by Mary Gentle
She hung, completely unable to move, while mail-clad soldiers of the Visigoth Empire tugged thoughtfully at the chain across the mare’s back, and picked hopefully at the tangle of her wrists in the cloak and stirrup.
A face came into her view, a man bending down. The nazir Theudibert shouted, “What have you got to laugh at, bitch?”
“Nothing.” Ash shut her lips firmly together. His upside-down face, beard at the top and helmet underneath, and with an expression of complete bewilderment, sent her off again. A chest-heaving, belly-shaking laugh. “N-n-nothing – I could have been k-killed!”
She managed to wrestle her right hand and chain free. With that resting on the flagstones, wrist-deep in cold wet snow, she took some of her own weight. Hands manhandled her and the world swooped, sickeningly, and she was upright, the saddle between her thighs, feet scrabbling for stirrups.
A circle of dismounted men with swords surrounded her and the mare, wind driving snow into their faces. Beyond that were a ring of surrounding riders; and a clump of cavalry close around both Godfrey’s palfrey, and Fernando’s riding horse. Even in the increasing wind and poor visibility, there was no way through the cordon.
“Nobody made a mistake, then,” Ash remarked cheerfully as her gut settled.
She freed her hands and wiped her nose on the linen lining of her cloak. The inner cloth was still dry. She started to speak, giggled, swallowed it back, and surveyed the cavalrymen around her with a warm, appreciative, and entirely embracing smile. “Whose dumb idea was this in the first place?”
One or two of them grinned in spite of the foul weather. She sat back in the saddle and picked up her reins, snuffling back chest-aching mirth.
Fernando del Guiz, from where he and his German troops sat surrounded on their horses, called, “Ash! Why are you laughing?”
Ash said, “Because it’s funny.”
She caught sight of Godfrey. Under his snow-whitened hood, he was smiling.
The ’arif Alderic’s horse moved back into the circle of torch-light, Alderic riding with a solid, erect stance despite the driving snow.
“Nazir. Get that damn horse moving. The scout’s come back. We’re no more than a furlong from the city gate.”
III
“But they goin’ to kill you!” the boy-faced soldier, Gaiseric, emphasised; his tone somewhere between confused malice, and awe. “You know that, bitch?”
“Of course I know it. Do I look stupid?”
The north-east quadrant steps of House Leofric jolted Ash as she plodded down their spiral again, Gaiseric and Barbas and the nazir in front of her, the rest of the squad behind. Mail jingled; sword scabbards scraped the curved wall. Her soaking wet wool skirts dragged behind her on the steps.
“I don’t think,” Ash said, “that you’ve understood.”
As they walked out into a corridor, she hauled her cloak out from under her feet. The glasses of Greek Fire in the corridor showed her Gaiseric’s bewildered face, white with the cold.
“Don’ get you,” the boy said, as his nazir went ahead down the mosaic-tiled corridor.
Ash only smiled at him. She surreptitiously flexed her bruised and aching arms. The muscles of her inner thighs burned. She thought, It must be three weeks since I’ve ridden anything – not since the field of Auxonne.
“I’ve been taken prisoner before,” she explained. “I think I’d forgotten that.”
As to why I’d forgotten – she cut the thought off, putting the cell with the blood-soaked floor away in some part of her mind where she need not look at it. She is young, she heals quickly; there is a background discomfort from her head, her knee; it does not, now, affect this rising of her spirits.
A voice called, “Bring her!”
Leofric, Ash identified. Yeah, thought so.
Gaiseric unexpectedly mumbled under his breath, “You’ll be all right in there. He has a fire in there for the vermin.”
Two soldiers slid open an iron-bound oak door. Theudibert pushed her through. She shook off his hand. There was a brief exchange of words between the lord-amir and the nazir. Ash strode forward, direct as a crossbow-bolt’s flight, towards a brazier full of red-hot charcoal, and sank down on her knees on the stone floor in front of it.
Something rustled. Something squeaked.
