamed, wet. He didn’t let go of her hands to wipe it. “It was all that I could think of doing for you!”
His hard hands crushed hers. She tightened her grip. The wind from the open stone window blew in, hard enough to whip her skirts around her bare ankles.
“You’re cold,” Godfrey Maximillian said accusingly, “your hands are bitter.”
He lifted her hands and put them up under his armpits, into the warmth of his robe, and for the first time, met her eyes. His lids were reddened, wet. She could not imagine what he was seeing: a crop-haired thing in a dress and a steel collar, could not know how her own face was sharpened by hunger, by the loss of a silver waterfall of hair, short hair throwing brow and ear and eye and scar all into sharp relief.
Her cold fingers began to warm, prickling with blood-flow.
“What happened to us? ” she demanded, “to the Lion? What? ”
“I – don’t know. I left two days before you fought. I thought—”
He freed one hand and wiped his face, his beard.
Words hung between them, spoken at Dijon. Ash felt his body-warmth through her cold skin. She raised her head, needing as always to look up to look into his face; and saw, not anguished declarations, but a face she knows (given the infrequency of mirrors) better than her own, and a mind of which she knows most, if not every, weakness.
Godfrey Maximillian said brusquely, “When I docked here, the field had been fought ten days ago. All I can tell you is what everybody knows: Duke Charles is wounded; the flower of Burgundian chivalry lies dead on the field outside Auxonne – but Dijon is holding out, I believe; or, there’s still some fighting somewhere. No one knows or cares about one mercenary company. The Lion Azure had some notoriety because of its woman commander, but there is nothing, only minor rumours, no one in Carthage cares whether we were massacred outright, or changed sides and fought with the Faris, or ran away; they just care that the victory was theirs.”
Ash found herself nodding her head.
“I have tried,” Godfrey said.
Ash tightened her grip, fingers fisted in his, buried deep in his robe’s scratchy brown wool. No. If I hold him, embrace him, it will be for my comfort, not his. Not his, when he wants me. Shit. Shit.
“You always come for me. You came for me at St Herlaine, and Milan.” A hot tear flowed. She hitched her shoulder up, wiping her cheek on the blue wool, and stared up in wonder at him. “You don’t want me. You just think you do. You’ll get over it. And I’ll wait, Godfrey, because I have no intention of losing you. We’ve known each other too long, and we love each other too well.”
“You don’t know what I want,” he said roughly.
Godfrey stepped away and released her hand. The air seared cold on her skin. Ash watched him, calmly. She watched him pace, as far as the tiny cell allowed; two steps each way on the mosaic tiled floor.
“I burn. Doesn’t the Word say it’s better to marry than to burn?” His clear eyes, the brown of woodland-river water, fixed on her face. “You love that boy. What else needs to be said? You will forgive me, most men go through this at a much younger age; this is the first and only time I would have given back my priesting and rejoined the world.” He made an odd, sonorous murmur in his chest, that Ash realised was laughter. “This, also, I have learned in confession – that men who love in secret, for so long, don’t know what to do if that love is returned. I don’t suppose I would be different in that respect.”
Whatever: let him have that thought for consolation. I must not hold him, Ash thought; and could not stop herself. She moved forward, grabbed his arms, clutching him around the hanging sleeves of his gown, and hugged her arms around his broad back. “Shit, Godfrey! You don’t know what it’s like to see you here. You don’t know.”
His forearms closed momentarily across her back. Enfolded, her face buried against his warm chest, she is for a long second blank to everything but his familiarity, his scent, the sound of his voice, the history that they share.
He put her back from him. As his hands left her shoulders, he touched the steel band riveted around her neck.
“I found out nothing about your voice. I failed. Every bit of the money I brought with me is gone.” A glint of humour in his eyes, gazing down at her, a half-smile on his lips. “If I can’t buy information, child, who can? I bribed who I could. I know everything about the outside of this—” a movement of his bearded chin, indicating the walls of House Leofric “—and nothing inside.”
“I know all about the inside. And my voice. Did they search you, coming in?”
“Your voice?”
“Later: it’s complicated. It is the Golem. I think Leofric wants me to—” learn from, she did not say. She was unaware that an expression of pain touched her face, and that Godfrey registered it and remained thoughtfully silent. “Were you searched?”
“No.”
“They might search you going out, though. They can’t search your heart, Godfrey; look at this.” She started to undo the draw-cord of her shift, hesitated, faced away from him, and retrieved her paper and charcoal before she turned back. “Here. This is my best guess for a house-plan.”
Godfrey Maximillian eased himself down on to the pallet, which she patted in invitation. He pointed at the paper, and charcoal twig. “Where did you get those?”
“The same place I got most of this information. A slave child. Violante.” Ash swathed the full skirt around her knees and tucked the hem under her feet, in an attempt to be warm. “I share my food with her. She steals things for me.”
“You do know what could happen to her, if she’s caught?”
