Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  His eyelids fluttered as he avoided her gaze. She thought she had not noticed before how long and fine his brown lashes were. She felt a pain in her hand and looked down. His knuckles were white where he gripped her hand.

  “How—” Godfrey coughed. “How do you know it to be true? How did you discover this?”

  “Amir Leofric told me,” Ash said. She waited until Godfrey looked her in the face again. “And I asked the Stone Golem.”

  “You asked—”

  “He wanted to know whether I was a fake or not. So I told him. If I could, and it was right, then I had to be hearing it from somewhere, I had to be hearing the voice of the machine.” Ash reached down with her other hand and began to peel Godfrey’s fingers off her. Where he had gripped, her skin was bloodlessly white.

  “He bred a general who could hear his machine,” Ash said, “but now – he doesn’t need another one.”

  “Iesu Christus Viridianus, Christus Imperator,”4 Godfrey said. He looked down at his hands without seeing them. Ash noticed that the cuffs of his robe were frayed. And half the gauntness of his face could be attributable to nothing other than hunger: a poor priest, lodging in some Carthage tenement, dependant on doctors like Annibale Valzacchi for alms, and for information. No information is without its price.

  In the silence, she said: “When you pray, Godfrey, do you get an answer?”

  The question brought him out of his amazement. “It would be presumptuous to say.”

  All her body was tense against the cold, mitigated as it might be by thick stone walls. She shifted on the pallet.

  “This,” she touched her temple, “isn’t the Communion of Saints. I used to hope it would be, Godfrey. I kind of hoped it would be Saint George, or one of the soldier-saints, you know?”

  A faint smile curled up one corner of his mouth. “I suppose you would hope that, child.”

  “It isn’t a saint’s voice, it’s a machine’s voice. Although the machine might have been made by a miracle. If Prophet Gundobad was a real prophet of God?” She looked quizzically at Godfrey, without giving him time to answer. “And when I hear it, I don’t just listen.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Ash bounced where she sat, hitting one fist on the pallet. “It’s not just listening. When I hear you speak, I don’t have to do anything to hear you.”

  “I frequently feel that you don’t have to pay attention,” Godfrey said, with a grave humour; derailing her absolutely. He gave her a smile of apology. “There is something more to this?”

  “The voice.” Ash made a helpless gesture with her hands. “I feel as if I’m pulling on a rope, or – you won’t understand this, but, sometimes in combat you can make someone else attack you in a certain way, by the way you stand and hold your weapon, by the way you move – you offer a gap, a way in through your defences – and they come in where you want them to, and then you deal with them. I never noticed when it was just a question or two before we fought, but Leofric made me listen to the Stone Golem for a long time. I’m doing something when I listen, Godfrey. Offering a … way in.”

  “There are acts of omission and acts of commission.” Godfrey sounded rapt, again. Abruptly, he glanced at the door and lowered the volume of his speech. “How much can you get it to tell you? Can it tell you how to leave?”

  “Oh, it could tell me. Probably tell me where all the guards are stationed.” Ash flicked her gaze up to meet Godfrey’s. “I’ve been talking to the slaves. When Leofric wants to know what tactical questions the Faris is asking the machine, he asks it – and it tells him.”

  “And would tell what you ask, too?”

  She shrugged. Staccato, she said, “Maybe. If it ‘remembers’. If Leofric thinks to ask. He will. He’s smart. Then I’m caught. They’ll just change duty rosters. Maybe beat me until I’m unconscious and can’t ask.”

  Godfrey Maximillian took her hand. His body was still half-turned towards the door. “Slaves do not always tell the truth.”

  “I know. If I was going to—” Ash made another unspecific gesture, trying to frame a thought. “To call what it knows to me, I’d ask something else first. Godfrey, I’d ask it why is it so cold here? Amir Leofric doesn’t know the answer to that, and he’s scared.”

  “Everyone is—”

  “That’s just it. Everyone here is scared, too. I thought this was something they made happen for their crusade – but they didn’t expect this cold either. This isn’t the Eternal Twilight, this is something else again.”

