by Mary Gentle
Geraint straightened his shoulders. “Don’t like it, boss,” he repeated. He looked down at her hands. “Nor do the lads. We don’t know what this war’s for, any more.”
Floria, her face in shadow, said vitriolically: “Loot, pay, rapine, drunkenness and fornication, Master Morgan?”
“We’re still out here to beat any other company in the field,” Euen Huw said as if it were self-evident.
“Master Anselm and the others!” Rickard croaked.
An edge of tension informed all their voices. Ash let go of Geraint Morgan’s arms, giving him a friendly slap. She looked around at the others, unconsciously bracing herself before she spoke again.
“No. He’s right. Geraint’s right. We don’t know what this war is for.” She paused for a moment. “And the Visigoths don’t know what this war’s for. That’s the key. They think it’s a crusade against Christendom. But it’s far more than that.”
Slowly, she stripped off her armoured sheepskin mittens, rubbing her frozen fingers together.
“I know the Wild Machines have fed ideas to Leofric, and through him to the King-Caliph. They speak through the Stone Golem. The Visigoth armies are here because the Wild Machines sent them here. Not to Constantinople, or anywhere in the east – here, so they could get Burgundy overrun and destroyed.”
From the back of the tent, Richard Faversham said in English, “Why Burgundy?”
“Yeah: why Burgundy?” Ash repeated in camp patois. “I don’t know, Richard. In fact, I don’t know why they’ve brought an army here at all.”
Geraint ab Morgan spluttered an amazed laugh. Unselfconsciously falling back into his rank, he blurted, “Boss, you’re mad! How else would they fight Duke Charles?”
Ash looked past him. “Richard. We need more light in this tent.”
The apparent non sequitur silenced them all. She had a moment to watch as the English priest lumbered up off his stool and knelt down, Thomas Rochester shifting out of the way; Floria turning to look at Ash in amazement; Wat Rodway stuffing his whetstone back in his purse, and his skinning knife into its sheath.
“In nomine Christi Viridiani…”9
Richard Faversham’s surprising high tenor silenced them.
“…Christi Luciferi,10 Iesu Christi Viridiani…”
The prayer went on; their voices joined in. Ash watched them, with their lowered heads and clasped hands, even Rickard at the tent-flap turning and kneeling down in the cold mud.
“God will grant this, to you,” Faversham announced, “in your need.”
A low, yellow light, like the light of a candle, shone from the air.
A shiver went up from her belly. Ash shut her eyes, involuntarily. A faint warmth touched her scarred cheeks. She opened her eyes again, seeing their faces clearly now in the calm light: Euen Huw, Thomas Rochester, Wat Rodway, Henri Brant, Floria del Guiz – and, slipping in, Antonio Angelotti; his wet, mud-draggled hair and face taking on a smirched, unearthly beauty.
“Blessed be.” The gunner touched his doublet, above his heart. “What is here?”
“Light in darkness. God forgive me,” Ash said, resting her hand on Richard Faversham’s shoulder. She raised her head, gazing around now at parchment-coloured canvas, at swords and a few last herbs hanging from the roof-wheel. Shadows leaped; shrank. “I had no need of it, except to show it could be done. Richard, I’m sorry for using you.”
The honey light clung about her. Sparkles of white light flickered at the edges of her vision. Richard Faversham kissed the Briar Cross he held and stood up, heavily, his hose black with leaf-mould.
He murmured, “Man calls on God eternally, Captain Ash, and for greater than this; yet all seems, to Him, as small as a candle-flame. And in any case, small miracles are what I’m with the company for.”
Ash knelt, briefly. “Bless me.”
“Ego te absolvo,” the priest recited.
Ash got to her feet.
“Geraint, you asked me a question. You said, how else would the Visigoths fight Duke Charles? This is how.”
The provost-captain shook his cropped head. “Don’t get it, boss.”
The luminous air shifted, granular.
“With miracles,” Ash said, gazing around. “Not like this one. Not from God. With evil; with devil’s miracles. I know this from the Wild Machines – they bred the Paris from Gundobad’s line. They bred her from the Wonder-Worker’s blood, to be another saint, another Prophet, another Gundobad. But not for Christ. They’ve bred her so she can be their power on earth and to perform their miracles. On their compulsion – and they can compel.”
