by Mary Gentle
I’m still in the Citadel: where—?
The wind changed direction. She rose, straining her ears.
A confused noise of shouting and screams came to her. Rumbling cartwheels. Metal striking metal. A fight, a chaos; but nothing to tell her where, within the Citadel or outside the walls in Carthage itself – the wind blew at her back again, and she lost the sounds.
But I’m out!
Ash drew a deep breath, choked at her own stench, and looked around herself. Bare stone walls confronted her, either side of the narrow street. They went up high enough that she had no chance of seeing a landmark, no guess at which way might be the dome, which way the walls. She sniffed. The smell of the harbour, yes, but something else…
Smoke.
A smell of burning drifted across the narrow street. Ash looked up and down: cross-streets at either end. The subsidence to her left should be avoided. She moved off to the right.
A pang went through her, of sorrow and revulsion. Something lay ahead on the cobbles, at the edge of the pool of light cast by the remaining lamp.
A man’s body, slumped – with the same stillness that Godfrey has, dead.
She put grief out of her mind quite deliberately. “It’ll keep.”
She strode up the alley, moving quickly to keep warm. Her sandals left smears of filth on the cobbles. She went towards the prone body that lay up against the featureless wall. Rob it of money if a civilian; or weapons, if a soldier—
The light was not good. The Greek Fire above her dimmed in its glass bowl. Ash knelt, reaching out to roll the prone body over on to its back. In quick succession she noted, as her hands hauled at his cold dead weight, that it was a man, wearing hose, and livery tabard, and steel sallet; his belt already gone, his sword looted, his dagger missing—
“Sweet Christ,”
Ash slid down into a sitting position, her knees given way. She leaned forward and threw the dead man’s arms back, exposing his chest. All his throat and shoulders were a mass of coagulated blood. A bright livery tabard was tied on over his mail shirt, ties knotted at his waist, and some dark device on the cloth—
She unbuckled the strap of the man’s sallet, hauling it off his head, her hands coming away bloody from the crossbow bolt that stood up out of his throat. A sallet, with a visor, and an articulated tail: not a Visigoth helmet. Made in Augsburg, in the Germanies – home!
Ash jammed the padded helmet on her head, buckled the strap, reached for the man’s ankles, and dragged him bodily over the cobbles, under the dimming light.
He sprawled with his arms above his head, his head turned to one side. A young man, fifteen or sixteen, with light hair and the beginnings of a beard; she has seen him somewhere, knows him, knows the dead face if not his name—
Under the light, she stares down at his livery, clearly visible now.
A gold livery tabard.
On the breast, in blue, a lion.
The livery of the Lion Azure. Her company livery.
II
Ash unknotted the ties with wet, frozen fingers, and hauled the livery tabard off the boy’s body. The neck of the garment was made wide enough to accommodate a helmet: she threw it on over her head. Tying its cords at her waist, she stared down at him. “Michael? Matthew?”
He had stopped bleeding. His body did not feel rigid. Cold in this outdoor city, but not stiff. No rigor, yet.
She smoothed the dyed linen cloth down over her unprotected belly. No way to get a mail shirt off a casualty alone, mail is hard enough to get off when you’re living: the linked metal sucks on to the body. She tugged the mail mittens from his hands – too large, but she can live with that – and the boots from his feet.
Stripped, he seemed pathetic; with the long bones and fat face of young manhood. She hauled his boots on.
“Mark. Mark Tydder,” she said aloud. She reached across, drawing a cross on his cold brow. “You’re – you were one of Euen’s lance, weren’t you?”
You’re not here on your own.
How many more people are going to die because somebody brought me to Carthage?
Ash stood up and stared around her at the cold dark street. I can’t waste time wondering if there’s one, are there more; who’s alive, who’s dead? I just have to find them and get on with it.
She bent and kissed the soiled, dead body of Mark Tydder on the forehead, and folded his arms across his chest.
“I’ll send someone back for you if I can.”
The Greek Fire above her guttered and gave out. She waited a moment as her eyes adjusted to the dark. The shapes of windowless walls rose above her, and, in the gap between roofs, unrecognisable constellations of stars in the icy, windy sky – an hour or less before sunset her mind automatically calculated.