  “Perhaps these are the last days—”

  A heavy tread sounded in the corridor.

  Godfrey Maximillian leapt to his feet rapidly, brushing down his robe and gown.

  “Try and get me out,” Ash said quickly and quietly, “if I don’t hear from you soon, I’ll try any way I can think of.”

  His strong hand enveloped her shoulder, pushing her back down as she tried to rise, so that she was kneeling in front of him as the cell door began to open and soldiers came in. Godfrey crossed himself, and lifted the cross from his broad chest, and kissed it devoutly. “I have an idea. You won’t like it. Absolvo te,5 my child.”

  The nazir with Alderic was not Theudibert, Ash noted; nor were any of the squad Theudibert’s men. The ’arif commander stood back while his soldiers filed out, Godfrey Maximillian between them.

  Ash watched impassively.

  “You ought to be more careful what you say, Frankish girl,” ’Arif Alderic remarked. He put his hand on the steel door and, instead of closing it behind him, pushed it to in front of him, and turned around to face her. “That’s a friendly warning.”

  “One,” Ash held up her hand and ticked it off on her fingers, “what makes you think I don’t know there are always people here listening to me? Two: what makes you think I care what you report to your lord-amir? He’s mad. Three, he’s already planning to torture me, just what have I got to worry about?”

  She managed to end with her fists on her hips, chin up; and more energy in her voice than she thought she could find, given the weakness from hunger that went through her every time she stood up. The big bearded man stirred uncomfortably. Something about her bothered him; it took Ash several seconds to work out that it was the contradiction between her dress and her stance.

  “You should be more careful,” the Visigoth captain repeated stubbornly.

  “Why?”

  ’Arif Alderic did not answer. He walked past her to the window, leaning up the red granite shaft and peering at the sky. A smell of ripe harbour rubbish drifted in.

  “Have you ever done anything you remained ashamed of, Frankish girl?”

  “What?” Ash looked at the back of his head. By the set of his shoulders, he was uncomfortable. A chill feathered the hairs on her arms. What is this?

  “I said, have you ever done anything that you stayed ashamed of? As a soldier?” He turned to face her, looked her up and down, and repeated more firmly, “As a soldier.”

  Ash folded her arms. She bit back the first smart remark that came to her mind, and studied him. In addition to his white robes and mail hauberk, the Visigoth wore a crude goatskin jacket, laced like a peasant’s tunic; and fur-lined boots, not sandals. He carried a curved dagger at his belt, and a sword with a narrow straight cross. Far too alert to be attacked, surprised.

  Moved to truth, she relaxed and said, “Yes, everybody has. I have.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  “Why—” Ash stopped herself. “Okay. Five years ago. I was in a siege, it doesn’t matter where, some little town on the borders of Iberia. Our lord wouldn’t let the townspeople come out. He wanted them to eat up the garrison’s supplies, so they’d have to give up the siege. The garrison commander didn’t want that, so he evacuated them, drove them out into the moat. So there they were, two hundred people, in a ditch between two armies, neither of whom were going to let them back or through. We killed a dozen before they’d believe us. It went on for a month. They starved and they died.
The smell was something else, even for a siege…”

  She refocused her gaze on Alderic, to find the older man studying her closely.

  “That’s a story I’ve told before,” she said. “Usually to discourage the kind of would-be mercenary recruit who is fourteen and thinks it’s all sitting on horseback and charging a noble enemy. I don’t suppose you have those. What I don’t say, and what I’m ashamed of, is the newborn babies. Our lord said it wasn’t right they should be unbaptised and go to hell, so he let the townspeople pass them up to us. And we passed them to the field-priest, who baptised them – and then we handed them straight back down into the ditch.”

  Unconsciously she rested her palms flat against her belly.

  “We did. I did. It went on for weeks. I know they died of starvation while in a state of grace … but it stays with me.”

  The Visigoth ’arif nodded an acknowledgement.

