Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  “And sometimes needs to use it for a revolt of her own men?” the lord-amir. said quizzically, preparing to follow the slave out. “You are not infallible, daughter. Let me consider.”

  Ash froze, not attending to his last words.

  For a revolt of—

  The last time in Dijon I spoke to the Stone Golem, it was the riot, when they almost killed Florian—

  She bowed her head as the lord-amir Leofric left the room, so that he shouldn’t see her expression.

  Jesu Christus, I was right. He can find out from the Stone Golem what questions it’s been asked – by her or by me. He can know exactly what tactical problems I’ve had.

  Or will have. If I still have a voice. If it isn’t just silence, like it was out in the pyramids. And I can’t ask! Goddammit.

  She thought, furiously, not really attending as a troop of soldiers escorted her back to her cell. The manacles on her ankles were removed, the collar left on her. She sat in the dark of the day, alone, in a bare room with only a pallet and a pisspot, her head between her hands, straining her mind for an idea, a thought, anything.

  No. Anything I ask it – Leofric will know. I’d be telling him what I was doing!

  A hollow metallic call from outside announced sunset.

  Ash lifted her head. Snow, drifting, whitened the stone ledge at the front of the window embrasure, but it did not penetrate far in. Gown and cloak swathed her. Hunger, grinding, made her stomach knot up. The single light, too high up to be reachable, shone down on bas-relief walls, and the worn mosaics of the floor, and the flat black surface of the iron door.

  She pushed her fingers up under her collar, easing the metal away from the sores it had already rubbed on her skin.

  Something scratched on the outside surface of the door.

  A child’s voice came clearly between the junction of door and jamb, where great steel bars socketed into the wall.

  “Ash? Ash!”

  “Violante?”

  “Done,” the voice whispered. More urgently, “Done, Ash, done!”

  Ash scrambled to the door, kneeling on her skirts. “What is it? What’s been done?”

  “A Caliph. We have Caliph, now.”

  Shit! The election’s finished sooner than I thought.

  “Who?” Ash did not expect to recognise the name. Talking to Leovigild and other slaves had brought her scurrilous rumours about the habits of the lord-amirs of the King-Caliph’s court, a passing acquaintance with some political careers, the knowledge of such sexual alliances as slaves witness, and a good deal of gossip about deaths from natural causes. Given another forty-eight hours to persuade the soldiers to gossip, she might have been in a better position to judge military power. Leofric’s name was often mentioned, but that Leofric should gain the throne was neither impossible, nor likely.

  If he does, he’ll have too much new business to think about vivisecting me. If he doesn’t—

  I needed another forty-eight hours. I don’t know enough!

  “Who?” she demanded, again.

  Violante’s voice, through the knife-thin crack, said, “Gelimer. Ash, Amir Gelimer is Caliph now.”

  IV

  In the room outside her cell a second row of Greek Fire lights flared into brilliance, marking the onset of black day. Their radiance shone through the stone grill over the door. Ash sat staring at the window embrasure and the lightless sky.

  “Faris,” a man’s voice said, over the noise of steel bolts sliding protestingly back into the wall sockets.

  “Leovigild?”

  The beardless slave stepped into her cell, leaving two armed guards outside. He carried a bundle in his arms.

  “Here!”

  A roll of cloth dumped and spilled on the pallet. Ash knelt up, hands rapidly sorting through the pile.

  A fine-textured linen shirt. Hose, still laced to a pourpoint; the colour invisible in this light. A great thick wool demi-gown with the sleeves sewn in, and silver buttons down the front. A belt, a purse – empty, her furiously scrabbling fingers determined – and no shoes, just a pair of soles with long leather cords affixed. Ash looked up, puzzled.

  “I show, wear.” Leovigild shook his head in frustration. The reflected light allowed her to see the relaxation of lines in his face. “Violante speak, not come.” The lithe man made a quick gesture, cradling his arms as if cuddling something against his cheek. “Wear, Faris.”

  Ash, kneeling on the pallet, looked up at him. What she held between her hands was the padded roll and hanging tail of a chaperon hat.

  The hydraulically powered horn sounded the hour across the city six times before her cell door opened again.

