by Mary Gentle
In the harbour, flame runs from ship to ship along the docks, carracks and cogs burning, a throng of men like black lice running frantically, a bucket-line forming to the warehouses, chaff and embers sprinkling red on the wind, drifting towards other roofs. Small boats are being frantically rowed across the black vitreous water, trying to take cargo off before vessels are burned – and a throng of merchants, clerks, sailors, tapsters and whores shrieks around the warehouses, leather buckets of water pissing on the conflagration, chains of men passing cargo out, fights starting, theft.
Ash heard screamed orders, shouting, and on one burst of wind, the sound of a man bellowing in such pain that it made her hurt in sympathy. This will be happening a thousand times across Carthage now: no one is thinking about one amir’s house, up on the Citadel.
“Shit.” She found herself grinning at the Earl of Oxford. “What an opportunity. Nicely done. There won’t be another chance like this.”
John de Vere gave her a shining, utterly reckless-smile. “I thought this worth the venture, though foolhardy or desperate even if it succeeded in destroying the machina rei militaris. Now, with the earth tremor, madam, yes, we may succeed and leave. Oftentimes I am blessed with such lucky accidents when I need them.”
“Wuff!” Ash felt breathless. “‘When I need them’—!”
“However,” de Vere continued, squinting down at the chaos of burning ships and men, “I had planned for us to leave by way of the aqueducts – which have not fallen, but they may not be safe after the earth tremors.”
“We won’t get out by way of the streets, even in this.” Ash’s scarred face shone in the nickering light of the flames below. “Even if they’re falling down, the aqueducts are a damn sight better than trying to fight our way out through Gelimer’s army – this confusion won’t last for ever.”
“Gelimer?”
“The newly elected Caliph.”
“Ah. That was his name.”
“You have been lucky,” Ash said. She spoke to Oxford over her shoulder as she crab-crawled behind the barricade, back across the wall. Two black-feathered shafts abruptly stood out from a pavise over her head. She ignored them as if they were a mere irritating nuisance. “Theodoric’s death, and the election! – all the amirs‘ troops are wiping their own masters’ bottoms right now, instead of thundering around the city. All there is down there is the militia, and they’re crap. Up here…”
Ash wiped her nose on the leather palm of her mail glove, wet skin freezing in the air.
“This city spends half its time with lords’ households at war with each other,” she said. “They’re used to shutting themselves up in these house-forts and waiting for the shit to go away. But Leofric’s men are going to come out real soon.”
“They need not do so, if we cannot take that gate!”
A shriek thirty feet away whipped her head around. On the roof of House Leofric, another mail-clad man in white robes threw up his arms and slumped over the wall, tumbling down into the alley. A raucous cheer went up from below. Carracci ran forward and dragged the twitching dead man behind the shields; Thomas Morgan scooped up the Visigoth’s bow.
“Leofric left troops guarding the place – or maybe he’s made it back from the palace. Either way, they’ve about worked out that we’re not Visigoths, we’re Franks, this isn’t another amir attacking them.”
A whistling sound split the air. Ash had no time to throw herself flat, only to wince – herself, Oxford, and the soldiers on the Citadel wall half-ducking in identical jerky movement - and something whooshed up from inside the walls of House Leofric, and a flare and flat concussion banged out fifty feet above their heads.
White light strobed collapsed buildings, blocked alleys, the mass of helmets below.
“Distress rockets! Calling their allies.” Ash shook her head. “Okay. Decision, my lord – we attack right now, or we withdraw.”
“No! No retreat!” The Earl of Oxford swore. “I will have this Stone Golem of the Faris’s, and I will leave it rubble like the rest of this thrice-damned city!”
“The Visigoths have other generals.”
“But none that they believe to be of such great power.” Oxford gave her a look which, despite battle-dirt and their situation, was all reflective irony. “I dare say they have better generals, madam – but none with a mystical war-machine at home, none that they believe invincible. We are in such straits, in Burgundy, we must stop her!”
Something about Burgundy tugged at her mind: she forcibly ignored it.