  “We have the fourteen-year-olds in the household levies.” White teeth flashed in his black beard, and then his expression changed. “Mine is infants, also. I was perhaps your age, no older. My amir – my lord, you would call him; Leofric – had me working in the stock pens.”

  Ash was aware that she must look puzzled.

  “The slave breeding-pens. No larger than this, most of them.” Alderic gestured around the cell. “My amir set me and my squad to culling ‘errors’ in the breeding programme, when they were twelve or fourteen weeks old.” The ’arif abruptly pulled off his helmet, wiping his white brow, that was sweating despite the cold. “We were the clear-up squad. Nothing I have done since, in twenty years of war, has been so bad as slashing the throats of babies – the big vein, here – and then just … throwing them away. Out of windows like this one, into the harbour: rubbish. No one questions my amir. My squad did as we were ordered.”

  He shrugged helplessly, and met her gaze.

  She looks at Alderic’s face in the knowledge that – if this is the way it happened for her – there is a sporting chance that he almost killed her, casually slashed her throat and dumped her, twenty years ago. And that he knows this.

  “So,” Ash said. She grinned at Alderic companionably. “So, Leofric was nuts even back then, huh?”

  She saw his brief confusion, a frown – the woman can’t be that obtuse, surely? – and a dawning acknowledgement.

  The ’arif said, reprovingly, “That’s a disrespectful way to speak of a man who may become King-Caliph.”

  “If the Visigoth Empire elects Leofric, you deserve all you get!” She lifted her hand to her neck. She is sure that her bodice shows the old white scar around her neck, that Fernando del Guiz touched so long ago in Cologne. “I always just assumed this was some childhood accident… Not that you were exactly efficient, ’Arif Alderic. A quarter-inch either way and I wouldn’t be talking to you, would I?”

  “Even a dumb grunt can’t get everything right,” Alderic said gravely. “Accidents will happen.”

  Pure happenstance. Pure, freak chance.

  The thought makes her sweat. She distracts herself.

  “Why so young?” she said suddenly. “These children… Wouldn’t the babies have to be old enough to talk, at least, before Leofric could find out they couldn’t communicate with the Stone Golem?”

  Alderic gave her a look. It took her a second to realise that it was the look soldiers reserve for civilians who find some piece of mass battlefield killing irrational.

  “They don’t have to talk,” Alderic said. “He doesn’t find out from them. The babies are kept in a different quarter of the house; he waits until they are old enough to distinguish real pain from a hunger to be fed, or discomfort, and then he hurts them badly – usually burns them with fire. They shriek. Then he asks the Stone Golem if it can hear them.”

  Sweet Christus!

  Ash thinks with her mind and with her body. Her body is reading his, judging, finding no fault in his alertness, no point at which she might snatch a knife, gain a sword. Her mind tells her there is nothing she could do with a weapon if she had one.

  “Granted they were slave-children,” the ’arif said, with a supreme insensibility to the slave-woman in front of him, “it is still something I dream I am doing, most nights.”

  “Yeah … people have told me about that sort of dream.”

  Over and beyond what they say, some other wordless, friendly communication is present in the room. Ash, bright-eyed, rubbed her hands briskly over her wool-sleeved arms. “Soldiers have more in common with other soldiers than with lords, with amirs, have you ever noticed that, ’Arif Alderic? Even soldiers on opposite sides!”

  Alderic touched his right hand to his chest, over his heart. “I wish I could have faced you in combat, lady.”

  “I wish you may still get your wish!”

  It came out acerbic. The Visigoth threw back his head, beard jutting, and laughed. He moved towards the door.

  “And while you’re at it,” Ash said, “the food here’s terrible, but I’d like more of it.”

  Alderic smiled brilliantly, shaking his head. “You have only to command, lady.”

  “I wish.”

  The steel grill closed behind him. The sounds of locking metal died away, leaving only the wail of the rising wind. Outside, freezing rain spattered on carven red granite.

  “I have only to command, temporarily” Ash amended, aloud.