“Oh, yeah… that’s more like it,” she sighed, eyes closing. Heat from the fire soaked her face. She opened her eyes, reached up clumsily, and pushed her hood back. Steam rose off the surface of the wool. The stone floor was wet all around her. She rubbed her fists together, biting her lip against the pain as numbness gave way to returning circulation.
“Lord-Amir!” Theudibert acknowledged. The door slammed; soldiers’ footsteps departing down the corridor. She looked up to find herself alone with the lord-amir Leofric and a number of his slaves, some of whom she knew by name.
The walls of the room were stacked with iron rat cages, five and six deep. A myriad beady eyes watched her from behind thin metal grills.
“My lord.” Ash faced Leofric. “I think we have to talk.”
Whatever he had been expecting, it was not speech from her. He turned, more like a startled owl than ever, his grey-white hair and beard jutting out where he had run his fingers through it. He was wearing a floor-length gown of green wool, spotted with the droppings and litter of his animals.
“Your future is decided. What can you have to say to me?”
His incredulous emphasis on you stirred her temper. Ash got to her feet, pulling down the tight wrists of her gown, so that she faced him as a young woman in European dress, her shorn hair hidden by her coif, her body swathed in the wet cloak and hood that she would not abandon in case some slave cleared it away.
She approached the bench where he stood by an open cage. Violante stood beside him, carrying a leather bucket of water.
“What are you doing?” It was a deliberate distraction, while she furiously thought.
Leofric glanced down. “Breeding a true characteristic. Or rather, not. This is my fifth attempt. And this, also, has failed. Girl!”
The iron box in front of the amir was full of chopped hay. Ash lifted her brows, thinking, The sheer expense of that, here, where nothing grows—!
Wriggling white grubs lay among the hay. She peered closer, memories coming back of living in a wagon with Big Isobel, when she had been nine or ten: the quartermaster paying a loaf of bread for ten dead rats, or a litter of babies. She leaned over the box, looking at the rat pups – their blind heads big, like hound-pups’, and their small bodies covered with a fine white fur. Two were plain grey.
“At five days, you may see the markings. These, like the previous litters, have proved to be useless,” the lord-amir Leofric observed over her shoulder. His breath smelled of spices. He reached down with trim-nailed fingers, scooping the whole litter up in his palm, and dropped them into the leather bucket.
“Wh—”
They plopped beneath the black surface of the water without a struggle. Her senses, stretched keen, distinguished the rapid succession of fifteen or twenty tiny, heavy, splashes. Ash, staring, met the eyes of Violante, holding the leather bucket. The child’s eyes brimmed over with tears.
“The buck is number four-six-eight,” the elderly man said, oblivious, reaching up to another cage. “It will not breed true.”
He reached swiftly in. Ash heard a squeal. Leofric took his hand out, gripping a buck rat around the middle of its body. Ash recognised the liver-and-white patched rat – it squealed, thrashing, all four legs splaying, tail held out stiff, then whipping from side to side in panic. Leofric raised the rat up and brought its head cracking down on the sharp edge of the bench—
Ash, moving before she realised she had the intention, locked her hand around his wrist, arresting his movement before he could strike the animal’s brains out.
“No.” She pressed her lips together, shook her head. “No, I don’t think so – Father.”
It was said purely to jolt him. It d
id. The elderly man stared at her, skin crinkling around his sclerotic blue eyes. Abruptly he flinched, scowled, and flung the rat straight at her, putting his bleeding finger to his mouth. “Keep it if you want it!”
The flying object thumped into Ash’s chest. She dropped her hands to catch it, momentarily held a bundle of flailing needles, swore, snatched at the rat’s muscular body, and froze, completely, as the animal shot down into the depths of her voluminous cloak.
“What is your objection?” Leofric snapped testily.
“Um…” Ash remained perfectly still. A stench of rat droppings was in the air. Somewhere in the folds of her cloak, a small solid body moved. It’s sitting in the crook of my elbow! she realised. She did not put her hand into the cloth. She attempted a chirrup. “Hey, Lickfinger…”
The small warm solidity moved. She felt the rat’s body shift into a crouch. She couldn’t help but tense against the stab of razor-sharp chisel-teeth.