  Hunger gnawed in her gut, and finally quietened. It would return later, sharper, she knew. A small smile curled up one corner of her mouth, that she was unaware of; it was a smile of pure, delighted recognition. Hunger and isolation are tools she is familiar with.

  They mean she is still worth being persuaded.

  From the harbour below, sounds racketed up the stone walls and battlements: loud singing, shrill music of flutes, continuous shouting, and once a swift crash of blades. She could not wriggle up the window embrasure far enough to see downwards, but pressed up against the iron bars, staring into the dark, she witnessed bonfires on top of the next harbour headland, to the east, and tiny figures silhouetted against the flames, dancing in wild celebration. The smell of the sea came tinged with wood-smoke.

  The hose were tight, the doublet a shade big, but the feel of a fine linen shirt against her skin again made up for it all. She was whistling under her breath without knowing it as she laced Leovigild’s odd footwear up her shins, over her hose, with fingers blue with cold.

  “All I need is a sword.”

  She knotted the ties of the cloak around her neck, put on her hood, and tugged the shoulder-cape of the woollen hood down and under the steel collar around her neck, not caring if it was a visible mark of slavery so long as she had something to cushion it from the sores on her skin. She wore the hood pushed back and the hat pulled down on her head; gradually growing warm now, despite the howling chill and sleet at the granite window’s edge.

  She had used the pisspot an hour since, when she finally heard footsteps in the guardroom outside and was ready.

  “Nazir,” she greeted Theudibert, standing.

  His expression, between disapproval and fear of a reprimand if he questioned the reason for her new appearance with his superiors, might have made her smile, but his attack was not yet distant enough in her mind.

  “Move!” He jerked his thumb at the door.

  Ash nodded, not so much in acknowledgement of what he said, as to herself.

  I need to know who sent me these clothes. If it was Leofric, as a gift, it means one thing. If Violante or Leovigild stole them, it means another. If I ask, and it was theft, they’ll be killed. So I can’t ask.

  So, I don’t ask. It’s only one more thing that I don’t know. And I can handle that.

  One of the men said something to Theudibert, gesturing at her ankles. A suggestion to replace the manacles, Ash guessed. My hands, too?

  The nazir snarled something and struck the man.

  Orders not to? Or just, no orders?

  Tension tightened her gut, like the morning before battle. Ash hitched the heavy woollen cloak forward around her shoulders, tucking her bare hands into the cloth, and smiled at Gaiseric and Barbas as she strode out of the cell.

  The spiral stairs of House Leofric were packed with freeborn men in their finest dress. Theudibert’s squad moved her through with the minimum of fuss; up and out into the great courtyard, scarred with sleet, where bareheaded slaves slipped as they ran, bringing drink, banners, lutes, roasted fish, firecrackers, and bandoleers of folly-bells. She bit her lip, her sandalled heels skidding on the sleet-covered chequer-paved court; found herself huddled between armed men and hurried out through a long archway, out into a lightless street or alley.

  This is the way I was brought
in to House Leofric. Four days ago? Is it only four days?

  Gaiseric stopped dead in front of her.

  She cannoned into his back, and grunted. His mail hauberk was covered with a long surcoat, the notched-wheel livery of House Leofric, bright black on white. His sword-hilt was almost reachable. In the same second of realisation she heard a command from the nazir, and she felt her hands gripped, and a short length of cord tied around her wrists.

  Gaiseric moved forward a step.

  The torches, held high, showed nothing in front of them but the backs of other men.

  They began to inch slowly forward, with the crowd, on through the narrow blank streets of the Citadel.

  Ash found herself stumbling over discarded rubbish underfoot: burned-out torches, someone’s shoe, ribbons, a discarded wooden plate. Having her hands bound kept her off-balance, and her eyes down, trying to see in the wavering yellow light what she was about to trip over. The distant city clock hooted again twice while she sometimes walked, and more often stood still, crammed up against the bodies of Theudibert’s squad.

  None of the young men put their hands on her.