She moved off down the alley. Here, no damage could be seen from the quake. At the first cross-street, she turned left; and at the next, right.
Buildings spilled rubble across the road. She slowed, picking her way. Above her head, splintered beams jutted out. The further down the alley she went, the more she was picking her way over high piles of dressed stone, fractured mosaics, broken furniture – a dead horse—
No dead people. No wounded. Someone has been through this area after the quake – or it was deserted, everyone up at the palace?
Climbing over a fallen pillar, boots skidding on frost-slick stone, she came to what had been another road junction. Buildings on the far side still stood. Immense cracks, taller than she was, spiderwebbed their walls. She halted, lifting up her helmet and listening intently.
There was a deafening boom! A sound loud enough to burst her eardrums blasted the air. Rubble shifted and slid.
“Shit!” Ash grinned, ferociously, her head ringing. She swung around to her left. With no hesitation, she scrambled down and trotted as fast as she could in the dark, in the direction of the noise. “That’s guns!”
A swivel gun or a hook gun. Light cannon? She skidded across split cobbles, scrambling down the dark narrow street. Not Goths! That’s us!
Clouds slid over the sky. The faint starlight dimmed to nothing, leaving her between windowless houses cracked from foundations to roof. She saw little rubble here. Heedless, in almost complete blackness, she loped on down the alley, arms stretched out in front of her to hit obstacles first.
Boom!
“Got you.” Ash halted. The slick soles of the boots let her feel the contours of the cobblestones under her feet: the ground sloping slightly down now. She stared into the absolute darkness. Air blew into her face. An open square? An area where the quake has demolished every house? Trailing leaves brushed her face – she flinched – some kind of creeper?
Lanterns.
The yellow light might have been just flecks in her vision, but a sharp angle cut across it: a wall. She made out that she was standing off-set from an alley leading out of this square, the buildings on the left-hand side of it collapsed in on themselves, but on the right-hand side, still standing. Towards the far end of the alley, someone was holding a lantern.
The dry, acrid, infinitely familiar smell of powder hit her nostrils.
Ash did not know that her teeth were bared, grinning fiercely into the dark. One hand closed, by itself, seeking the hilt of a sword which did not hang from her belt.
She filled her lungs with the cold, gunpowder-air:
“Hey! ASSHOLES! DON’T SHOOT!”
The lantern jerked. An explosive spang! blew fragments of clay facing down on her head. A crossbow bolt: shot high and wide, hitting the right-hand wall somewhere above her.
“I SAID DON’T FUCKING SHOOT ME YOU ASSHOLES!”
A cautious voice called, “Mark? That you?”
A second voice cut in: “That’s not Tydder. Who goes there?”
“Who do you fucking think?” Ash bawled, still in the Franco-Flemish dialect that was the common patois of the camp.
A silent pause – which brought Ash’s heart up into her mouth, dried out her chest with breathlessnes
s, fear, hope – and then the second voice, rather small, and distinctively Welsh, called uncertainly, “…Boss?”
“Euen?”
“Boss!”
“I’m coming in! Don’t be so fucking trigger-happy!”
She trotted up the alley towards the light. Six or seven men with weapons filled the width of it: men in European-style steel helmets, and with razor-edged bills, and swords, and two with crossbows, one frantically winching as if to prove he had not fired his bolt.
“Negligent discharge,” Ash grinned in passing, and then: “Euen!” She reached out, grabbing the small dark man’s hands and wringing them. “Thomas – Michel – Bartolemey—”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Euen Huw said reverently.
“Boss!” Euen’s red-haired 2IC, Thomas Morgan, crossed himself, with the hand that did not hold a spanned crossbow.
“Shit, man!” The others – tall, broad-shouldered men with hard, hunger-marked faces – began to grin at her and make comments among themselves. They were standing among neatly piled heaps of wine-casks, velvet gowns, and heavy jute sacks, Ash noted; their shining faces turning to her, plain wonder on their expressions. “Would you ever fucking believe it!”
“It’s me,” Ash said, turning back to the wiry, dark Welshman.