In the miraculous light, Richard Faversham licked his dry lips. “God wouldn’t permit it.”
“God may not have. But we don’t know that.” Ash paused. “What we do know is, the Faris isn’t the King-Caliph’s design, nor Amir Leofric’s. The Faris belongs to the Wild Machines. They bred her to make a devil’s miracle and wipe Burgundy off the face of the earth. So – why has she come with an army?”
There was a momentary silence.
Richard Faversham suggested, “Her power for miracles may be small; every day. No more than a priest or deacon. If that is so, then of course she must bring an army.”
Floria frowned at the priest. “Or … not come into her power yet?”
“Or their breeding may have failed.” Antonio Angelotti stood, not looking at Ash, smiling gently in the luminous air. “Perhaps God is good, and she can do no evil miracles? You can’t.”
Ash looked ruefully back at the English priest. “No. I can’t even do tiny miracles. Richard will tell you how many nights on this trek I’ve spent praying with him! I’ll never make a priest. All I can do is hear the Stone Golem. And the Wild Machines. She could be more than I am. And yet, here she is, fighting her way in…”
Antonio Angelotti shook his head. “If I hadn’t known you so long, madonna, and if I hadn’t seen what we saw in the desert, I’d think you were crazy or drunk or possessed!” His bright eyes flicked up to meet her gaze. “As it is, I must believe you. Clearly, you heard them. But if the Faris knows nothing of their existence, and if the Wild Machines only speak to her in the disguise of the Stone Golem’s voice, she may not know yet what we know.”
Richard Faversham demanded, “And when she does know, will she make a desolation here for them?”
Angelotti shrugged. “The Visigoth armies have already made a desolation. Nothing stands where Milano stood, not a wall, not a roof. Venice is burnt. A generation of young men are dead in the Swiss Cantons… Madonna, I trust you, but tell us this at least – why Burgundy?”
There were murmurs of agreement; faces turned towards her.
“Oh, I’d tell you – if I knew. I asked the Wild Machines questions, and got my soul nearly blasted out of my body. I don’t know, and I can’t think why.” Ash wiped her nose on her sleeve again, conscious of the stink of mildew in this pavilion, too. “Florian, you’re Burgundian-born. Why these lands? Why not France, or the Germanies? Why this Duke, and why Burgundy?”
The woman surgeon shook her head. “We’ve been on the road well over two months. Every night I’ve thought about it. I don’t know. I don’t know why these ‘Wild Machines’ care about anything human, never mind the Burgundians.” Sardonic, Florian added, “Don’t try asking them! Not now.”
“No,” Ash said, something naked about her expression. The miraculous light dimmed a little, the air turning thin and dark again. Ash glanced at Richard Faversham. An expression of pain, or the concentration of prayer, passed across his face.
Even our miracles are becoming weaker.
She turned her gaze back to Geraint, Euen, Thomas Rochester, Angelotti. The tent was full of the smell of sodden wool and male sweat.
“All we know for sure,” she said, “is that there’s a war behind the war. If I’ve got you guys involved because of what I am, then that’s regrettable – but remember that we would have been in this war anyway. It’s what we do.” She hesitated. “And if t
heir Faris hasn’t done a devil’s miracle yet, we can hope that she won’t do any in the future. Then it’s down to steel and guns. And that’s what we do.”
Reservations were plain on their faces, but no more so than during any campaign. Not even Geraint Morgan, she noted.
“Boss?” the provost-captain asked diffidently, as her gaze fell on him.
“What is it, Geraint?”
“If she does conquer Burgundy, if she does kill their old Duke for them, whether it’s by a war or a miracle – what happens then, boss?”
Ash suddenly laughed. “You know – your guess is as good as mine!”
“What do you care, Morgan?” Euen Huw demanded, roughly good-humoured. “By the time that happens you’ll be back in Bristol, with all the money you can spend, and clap enough to keep the doctors rich for years!”