No bite came.
Wild animals do not willingly put up with human touch. They panic, confined. Someone has handled this one, Ash thought. Often. Far more often than Leofric, playing the eccentric rat-breeding amir…
Ash, very still, shifted her gaze and looked at Violante. The slave-girl had put down the bucket of dead rat-pups and was standing, fists in her mouth, face wet, staring at Ash with appalled hope.
Tameness is a ‘by-product’ of the breeding programme, is it? Bollocks! Bollocks. Leofric, you haven’t got a clue. I know who’s been petting these beasts. And I’ll bet she isn’t the only slave to do it, either…
“All right, I’ll keep it.” Ash turned back to Leofric. “I think you’ve misunderstood.”
“Misunderstood what?”
“I’m not a rat.”
“What?”
Ash held herself in stillness. The small, warm, solid body stretched out, under the wool, resting on her forearm. Against her skin – under my sleeve! she thought, picturing it sliding between points at her shoulder, wriggling under the neck of her shift. She had a brief lurch in her gut, feeling its furry snake-head and bald, scaly tail in contact with her skin – and realised that what she was feeling was warm fur, no different to a hound puppy; and a rapid, pattering heartbeat.
Ash raised her eyes to Leofric’s face and spoke with care. “I’m not a rat, my lord Father. You can’t breed me. And I’m not one of your naked slaves, either. I come with a history. I have a life, eighteen or twenty years of it, and I have ties, and responsibilities, and people who depend on me.”
“And?” Leofric held out his hands, and one of the male slaves came with a bowl and towel and soap. He spoke without appearing to notice the man who washed him.
I’ve done that with pages, Ash thought suddenly. It isn’t the same. It isn’t the same!
“They come with a history, too,” she added.
“What are you saying to me?”
“If I come from here, you still don’t own me. If I was born to one of your slaves, so what? I’m not yours. You have a responsibility to let me go,” Ash said. Her expression changed. In a quite different voice, she said, “Oh Lord, it’s licking me!”
The small hot tongue continued to rasp at the tender skin of her forearm, inside her elbow. Ash shivered. She looked up again, delighted; and seeing that Leofric was regarding her with his hands folded in front of his body, she said, “Talk. Negotiate. That’s what real people do, my lord Father. You see, you may be a cruel man, but you’re not mad. A madman could have run this experiment, but he couldn’t have managed a household, and court politics, and all the preparations for the invasion – crusade,” she corrected herself.
Leofric lifted his arms as a slave buckled his belt and purse over his long gown. He prompted quietly, “And?”
“And you should never turn down the chance of five hundred armed men,” Ash said calmly. “If I don’t have my company any more, give me a company of your men. You know what the Faris can do. Well, I’m better than her. Give me Alderic and your men, and I’ll make certain House Leofric doesn’t go down in the struggle for election. Let me send messengers and call my captains, and my specialist gunners and engineers, and I’ll make sure things go your way in Europe, too. What’s Burgundy, to me? It all comes down to armed force, in the end.”
She smiled, hand hovering over her elbow, afraid to touch the rat through the damp wool. By the feel of it, the animal could be asleep.
“Things are different, now that Caliph Theodoric’s dead,” she said. “I know what it’s like, I’ve been around enough times when heirs take over from lords, and there’s always the doubts about the succession, about who’s going to follow who. You think about it, my lord Father. This isn’t three days ago, this is now. I’m not a rat. I’m not a slave. I’m an experienced military commander and I’ve been doing this a long time.” Ash shrugged. “A split second with a poleaxe and these brains go flying out, and end up splattered up someone’s breastplate. But until that happens, I know so much that you need me, lord Father. At least until you’ve got yourself elected King-Caliph.”
Leofric’s lined and creased face ceased to have its habitual, blurred expression. He put his fingers through his unbraided beard, combing it tidy. His eyes were bright, and focused on Ash. She thought, I’ve woken him up, I’ve got him.
“I don’t believe I could trust you to command my troops and remain here.”