Euen Huw was not a particularly prepossessing sight: his jack was faded, salt-stained under the intermittent light from the pierced iron lantern; and an old blackened bandage was wrapped around his left hand and wrist. His other hand grasped the hilt of a riding sword, a ridiculous forty inches of razor-sharpened steel.
“Christ, I might have known it, boss,” Euen said. “Straight out of the middle of a fucking earthquake, you come. Right. What do we do now?”
“Why are you asking me?” Ash inquired wryly, surveying their dirty larcenous faces. “Ah, that’s right – I’m the boss! I knew there was some reason.”
“Where you been, boss?” Michel, the other crossbowman, asked.
“In a Visigoth nick. But.” Ash grinned. “Here I am. Okay, this ain’t a fucking social banquet. Tell me. Who’s here, why are we here, and what the fuck is going on?”
Boom!
That gun was close enough that the ground twanged under her feet. Ash fingered her ear with a pained expression, watching them watch her do it, seeing them grin; judging how much strain was also in their expressions, how most of them were losing the momentary amazement of her presence, falling back into the old habit of being commanded by her: this is Ash, she’ll tell us what to do, get us through this. In the adrenalin-rush of combat, they are not even surprised: impossible things happen all the time in battle.
In the middle of the heart-city of the Visigoth Empire, surrounded by enemy people and enemy troops—
“What dumb fuck brought you guys here?”
The crossbowman, Michel, shoved a suspicious sack aside with his boot. “Mad Jack Oxford, boss.”
“Oh my God. Who’s with the guns?”
“Master Captain Angelotti,” Euen Huw answered. “He’s up there trying to bust into this shit-rich lord-amir‘s house – ’course, his house couldn’t fall down like the rest of them, could it? No chance!”
“Which lord-amir – no, tell me later. What are you motherfuckers doing out here?”
“We’re a picket, boss, wouldn’t you know it? Waiting for all them little rag-heads to turn up and try to mince us into the ground.”
His sardonic sarcasm got answering grins from his lance. Ash let herself chuckle.
“I’m just sorry for the Goths! Okay, stick to it. And watch it! You’re in the middle of an overturned hive here.”
“Don’t we know it!” Euen Huw grinned.
“Mark Tydder’s body’s down one of those alleys, you – Michel – go scout it; then you and another man bring him back, if the road’s clear. We don’t leave our own—”
A sudden image bit into her mind. Godfrey, his green robe black with water and filth, and the white splinters of bone above his tanned brow. Her eyes stung.
“—if we can help it. If any troops show up, report to me fucking fast. I’ll be with HQ.”
Euen Huw said cheerfully, “Boss, you are HQ.”
“Not until I know what the hell Oxford thinks he’s doing! You.” She indicated the redheaded lance-second, Thomas Morgan. “Lead me to Oxford and Angelotti. And you guys here, close that fucking lantern up! I could see you a mile off! None of you have got the brains of a field mouse, but that’s no reason you shouldn’t make it home – just follow my orders! Okay, let’s go! Move it!”
As she moved off, Thomas Morgan’s tall broad back blocking the hastily closed lantern, she heard a man mutter, “Shit, lil’ scarface is back…”
“Too fucking right,” Ash growled.
They’re alive!
With the lantern gone and the cloud-cover thick, it was impossible to see anything but blackness, but there were voices ahead of her now, and the shouts of men sponging gun-breeches and loading them: she tucked her mittened fingers under the back of Thomas Morgan’s belt and followed his uncertain progress as he tapped his way down the cobbles with the shaft of his bill, the wood knocking against spilled masonry and rubble.
A coldness crept into her belly. Her mind put nightmare pictures on the darkness in front of her: these men, men that she knows, trapped in these streets, trapped inside the middle of a walled city – a walled city within a walled city – and all of Carthage outside, the amirs, their household troops, the King-Caliph’s army, the merchants and the workers and the slaves, each an enemy—
What fucking dangerous lunatic brought them here? Ash wondered bleakly, furiously. How do I get them out of here?
And do what we have to do, first?
Thomas Morgan stumbled, muttered something obscene, clattered his bill-shaft against a splintered masonry block, and stepped to the right. She kept her footing and followed.