“My voice for the attack. Dickon?” The Earl glanced at his younger brother, who stuttered, “Yes, my lord, mine also.”
Ash loosened the strap of her helmet and lifted the edge, listening – hearing nothing but the racket and clamour of her own men. “They’re still my people. This is my company. The decision’s mine.” When we run, we’ll get mauled getting out, too. “You may be an English Earl, my lord, but I am their captain, who are they going to follow?”
John de Vere regarded her grimly. “In especial, after a miraculous reappearance? Better not to put it to the test, madam. Leadership cannot quarrel, not where we stand now!”
“Who’s quarrelling?” Ash grinned widely, breathing in the chill air that stank sweetly of black powder; putting aside her invaded soul, other voices, everything, for this now-or-never second. “There’ll never be another chance like this! Let’s do it!”
“Boss!” Geraint’s voice came from an anonymous head in an archer’s sallet, stuck up just above the level of the parapet. “They’re trying to get runners out, down the wall from their roof!”
“Get your bowmen back out there, pick them off!”
The helmet vanished. She has not fully taken it in, the reality of the presence of these men: Geraint, Angelotti, Carracci, Thomas Morgan, Thomas Rochester – and Floria! Christus! Floria…
Here. Here in Carthage. Shit.
She risked a glance over the edge, into the alley below. Floria and Richard Faversham knelt in a protective cordon of billmen, a thrashing yelling body between them – the crossbow-woman, Ludmilla Rostovnaya – rolling bloody on the cobbles; Floria’s surgeon’s box open, bandages welling red with blood.
“Don’t attack through that front gate,” Ash snapped. “It opens into a tunnel. A closed passage full of murder-holes!”
De Vere frowned. Still more of her men came piling past them now – mere minutes since she’d come up here – climbing down the scaling ladders, shifting iron barrels on wooden trenchers, casks, arquebuses, barrels of arrows and bolts. The Earl lowered the intensity of his tone so that his voice should not carry:
“I could purchase no information about the inside of these palaces.”
“But I know, my lord.” Ash’s face went momentarily bleak, remembering. “I talked a lot to slaves. The houses go down into living rock. There are six floors below street-level. I was in this House for—” She had to force herself to think. “Three, four days. There are shafts, murder-holes, and deep bolt-holes. It’s fucking impossible. I don’t wonder Carthage was never taken!”
“And the Golem?” De Vere’s sandblasted fair face, under his visor, lit up grimly. “Madam, do you know where this golem is kept?”
The realisation came to her with the sensation of machinery locking home: this man’s knowledge, and her own.
We’re going to do this. We’re going to succeed.
“Yes. I know exactly where the Stone Golem is. I talked to the slaves who clean it. It’s in the north-east quadrant of the House, and it’s six floors down.”
“God’s bollocks!”
An odd abstraction overcame her. She ignored the swish of a second distress rocket climbing the black sky, blasting a hollow sphere of light above her.
“How would I attack this place…? Not frontally, that’s for sure. We could scale their walls and climb down into the central courtyard – and then be caught in a crossfire from all directions, when they pot us from inside the building…”
> “Madam Ash!” John de Vere shook her by the shoulders. “No time for talk. We go or we stay, we run or we attack! There is no time. Or I shall lead this company in despite of you!”
Ash leaned out from the wall, one hand to the top of a ladder. “Carracci! Geraint! Thomas Morgan!”
“Yes, boss?” Red-faced under his helmet, Carracci bawled happily up at her.
“Clear this alley!”
“Yes, boss!”
“Angelotti!”
The master gunner ran through the crowding armed men to the foot of the wall, and shouted up: “What, madonna?”
This is the north-east side. Allow about twenty paces for the thickness of the city wall – then allow another twenty feet—
“Put powder casks up against the House wall, right down there.” She pointed. “Everything you’ve got in casks, and clear this area!”
“Yes, madonna!”
The powder will not be going off in a confined space, so it will have less force; but in an alley ten feet wide, even open to the stars, it will have such force between the buildings that it will rip masonry apart.