“Think about it.” She saw the fact that she did not plead sink home with him. “It’s your choice. No one who’s ever hired me knew I wasn’t going to turn coat and leg it. But I’m neither stubborn nor stupid. If I can come to a compromise that keeps me alive, and means I have some hope of finding out what happened to my guys at Auxonne, then I’ll fight for you, and you can trust me to go out there and die for you – or not die,” she added, “which is more to the point.”
She deliberately turned away from his intense, pondering face.
“Excuse me. Violante? I have a rat down my shift.”
She did not look at Leofric for the next confusing few minutes, loosening her laces, the small girl’s cold hands rummaging around her bodice, and the rat’s needle-thin claws scoring red weals down her shoulder as the reluctant furry body was removed. Two red eyes fixed on her from a pointy, furry face. The rat squicked.
“Look after him for me,” Ash ordered, as Violante cuddled the buck against her thin body. “Well, my lord Father?”
“I am what you would call a cruel man.” The Visigoth noble’s tone was completely unapologetic. “Cruelty is a very efficient way of getting what one needs, both from the world and from other people. You, for example, would suffer if I ordered the death of that piece of vermin, and the girl, or the priest that visited you here.”
“You think every other lord who hires a bunch of mercenaries doesn’t try that?”
“What do you do?” Leofric sounded interested.
“Generally, I have two or three hundred men around me who are trained to use swords and bows and axes. That discourages a lot of them.” Ash straightened her puff-shouldered sleeves. The chill, animal-scented room was finally beginning to feel warm, after the blizzard outside. “There’s always someone who’s stronger than you. That’s the first thing you learn. So you negotiate, make yourself on balance more useful to them than not – and it doesn’t always work; it didn’t work with my old company, the Griffin-in-Gold. They made the mistake of surrendering a garrison: the local lord drowned half of them in the lake, there, and hanged the rest from his walnut trees. Everybody’s time runs out sooner or later.” She deliberately met Leofric’s gaze, and said brutally, “Later, we’re all dead and rotten. What matters is what we do now.”
He took some notice of that, she thought, but could not be sure. What he did was to turn aside and let his slaves finish dressing him, in a new gown, belt, purse and eating-knife; and fur-trimmed velvet bonnet. She studied his back, that was beginning to stoop with age.
He’s nothing more than any other lord or amir.
And nothing less, of course. He can have me killed at any time.
“I wonder,” Leofric’s voice creaked, “whether my daughter would behave so well, if she were captured, and in the heart of an enemy stronghold?”
Ash began to smile. “If I’d been a better military commander, you wouldn’t be having the chance to compare us.”
He turned and continued to watch her assessingly. Ash thought, He doesn’t mind hurting people, he’s ambitious enough to try for the place of power, and the only difference between him and me is that he has the money and the men, and I don’t.
That, and the fact that he has forty or so years of experience that I don’t have. This is not a man to fight. This is a man to come to an agreement with.
“One of my ’arifs, Alderic, takes you to be a soldier.”
“I am.”
“But, as with my daughter, you are something more than that.”
The lord-amir glanced away as an older, robed slave entered the room, his hands full of parchment scrolls. The slave bowed briefly and began immediately to whisper to Leofric in an intense undertone. Ash guessed it to be a series of messages, requiring – by Leofric’s tone – assent, reassurance, or temporising rejection. It gave her the sense of how, six floors above her head, the stone world of the Citadel buzzed with men seeking allies, to gain power.
Leofric broke off. “I grant you that I will consider this.”
“My lord Father,” Ash acknowledged.
Better than I’d hoped for.
Rats rustled and scuttled, captive in their cages that lined the room. The hem of her kirtle dragged wetly at her heels, and the manacles on her ankles and her steel collar made her wince with their galling.
He hasn’t changed his mind. He may be thinking about changing it, but that’s as far as he’s got. What can I put into the balance?
“I am something more,” she said. “Two for the price of one, remember? Maybe you could do with a commander here in Carthage who can use the Stone Golem’s tactical advice?”