  Her gaze down, she could not see where they were heading until they were almost there. A fine cold wetness – not quite sleet – fell out of the black sky on to upturned faces. Here, there were enough torches, held by bareheaded slaves standing on a low wall, surrounding an open square, that she could see for about a bow-shot.

  Yellow light fell on the heads of the packed crowd, and on the walls of a building that stood, isolated, in what must be the Citadel’s centre. Its gilded, curved walls rose up into a great dome, high over Ash’s head. An even tighter cordon of armed men in the Caliph’s personal colours surrounded the front of the building: she could actually see bare pavement behind them.

  A disturbance eddied the heads of the crowd to her right. The nazir muttered something unenthusiastic.

  “Not here, nazir!” a sharp, deep voice said. Ash got sight of the ’arif Alderic shoving his way through the civilian crowd. “Round the back.”

  “Sir.”

  The squad fell in around Alderic. Ash took in the fact that the bearded Visigoth soldier sweated, despite the cold. She could not have eaten, now, her stomach knotted up like a horse with colic.

  “I hear you might be joining us as a captain,” ’Arif Alderic murmured, his eyes fixed forward.

  No hope of keeping anything secret in a household full of slaves. Or soldiers, Ash reflected. Is this truth, or only a rumour? Please, let it be true!

  “It’s what I do. Fight for who pays me.”

  “And you’ll be betraying your previous employer.”

  “I prefer to think of it as re-aligning my loyalties.”

  Alderic’s squad shoved their way through a crowd that did not perceptibly thin as they circumnavigated the wall of the massive building. Closer to the walls, Ash could see that arches punctuated it at intervals around; and through these, light spilled out, and the sound of boy-choirs singing; the inaugural festivities obviously still not completed, eight hours on in the day. The dome above her gleamed. The tiles that scaled its curves looked, very much, as if they were gilded; and Ash blinked, dazzled, both at the reflected torchlight from gold leaf and the realisation of wealth.

  The squad wheeled left. ’Arif Alderic went forward, speaking to a sergeant in a black surcoat. Ash craned her neck back, apparently gawping at the dome, and let her peripheral vision bring her an assessment of the chamberlains, musicians, squires and pages crowded around this entrance. All of them wore what she thought must be their winter clothes, for such winter as ever came to this warm twilight coast, shivering in thin woollen robes; the ones who had money distinguishable now by northern garments: Venetian gowns, or English wool doublets, or dagged hoods and linen coifs.

  A man’s fist thumped her hard between the shoulder-blades. She stumbled forward, out of the sleet, into the building and the shelter of the archway; almost losing her balance since she was not able to put out her tied hands to recover it. If she had been wearing skirts, she would have gone sprawling.

  “In, bitch,” Theudibert growled.

  “That’s ‘Captain Bitch’ to you.”

  Someone snickered. The nazir was not fast enough to see who. Ash pressed her lips together and kept a straight face. She walked between armed men, out from under the arch and into the hall. Hundreds of courtiers and warriors crowded the rim of the circular hall, under its archways.

  The central floor was bare, except for a cluster of people around a throne.

  Green vegetation strewed the tiles. Much trodden down, it was nonetheless still recognisable: green blades of corn.

  No, Ash corrected herself, dismissing the gilded stone above her head. This is wealth.

  She surveyed the green stems, laid so thick that the floor was hardly visible. Smears of green marked the mosaic tiles, where boots had skidded on the leaf-sheathed stalks and prickly green heads of corn. A sharp, sour fragrance pervaded the air. Unripe corn, brought in from Iberia, she guessed; and wasted, purely for ceremony, laid down as one lays down rushes, to keep the floor neat.

  “Madonna Ash,” a familiar voice said as she was hustled to one side. She found herself standing, bound, with Alderic’s troop of forty; and with them a straggle-haired young man.

  “Messire Valzacchi!”

  The Italian doctor removed his velvet bonnet and bowed, as well as he could in the close crowd. “How is your knee?”

  Ash flexed it absently. “Hurts with this cold.”

  “You should attempt to keep it warm. The head?”

  “Better, dottore.” Like, I’m going to say I still get dizzy, in front of men I might – sweet Christ, please – might be commanding, before long.

  “You could always untie me, ’Arif” she added to Alderic. “After all, where am I going to go?”