As Angelotti and his crews ran, Ash said, “I paced it out, my lord. My cell, the passage. I know where things are on the other side of that wall.”
Preparing to climb down the scaling ladder, John de Vere gave her a look that was equal parts admiration and appalled shock. “This, while you were prisoner, and doubtless ill-handled? Madam, you are an amazement to me!”
Ash ignored that. Her pain, her blood on the floor; these are somewhere she cannot feel or notice them now.
She pointed at the growing heap of powder casks. “We don’t mess about with storming gates, we go straight in through the wall – blow the side of the building in. That puts us in at ground-level in the north-east quadrant.”
The Earl of Oxford nodded sharply. “And we take the whole House?”
“Don’t need to. It’s built in four quadrants, around four stairwells, and they don’t connect. Take the top of one, and you’ve taken the whole – or bottled up anyone who’s in there. I need men on the ground floor, to hold this quadrant against the rest of the House. Then we have to fight our way down six floors to find the Stone Golem…”
She turned, swung herself down the ladder, awkward in ill-fitting armour but growing accustomed; down out of the icy night wind, sweating into her padded arming doublet, into the empty alley, John de Vere and Dickon beside her; the alley dim now almost all the lanterns and torches had been pulled back.
A tall, leggy man in a powder-scarred padded jack heaved a last barrel into place: Angelotti, his curls bright gold under the metal rim of his helmet. Approaching, catching what she said, he offered, “The casks are in place. I still have powder. We can toss grenades down the stairwell.”
“That ought to do it—” Ash broke off.
She stands in a bare alley, the stars of the southern sky above her head; sounds of crossbows being frantically winched towards the front of the House, but here nothing, nothing except John de Vere treading with great care, so as not to strike a spark from his metal sabatons on the cobbles. And an innocent heap of small oak casks, piled neatly against the wall of House Leofric.
“We haven’t got much time, boss.” Geraint ab Morgan joined them with a bare respectful nod to the Earl of Oxford, and Dickon de Vere. “They’re shooting from slot windows up front, picking my boys off.”
“Madonna, do you want me to stop the swivel guns attacking the gate?” Angelotti demanded, wiping his mouth with a black, sweating hand. His took a slow match from Thomas Morgan as the man walked briskly up. The fuse smouldered odorously. “Or keep them going until we blow the wall?”
Both men shouted, loudly, to be heard over the noise of the wall-guns, and sporadic arquebus fire; the harsh shouts of men used to bellowing at other men wearing helmets, half-deaf from the padding, and the clatter of armour.
They looked to her expectantly, for split-second orders.
Ash, appalled, found herself speechless.
She stared at the men in the alley, her voice dead in her throat.
III
Her silence stretched out.
“Are you hurt, madam?” John de Vere half-shouted. “Ill-treated by your captors? Unfit for this?”
“No—” Now it ceases to be theory: becomes concrete.
Doubt grew on Geraint ab Morgan’s face.
Angelotti, his smirched beauty plain in torch-light, said swiftly, “Madonna, when I was Childeric’s gunner, I had to kill Christians. But when I returned to Christendom, I found at first I had no heart for fighting Visigoths – they might have been men I knew.”
“Shit. Shit, yes.” Ash spread her hands towards the Italian gunner. “Angeli, I never – this is the first time I had to attack somewhere where I know the defenders…”
Where I’ve lived with them.
She added, with difficulty, “I have – blood kin, within House Leofric.”
“Kin?” Angelotti, startled out of his Byzantine calm.
“Okay, they’re slaves,” she said steadily. “They’re still related to me. And no one else is.”
Gazing around at the group, she saw Dickon de Vere merely puzzled, excited with the anticipation of battle; his older brother with a calm, concerned face; Geraint shifting from one foot to another and scratching under his hose; Angelotti taken aback.
Violante. Leovigild. Even Alderic, even the ’arif, even the bloody rats; I know these people – if they’re inside, if the earth tremor hasn’t killed them, if—
If they’re inside now, and I order this attack, they’re on my conscience.