“She could be whipped. Or killed,” Ash said, “this is a crazy house. Godfrey, this is deliberate. I know what I’m doing, even if she doesn’t, because my life depends on it.” She turned the crumpled sheet to its blank side. “Okay, show me what’s outside.”
When he said nothing, she looked up again.
Godfrey Maximillian said quietly, “They let me in only to give you the last rites. I know they’ve condemned you to execution. What I don’t yet know is why, and what I can do about it.”
She choked up, nodded once, wiped the back of her wrist across her eyes. “I’ll tell you, if there’s time. Okay. Show me what’s outside this building.”
His broad, capable hands took the paper, the charcoal stick seeming tiny. With a surprisingly delicate touch, he drew an elongated squared-off U-shape. “You’re on the middle headland that protrudes into the harbour. There are quays here and here—” an ‘x’ each side of the U “—and streets coming up the hill to the Citadel.”
“What’s the scale?”
“About a half-mile to the mainland. The bluff is three, four furlongs high?” Godfrey’s rumble had a self-questioning note. He drew in another shape, an elongated square within the U, occupying t
he far end of it. “That’s the Citadel, that we’re in now. It’s walled.”
“I remember. They brought me in that way.” Her dirty fingertip traced a path from the ‘x’ quayside mark, up to the rectangle crowning the U. “Is this Citadel walled all the way around?”
“Walled and guarded. At this end, the walls come up sheer from the water. There are town streets going back on to the mainland, and then Carthage city is here and here—” A shape added, like a palm and three fingers, which Ash realised was the harbour and two other headlands; the town, by Godfrey’s markings, all down on one side. “The market – here. Where the road goes out towards Alexandria.”
“Which way is north?”
“Here.” A scribble. “The sea.”2
“Uh-huh…” She held it in her field of vision, under the Greek Fire that hissed in its glass cage above the door, until the lines burned into her memory.
“This window looks north,” she said thoughtfully, “as far as I can tell from the stars. There’s nothing between me and the sea, is there? I’m at the edge. Shit. So much for that.” She flipped the paper over. “I’ve talked to people. This is what I think we’re in.” She indicated her scrawled hollow square. “Where they bring you into the House, there’s a ground floor all around a courtyard: that’s the amir and his family, his hangers-on.”
“It’s big.” Godfrey sounded rapt.
Ash dotted in a black mark at the corners of each square. “These are four stairwells. They go down into the house underneath. Slave-quarters, kitchens, storerooms. There are stables and a mews at ground level, everything else is beneath. Violante tells me there are ten storeys carved out of the rock. I think I’m on the fifth one down. Each stair has four sets of halls and chambers coming off it, at each level, and the stairs don’t interconnect.” She finished with a cross at one corner. “That’s north-west, that’s me. Leofric is here, in the northeast set of chambers.”
She threw the charcoal stick down, and sat back against the wall.
“Shit, I would hate to have to take this place by force!”
When she glanced sideways, and saw Godfrey Maximillian’s closed expression, she smiled quietly.
“No. I’m not mad. Just old professional habit.”
“You’re not mad,” he agreed, “but you’re different.”
Ash said nothing. There was for that second nothing she was capable of saying. Her breasts momentarily hurt, heavy within her bodice.
“Is it this?” Godfrey touched the steel collar again.
“That? No.” Ash’s head came up. “This is my pass out of here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The lord-amir Gelimer did me a favour.” Ash knotted her fingers around the metal, feeling the steel’s rounded corners digging into her skin. She did not know that she looked at Godfrey with all the old careless excitement of balancing on an edge. “If I don’t have this, I’m a prisoner, a guest, a something you notice. With this… Alderic brought you down here—”
“Alderic?”
“The soldier.” Ash spoke more quickly. “He brought you down. You must have seen it, Godfrey. This house is full of fair-haired slaves. If I get out of this room then I’m just one more of them. Nobody sees me. Nobody finds me. I’m just one more faceless woman in a collar.”
“If that’s not the trouble, what is?” Godfrey pursued. He rapidly shook his head. “Deus vous garde.3 No. Say nothing until you wish it.”
“I will.”
“There are too many soldiers in this house.”
“I know. I have to get outside to escape. Just for a few minutes, just a chance.” She grinned, lopsidedly. “I know how thin a chance it is, Godfrey. I just can’t stop trying, that’s all. I have to get back. I have to get out.” She cut off the intensity cracking her voice; let her fingers trail off the pallet, on the uneven floor. “This place is old…”
The unwavering light of Greek Fire lit up every corner of the tiny room: the close-set tiles in their pink and black geometries, the chamfered edges of the window embrasure, the faint worn bas-relief on the walls: pomegranates and palm trees and men with the heads of animals. Someone had scratched a name, ARGENTIUS, down close to the floor, with some sharpened tool; not, she thought, with the carved wood spoon that came with her wooden bowl and infrequent food.
She complained absently, “They wouldn’t even let me have an eating-knife.”
Godfrey Maximillian said dryly, “I’m not surprised. They know who you are.”
Ash was startled into a laugh.