  The Visigoth commander gave her a short, amused glare, and turned back to his subordinates.

  “Worth a try…” Ash murmured.

  An oval white patch lay on the floor ahead of her, off-centre. Ash looked up. The great inner curve of the dome rose up over her head, ivory and gold mosaics picturing the saints in their splendour: Michael and Gawaine and Peredur and Constantine. The dark intricacy of the icons defeated her, she could not tell, in torchlight, whether it was bulls or boars depicted between the saints. But what she at first thought was a black circle seventy feet above her head was, in fact, an opening. At the apex of the dome, a stone-rimmed gap opened to the sky.

  Through the hole, as if it were night, Capricornus shone. A faint peppering of snow drifted down into the rotunda, diagonal on the air, sifting to the corn-strewn pavement beneath.

  The boy-choir began again. Ash deduced that the children must be somewhere on the far side. She could not see past the heads of the men around her. Tiered oak benches set between the arches held nobles and their households, their soldiers lining the aisles – a noble for each gap between arches, she guessed, running her eye across foreign heraldry.

  To her right, someone bore Leofric’s banner. Where polished and carved oaken pews rose up, she recognised some of the household, Leofric himself not visible.

  Before her, on a great octagonal plinth in the centre of the rotunda, stood the throne of the Visigoth Empire. A man sat there. At this distance she could not make out his face, but it must be the King-Caliph. Must be Gelimer.

  Annibale Valzacchi remarked, “You are privileged, madonna.”

  “I am?”

  “There are no other women present. I doubt there is a woman out of doors in all Carthage.” The young man snickered. “Since I am a doctor, I can at least vouch for your being female, if not a woman.”

  Despite choir and royal occasion, people were talking between themselves. Valzacchi’s voice came quiet under the buzz of three or four thousand voices, but with unmistakable malice. Ash gave him a swift glance, which took in his black wool gown, the cloth much faded, and the squirrel-fur trim at his hanging-sleeve sl
its matted and dirty.

  “No one pay your fees, dottore?”

  “I am not a hired killer,” Valzacchi emphasised bitterly. “Theodoric died, and so I go without my fee. You kill, therefore they are prepared to pay you. Tell me, madonna, where is Christian justice in that?”

  Prepared to pay you. Oh sweet Christ, Christ Viridianus, let it be true, not just a rumour – if I’ve convinced Leofric—

  “Let me even the balance of Justice’s scales. If I’m here to be bought, I’ll buy a doctor, too. You said you’d worked in a condottiere camp.” A tremor went through her body, so that she had to grip her hands together under her cloak, the cords chafing her wrists. Fortune is to be wooed, not commanded. “Of course, if I’m here to be executed, I’ll keep my mouth shut about you.”

  The doctor stuttered a laugh at this skinny, wide-shouldered woman in man’s dress; her shining silver hair cut too short even for a man, as short as a slave’s crop.

  “No,” he said. “I prefer to earn my gold healing, even if lately that gold has been copper. I will ask you a question, madonna, that I asked my brother Gianpaulo once in Milano. From the rise to the set of the sun, you put all your mind and all your body and all your soul into ways in which you can burn down houses, foul wells, slaughter cattle, rip unborn children out of their mother’s bellies, and slice off the legs and arms and heads of your fellow men, on the field. How is it that you sleep, at night?”

  “How is it that your brother sleeps?”

  “He used to drink himself senseless. Lately, he turned to the Lord God, and now says he sleeps in that mercy. But he has not changed his trade. He kills people for a living, madonna.”

  Something about the man’s face triggered, finally, recognition. “Shit! You’re Lamb’s brother! Agnes Dei. Aren’t you? I never knew his name was Valzacchi.”

  “You know him?”

  “I’ve known Lamb for years.” Oddly cheered, Ash smiled and shook her head.

  Annibale Valzacchi repeated, “How is it that you can sleep at night, after what you do? Do you drink?”

  “Most of the people I employ drink.” Ash met his gaze with her clear, cold dark eyes. “I don’t. I don’t need to, dottore. Doing this doesn’t bother me. It never has.”