  There was nothing to mark the passing of any given hour in the day except the uninformative horns; no wheeling constellations; no difference to the passing footsteps, or the bells in what must be the household chapel: House Leofric appeared to swarm with activity through each twenty-four hours. She hoped for Alderic to send either a slave or a soldier with food within the hour: no one came. When each hour can be final, when any key unlocking the door can bring terminal news, time stretches unbelievably. It might only have been minutes until the sound of metal turning metal tumblers brought her up on her feet, swaying and dizzy.

  Two soldiers, each carrying maces, came in and stood to either side of the narrow door. There was barely room for anyone else to come in. Ash backed up towards the window. The ’arif Alderic pushed between his guards. A robed, bearded man followed him in. Godfrey Maximillian.

  “Shit. Already? Now? ” Ash demanded; but Godfrey was shaking his head almost as soon as their eyes met.

  “The lord-amir Leofric thinks it best to keep you in good health, until you’re needed.” Godfrey Maximillian stumbled almost imperceptibly over the last word: she saw Alderic register the priest’s revulsion.

  “And?”

  “And you require exercise. A short period each day.”

  Nice try, Godfrey.

  Ash met Alderic’s gaze. “So. Your lord’s going to let me out of this stone box?”

  Yeah, right. You have to be joking! Under what possible circumstances—

  Alderic said impassively, “The amir has a trustworthy ally, he commits you to his custody for an hour each day from now until the inauguration. Perhaps only today.”

  Ash didn’t move. She looked from one man to the other. Then she sighed, relaxing very slightly, thinking: Outside of here is a political machine running at full stretch, I have no way of knowing the various alliances, enmities, deals, bribes, tricks – and if some piece of double-dealing chicanery on Leofric’s behalf is getting me out of this cell, I don’t care what I don’t know. I just need not to be watched for ten heartbeats and I’m gone.

  “So who does the lord-amir count as his trustworthy ally?” Ash asked. “Who does he trust to keep an eye on me once I’m out of here? Let’s not pretend I’m going to come back if I can help it.”

  “That much,” the ’arif Alderic said gravely, “I had worked out for myself. Nazir!”

  The taller of the two soldiers hooked his mace over his sword-hilt, by its leather lanyard, and disengaged a long steel-linked chain from his belt. Ash lifted her chin as he approached and began to thread it under her iron collar.

  “So, who?” she managed to get
out.

  Alderic’s face took on an expression something between rough humour and disapproval. “An ally, lady. One of your lords. You know him, I’m told. A Bavarian.”

  Ash watched as the nazir bent down to attach manacles to her ankles. Cold metal links hung down, pulling at her collar. She could have throttled him with the chain, possibly, but that would still leave the rest.

  “Bavarian?” she said abruptly. “Oh, shit, no!”

  Godfrey Maximillian raised a brow. “I told you that you wouldn’t like it.”

  “It’s Fernando! Isn’t it? He’s come south! Fucking Fernando del Guiz!”

  “He owns you,” Godfrey said, stone-faced. “He’s your husband. You’re his property. I’ve brought the amir Leofric to a proper understanding of that fact – that the Lord Fernando can be held completely responsible for you. The lord-amir then agreed to release you into your husband’s company for an hour, each day, on his parole.”

  “I imagine the Faris’s lap-dog will guard you well enough,” ’Arif Alderic finished, with gallows cheerfulness, “since his life depends on it.”

  Of course, Ash thought, somebody else could just be using me to get rid of Fernando. He’ll have made enemies. It could be anyone. Up to and including the lord-amir Leofric…

  “Fuck politics,” Ash said aloud, “why can’t I just hit somebody?”

  II

  The skull of a horse reared up under the nose of Ash’s mount. Hollow white eye-sockets and long yellow teeth leered up at her, bleached bone bright-edged in the intense light of Greek Fire.

  “Carnival!” a drunken male voice bellowed.

  “Shit!”

  The horse-skull’s wearer waved wild arms, in a flurry of red ribbons.