“So different, and so much the same.” Godfrey reached over to touch the cut ends of her silver hair. His hand went back to the cross at his breast. “If that captain didn’t know you, I’d give you these robes and hood and let you try to walk out of here. That’s been known to be successful.”
“Not for the man left behind,” she said acidly, and was startled when he, in turn, laughed. “What? What, Godfrey?”
“Nothing,” he said, frankly amused. “No wonder I’ve been with you since you were eleven.”
“They will kill me.” Ash watched his face change. “I’ve got forty-eight hours, realistically. I don’t know what it’s like out there, while they’re electing their new King-Caliph—”
“Chaotic. It’s carnival down in the city,” Godfrey shrugged, “with only the city’s own guards to keep it in order. As I discovered when I attempted to buy information, the amirs have retreated into their own houses up here, with their households and all their own troops.”
Ash hit one fist into her palm. “It has to be now! Is there any way you can legitimately get me out of here? Just out on to the street, just for a minute?”
“You’ll be guarded.”
“I can’t give up now.”
Some feeling sharpened his features, bringing the skin even more taut across the bone, but she could not read him. He looked down at his spatulate broad fingers. When he spoke, after some moments’ silence, there was an edge to his voice.
“You never give up, Ash. You sit in here and calculate that you may have two days left – but you may have two hours, or less; that Visigoth thug could knock on your door at any minute of today.” He glanced briefly at the stone tunnel that served as a window. The cell’s Greek Fire brilliance meant no night vision, nothing visible but a square of blackness. His tone strained, he continued, “Ash, don’t you know that you could die? Does nothing teach you that? Does nothing make you suffer?”
He is trying to reach me, Ash thought, killing her anger.
“I’m not deluding myself. Yes, I’m probably going to die.” She wrapped her hands in a fold of her woollen skirt, shivering against the cold. Footsteps banged down the corridor outside and faded into the distance, muffled by the steel door.
Godfrey said, “I’m nothing but an uneducated hedge-priest. You know that. I will pray to Our Lady and the Communion of Saints, I’ll move Heaven and Earth to free you, you know that. But I would be failing you in everything if I didn’t try to bring you to some realisation, some knowledge that you could be dead before you have time to put your soul right. When did you last go to confession? Before the field at Auxonne?”
Ash opened her mouth, shut it again. At last, she said, “I don’t remember. I really don’t remember the last time I was absolved. Does it matter?”
Godfrey gave a small, high chuckle; a noise that rather reminded her of Leofric’s rats. He brushed his hand across his face. When he looked at her, his taut expression had relaxed. “Why? Why do I bother? You’re a complete heathen, child. We both know it.”
“I’m sorry,” Ash said contritely.
“No.”
“I’m sorry I can’t be a good Christian for you.”
“I wouldn’t expect it. God’s representatives on Earth have not been entirely kind.” Godfrey Maximillian cocked his head, listening, then relaxed again. “You’re young. You have neither kith nor kin, household nor guild, lord nor lady. I’ve watched you on the outside, child; I know at l
east one other reason than lust for why you married Fernando del Guiz. Every human tie you have is bound with money, and unbound with the end of a contract. That will never lead you to a tie with Our Lord. I prayed that you would have time to grow older, and to consider.”
A long, harsh male scream echoed between the cell’s stone walls. It took Ash a second to realise that it was not close at hand but far off – far below – and loud enough to echo up from the harbour, over the noise of gulls.
“Carnival, huh?”
“A rough carnival.”
Ash thoughtfully wiped her charcoal several times across her paper, blurring the soft lines. She scrunched it up, knelt up, and threw it out of the window. The charcoal stick she tucked under one end of the pallet.
“Godfrey… How long does it take before a foetus has a soul?”
“Some authorities tell us, forty days. Others, that it takes on a soul when it quickens, and the woman feels the child move within her womb. Holy Saint Magdalen,” he said flatly, “is that it?”
“I was with child when I came here. They beat me, and I lost it. Yesterday.” Ash found herself making the same quick movement of looking at the black window that never showed her a sun, never reassured her that it was day. “No, the day before.”
His hand closed over hers. She looked down at it.
“Are the children of incest sinful?”
Godfrey’s grip tightened on her hand. “Incest? How could it be incest between you and your husband!”
“No, not Fernando. Me.” Ash stared at the opposite wall. She did not look at Godfrey Maximillian. She turned her hand over, so that her palm slid into his, and they sat with their backs leaning up against the wall, the heavy-duty cloth of the pallet cold under them.
“I do have family,” she said. “You’ve seen them, Godfrey. The Faris, and these slaves here. The Amir Leofric breeds them – us – like cattle. He breeds the son back to the mother, and the daughter to the father, and this family’s been doing it since before living memory. If I’d borne a child, it would have been incestuous a hundred times over.” Now she turned her head, so that she could see Godfrey’s face. “Does that shock you? It doesn’t shock me.” And in a pragmatic monotone, she added, “My baby might have been deformed. A monster. By that reasoning, I may be a monster. Not just my voice. Not all deformities are things you can see.”