“I never had family before,” she said.
“Area’s clear!” Carracci bawled from the far end of the alley. “I’ve cleared the men back three streets! Boss, come on back, and we’ll blow it!”
Men anxious to attack, now, before momentum and courage slacken.
Dickon de Vere said in a high-pitched voice to his brother, “Do it, before someone on the roof sees this! If someone drops a torch on those casks, we’re dead!”
Pull back from this wall, reinforce the perimeter, let no one approach this end of the headland, blow open the House—
It is no voice in her head, but she feels her own thoughts almost as automatic, as pragmatic, with the same absence of human feeling.
She thought, It’s only my trade, it’s only what I do, it isn’t me.
“When I give the signal!” Ash shouted to Angelotti, where he stood swinging the slow match and waiting her word to touch it to the fuse.
She turned, loping urgently back with the English Earl, Geraint and Dickon de Vere. The mass of men in the back streets had grown large. She watched their bobbing heads: faces under visors, hands gripping swords, axes, crossbows.
“Listen up!” she yelled in growing desperation to their upturned faces, raw with readiness, shitting themselves to be at it, in the overwhelming excitement and terror of actual fighting. “Listen—”
It is too little, too late.
“—We’re going in. My orders are, don’t hurt the house slaves. Spare the slaves! They have fair hair, and iron collars. Only kill the fighting men. Spare the commons!”
It is an old cry, from the English wars; John de Vere nods brief approval. Possible in battle. Sometimes. Men being what they are, on the verge of killing other men, they will listen to her to get them through this fight, but as for other orders…
And powder will not listen: not when you plan to use casks to blow the walls to smithereens and anyone inside to bloody rags of meat.
I can’t claim to be trapped in this, Ash thought. Even if it does feel like being caught up in a mill-wheel: grind or be ground. It’s still my decision.
“Angelotti, blow this place wide open!”
Carracci, further forward, relayed her shout. In seconds, he and Antonio Angelotti came pounding back down the alley, armoured elbows tucked into their ribs, running at the sprint. She spun around, following them; the cobbles h
ard under her boots, around one corner, around the next, plunging into the middle of a group of men: Euen Huw and his lance, all their faces wild with excitement, the unbearably prolonged moment before battle.
BOOM!
She did not hear the explosion so much as feel it, instantly deaf with the unbelievable roar of sixty casks of powder going up. The street jumped under her feet; a swirl of movement ahead is a building sliding into a slow collapse, black powder ending what the quake began; dust filled her face and she coughed, choked, Angelotti’s slender hand thumping her shoulders; a tongue of fire leaping up like lightning in reverse, to strike the heavens, somewhere somebody shrieking in utter agony; John de Vere’s mouth opening and shutting soundlessly.
Not hearing any word he said, she swung around, faced the mass of men, and shrieked, “Come on, you bastards!”
She cannot hear herself yell, lifts her arm, lifts the sword, points forward; and is running, all of them running with her and her banner, her head ringing, eardrums pierced with a thin wire of pain; running through great clouds of dust, stone chips, mortar-dust, flakes of granite embedded in the cobbles; running to where the side of House Leofric stands.
There is nothing.
A great cloud of dust hurtles around her head. She screams, “Lanterns! Torches!”, not knowing if she will be heard.
Light comes: partly from armed men with torches, partly from a roaring fire-rimmed cavern ahead. Men stream past her, she swats at their shoulders, urging them on and through, down the alleys; Geraint and Angelotti with her, shouting their own commands; Oxford and his brother at the head of the billmen; all faces contorted, all mouths open and yelling, but for her in the silence of the deaf.
The dust began to clear.
Ash, at the head of them by the time they reached the side alley, jerked up her hand for them to halt. Bodies crowded in back of her, shoving her forward.
To left and right, the side of the houses were gone. As if something had reached down and bitten a great hole in the walls. Most of the road surface was gone, a great deep pit where the barrels had stood.