How many of my guys are here now? What the fuck is Oxford thinking of? Just because we’re mercenaries doesn’t mean you can stick us out as a forlorn hope and leave us to die – well, maybe he thinks it does – I thought better of him—
The quality of the air changed.
Glancing up, Ash saw how the clouds, shredding, opened on bright stars: the constellations of the Eternal Twilight. Quickly she lowered her gaze. Her night vision took enough from the starlight to let her see where she stepped, drop her hand from Thomas Morgan’s belt, and focus on the corner of the blank-walled house in front of her.
Way down on her right, ahead, the building’s massive iron-banded main gates hung splintered and blasted – cannon-fire, not quake damage. Gun-crews crowded the corner here, behind a cluster of pavises.1 Two swivel guns2 had their supporting spikes jammed down into the dirt where the quake had split the cobblestones. Men, swearing bitterly and shouting; were trying to shoot fifty yards cross-wise down the alley and blast the gates open – no room to get cannon up close, opposite the House gate, not in an alley no more than ten feet wide.
More men came running in, pavises going up, looted wooden doors piled as makeshift defences. A silent flight of bolts impacted ten yards from her feet, blasting up splinters of stone. Antonio Angelotti’s voice – Angeli! Ash grinned, delighted at the recognition, his presence – screamed a beautiful obscenity. On the House roof, men briefly moved: shooting down: Visigoths, Visigoth House guards, this house—
Ash felt a sudden stab of memory. Genuine? Illusory? I think we’ve come north, I’ve come all the way back from the King-Caliph’s palace, this is how I was brought into Leofric’s house – this is House Leofric—!
Realisation hit her.
Oh shit. I know why Oxford’s here.
He’s doing what I said I was going to do.
He’s here for the Stone Golem.
Thomas Morgan bellowed, “Here they are, boss,” in a tone that suddenly held doubt.
Ash trotted past him, into the alley that dead-ended on her right, lit with lanterns and torches; all filled up with men
and their shouting, men running, two more swivel guns commanding the alley directly in front of House Leofric, having their breeches frantically sponged and shot rammed home. A tall, fair-haired man in Italian doublet and demi-gown crouched by the gun-crews, shouting – Angelotti – and a dozen other familiar faces: the deacon Richard Faversham, a skinny blond man with his hands wrist-deep in a sack of bandages, behind a big pavise and two billmen – Florian de Lacey, Floria del Guiz – and beyond her a massive cluster of men in breastplates and leg-harness, with maces and arquebuses, and Lion livery – and a young corn-haired knight in half-armour, Dickon de Vere; and John de Vere himself taking off his sallet to wipe his forehead—
She has a split-second to study them while they, busy in ordered chaos, ignore her arrival. It puts a curdle of panic into her bowels: to be facing men, soldiers, who ignore her as if she isn’t there – this is the commander’s dread of authority (that spider-thread) disappearing like mist. Who is she, that anyone should do what she says?
The person who persuaded them off their farms and into this business. Into many wet mornings on grassy blood-soaked hills, many nights in burning towns sprawling with mutilated bodies. The person whom they will think can get them through this alive.
Two or three nearer heads turned, Thomas Morgan’s visible presence penetrating their attention. One of the gunners put down his worm, staring; another man dropped the breech of the second gun. Three Flemish billmen stopped talking and gaped.
Antonio Angelotti said a foul word in utterly musical Italian.
Floria slowly stood up, her face in the flaring light broken with hope, with amazement, with a sudden wrenching fear.
“Get down in cover!” Ash bawled at her.
Ash nevertheless remained in the open. She reached up and unbuckled the strap of Mark Tydder’s sallet, easing it off her vulnerable head. Her cropped silver hair stood up in spikes, sweaty despite the freezing air. Even with the risk of some bastard getting me with a composite bow, they have to see me.
“Fuck,” someone said, awe-struck.
Ash tucked the sallet under her arm. The metal was freezing, even through the leather palms of her mittens. Lantern light fell on the livery tabard that she wore, black and stiff with dried blood at the throat, the Lion Azure plain across her chest. Her hands, muffled in too-large mail mittens, and her feet in too-large boots, gave her the appearance of a child in adult clothing. A tall skinny child with three scars standing out dark against the skin of her frozen white cheeks.