Wat Rodway, who had said nothing yet, regarded the fading miraculous light in the tent with jaundiced reverence. “Boss, can I go back and fix food to break our fast? Look – either she can bring some demonic retribution down on us, or she can’t. Either way, I’m about to cook the last pottage we’re going to see before we attack Dijon. You want it or don’t you?”
“‘You want it or don’t you, boss,’” Ash said.
“Oh, I’m not bothered with this. I’m off. Meal in an hour. Tell the lads.” Rodway strode out of the tent, with a word to the guards in the same abrupt and entirely offensive tone.
Ash shook her head. “You know, if that man couldn’t cook, I’d stick him in the pillory.”
“He can’t cook,” Floria snapped.
“No, that’s right. Hmm.” Ash, with a smile still stretching her cheeks, felt a cold wind blow through the open tent-flap, bringing the smell of unwashed men, excrement, wet trees, wood-smoke and horse-dung.
Nearly Prime, and the air has started to move—
“Angelotti, Thomas, Euen, Geraint; the rest of you; come outside.” She stepped forward, grabbing for the tent-flap. “Florian—”
Geraint ab Morgan leaned over, blocking her way.
“The men won’t like it,” he repeated, stubbornly. “They don’t want to attack the town.”
“Come outside,” Ash repeated, cheerfully and with an edge of authority. “I’m going to show you another reason why we’re here.”
Loud squawks and croaks from ravens echoed across the clearing as she stepped outside, past Geraint. She saw the black birds dropping down to the middens by the cook-wagons, strutting unfed, complaining raucously – and realised that she could see them clearly between the spaced beeches, twenty yards away.
Ash turned her face up to the sky.
The air moved across her skin.
“Look!” She pointed.
Deep in the trees, the first half-hour of it must have passed without notice. Now – men and women getting up off their knees in the mud, where they had been hearing Digorie Paston’s service of Prime – now all the leafless twigs and bare branches on the eastern horizon of the clearing stood out against the sky.
Ash barely looked at the moon, bone-white and sinking to the west. She felt a tightness in her chest, became aware that she was holding her breath; heard a muttering from the people thronging out into the empty space between the camp’s perimeter ditches.
The eastern sky turned slowly, slowly from grey to white to the palest eggshell blue.
The minutes passing could have been no time, or all time; Ash felt that she simultaneously endured an eternity, waiting; and at the same time, that it happened all in an instant – that one minute the clearing in the wood was dark, and the next, a line of bright yellow light lay across the trunks of the western trees, and a sliver of imperishable gold rose up over the eastern mist.
“Oh, Jesu!” Euen Huw plonked down on his knees in the mud.
“God be thanked!” Richard Faversham’s deep voice shouted out.
Ash, for once not hearing the shouts, or seeing people running – Geraint ab Morgan and Thomas Rochester grabbing each other in wild hugs, tears streaming down their cheeks for this continuing miracle – Ash stood watching as, for only the fourth morning since the twenty-first day of August, she saw the sun rise up in the eastern sky.
The end of three months of darkness.
A shoulder brushed hers. Dazed, she looked to see Floria beside her.
“You’re still not thinking this is our business,” Florian said quietly. “Just something for us to avoid.”
Ash almost reached out and thumped the woman’s shoulder, as she would have done an hour ago. She stopped herself from making physical contact.
“‘Our business’?” She stared around her at the men, kneeling. “I’ll tell you what ‘our business’ is, right now! We can’t stay camped here – I give it twenty-four hours maximum before we’ve got Visigoth scouts up our ass. We can’t eat here – and they got supply lines bringing in all the food they want. We’re outnumbered, what, thirty to one?”
She found herself grinning at Florian, but there was more blind exhilaration than humour in it.
“And then there’s this. It’s still happening! Light!”
“They won’t retreat now,” the surgeon said. “You realise that?”
Ash’s fist clenched. “You’re right. I won’t be able to lead them back Under the Penitence. I know that. We can’t go back. And we can’t stay here. We have to move forward.”
Floria del Guiz, for the first time since Ash had known her, and quite unconsciously, reached up with dirty fingers and crossed herself. “You told me on the beach. The ‘Penitence’ is nothing to do with the Visigoths. You told me the Wild Machines put out the sun over Christendom this summer. That they’ve made two hundred years of the Eternal Twilight, over Carthage, by drawing down the sun.”
Cold air moved against Ash’s face. A sudden cold tear ran down her scarred cheek at the brightness.
“Burgundy, again,” Florian said. “In the summer the Wild Machines made a darkness that stretches across Italy, the Cantons, the Germanies; now France … and when we cross the border, here, we’re out of it. Out of the Eternal Twilight, again. Into this.”
Ash looked down. The line of sunlight bisected her body, illuminated the dirt-ingrained skin of her hands, bringing out every whorl in her fingertips. Wet velvet sleeves began to steam under the infinitesimal warmth.
Florian’s voice said, “Before this year, the Twilight was only over Carthage. It spread. But not here. Have you thought? Maybe that’s why the Faris is here with an army. We may be beyond where the Wild Machines can reach.”
“Even if we are, that might not last.”
Ash looked up at the sky. Automatically, still, this being Florian, she added aloud what was in her mind:
“Remember ‘Burgundy must be destroyed’? This is their main target area. Florian, I had no choice about bringing us back here – but now we’re standing right on ground zero.”
III
Lowering her face from the faint but perceptible warmth of the risen sun, Ash wiped her muddy palm across her scarred cheeks.
Beside her, the woman took her gaze from the eastern sky and shivered in the cold morning.
“Girl, I wouldn’t want your job right now!” Florian briskly blew on her bare fingers, looking around at the camp. “We can’t go back. Can we go forward? What are you going to tell them?”
“That?” Ash, for the first time in weeks, gave a genuinely relaxed smile. “Oh, that’s not the difficult part. Okay: here we go…”
Ash walked on, out into the middle of the clearing, clapping her hands.
Five hundred people stopped talking fast enough, gathering around once they saw it was her: men in mail, and rusted plate, or padded jacks, standing, or squatting on the mud where it was too filthy to sit down. Some few diced in the wet. Rather more were drinking small ale. She gazed around her, at their faces that kept turning away in wonder to the sky.
“Well,” Ash said. “Will you look at your sorry asses!”
“We can take it, boss!”
one of the Tydder brothers yelled: Simon or Thomas, Ash was momentarily unsure which. He ducked a shower of punches, mud-balls, and insults.
“Creep!” Ash remarked. Laughter started, unstrained; going round the crowd.
Well, well. Geraint was wrong. And I was right.
She rubbed her hands together, and grinned broadly back at the drawn faces. “Okay, lads. We’re broke again. Not for the first time – won’t be the last. It means a day or two more on bread-rations, but hey, we’re rough, we’re tough, we can hack it.”
The other one of the Tydder brothers whimpered in a shrill falsetto, “Mummy!”
Ash took the laughter that followed as an opportunity to look at them closely. The Tydders and a lot of the younger men-at-arms were elbowing each other in the ribs; one with his lance-mate’s head wrestled under his arm. Two hundred fighting men with faded liveries and ragged hose, bundled up in every garment they owned; mud-stained, fingers white with chilblains, noses dripping clear liquid. She took the feel of them, electric in the air; read from their faces that they seemed tighter, more exultant, high on being rough, ragged, tough, and soldiers in a world of refugees.
It’s because there’s sun. We’ve come across the border. For the first time in weeks, there’s the sun…
And they’ve got out of Carthage in one piece and force-marched the better part of one hundred leagues in moonlight and darkness: right now, they think they’re shit-hot.
And they are.
Please God it’s not all for nothing.
As the laughter died down, Ash lifted her head and looked around at the muddy encampment, and the mud-stained men in front of her.
“We’re the Lion company. Never forget it. We’re fucking amazing. We’ve come across a hundred leagues of this, through night and bitter cold; it’s taken us weeks, but we’re still here, we’re still together, we’re still a company. That’s because we’re disciplined, and we’re the best. There isn’t any argument about it. Whatever happens from now on in, we’re the best, and you know it.”
