by Mary Gentle
“They draw their power from the sun’s spirit. I heard them saying they took more from the sun this summer than they had in ten thousand years.” Ash licked dry lips. “And that the next time it happened, it would be to use the Faris to make a miracle. What I don’t understand is why they haven’t done it before now—”
The voice of Godfrey Maximillian in her head whispered on, relentless, with an agonising determination in its tone:
– They will draw grace from the sun, as we have prayed to the saints for Divine grace. As I have made tiny miracles by the grace of God, so they will make her a channel for their will and their miracle. Soon! It is going to be soon.
“Yes, but, Godfrey—”
A voice that was many and one, loud enough that she bit her tongue at the shock, broke into her mind:
‘IT IS SHE!’
Ash sat bolt upright.
“Get me a priest!”
As every face turned towards her, she said, “They found me.”
IV
“It’s too dangerous, speaking with Devils!” Robert Anselm protested grimly. “We need you here. Commanding the company. Devils might – break you.”
Ash, studying his sweating brow, under his woollen hood pulled low, thought, You need me commanding the company. Is that it? Is that what you found out, these past three months? Shit, Roberto. I never took you for one of life’s natural 2ICs.
What has it been like here?
Softly, Antonio Angelotti said, “But it is Meister Godfrey. Alive, is it, madonna? Alive, still?”
“No; dead. It’s his—” Ash stumbled. “His soul. I know Godfrey’s soul as well as I know my own.” A crooked smile. “Better.”
Floria’s hand rested on the shoulder of Ash’s gown, her knuckles momentarily warm against the muscles of Ash’s neck. Not to Ash, but to Angelotti, she said, “What’s the priest to you? It isn’t worth losing our girl.”
The gunner, ragged curls gold in the candlelight, looked at last now as if he had been on campaign; lines drawn down the sides of his mouth, eyes hollow. A thick, stained bandage covered his left arm from shoulder to elbow. “Ash rescued me. Meister Godfrey prayed with me. If I can help him, I will.”
“Demon-possessed,” Robert Anselm cut in, “what if you end up demon-possessed again?”
“It’s too dangerous,” the surgeon said.
“I signed a condotta. The Duke has a right to demand this. Even if he is dying.” Ash held out her arms to her pages. “I’ll do it once. Guys… I might as well talk to the Wild Machines. They know I’m alive now. You can bet they’ll talk to me!”
One of the pages finished tying the eighteen pairs of aiglettes that fastened her doublet to her hose, and handed her a demi-gown. She shrugged into it.
“Now?” Robert Anselm said.
“Now. One of the things we’ve always known, Roberto. We have to have all the information we can get. Otherwise the company gets fucked. It’s my decision.” She shook his shoulder. “Digorie; Richard.”
The two company priests arrived at the head of the spiral stairs, Digorie Paston somewhat in the lead, his bony face alight with enthusiasm. Richard Faversham trod bear-like in his wake.
“Captain.” Digorie Paston’s stole lay askew on his shoulders. He gazed around. “Clear this room. The pages should bring clean water, and bread, and then go down below. All to go except Master Anselm, Master Angelotti, and – the surgeon.” He flushed pink to the tips of his ears. “Master Anselm, Master Angelotti, will you keep the door, please.”
“Just one minute.” Ash put her fists on her hips.
“Please, Captain,” the priest said. “This is an exorcism.”
Ash looked at him for a long minute. “It … might turn out to be that, yes.”
“Then let myself and Father Faversham do what is necessary. We will need all of God’s grace that we can get.”
The roof of the tower’s top floor shifted with shadows, candle-flames moving in the draughts. Ash moved to stand with her arms folded, near the fire, and watched as the two priests cleared the room with surprising lack of fuss. While Richard Faversham swung a censer, Digorie Paston followed him, around the corridor in the walls, appearing at the window gaps, disappearing again, their chant echoing up into the vaulted stone.
“You’re going to do this,” Floria said resignedly, walking to stand beside Ash in the yellow light.
“Somebody has to.”
“Do they? Do they have to?”
“To win this—”
“Oh, the war!” Floria put her back to the fire’s warmth. For a moment, her brother’s stone-green eyes looked at Ash from her face. “Bloody, pointless, destructive—! Won’t I ever get it through to you? Most people spend their lives building things!”
“Not the people I know,” Ash said mildly. “You’re maybe the exception.”
“I spend my life putting men back together after you get them chopped up. I get sick of it sometimes. Ten people died up on that wall!”
“We’re all going to die,” Ash said. Floria began to turn away. Ash caught her arm and repeated, “We’re all going to die some day. Doesn’t matter what we do. Till the fields, sell wool, sell your fanny, pray all your life in a nunnery – we’re all of us going to die. Four things go over this world like the seasons: hunger, plague, death, and war.7 They were doing it before I came along, and they’ll be doing it long after. People die. That’s all.”
“And you follow the Four Horsemen because you like it, and because it pays well.”
“Stop trying to pick a fight, Floria. I’m not going to fight with you. It isn’t just a war here. It isn’t just bad war. It’s complete and entire destruction…”
“Dead is dead,” Florian snapped. “I don’t suppose your civilian casualties care much whether they died in a ‘just war’ or a ‘bad war’!”
Paston and Faversham chanted, “Christus Imperator, Christus Viridianus.” Their voices swooped, one high, one low. In the light, that is bright only where the candles are, Angelotti and Anselm could be any pair of armed men, standing at the stair-entrance. The gunner appeared to be holding an impassioned sotto voce conversation. Ash saw Anselm scowl.
Impatience made her shift her footing, stare at the shuttered windows, the stacked crates of the armoury.
“Oh yeah – Florian – while I remember. I saw Soeur Simeon in the Tour Philippe le Bon. She wants your Margaret Schmidt back. That was a hell of a shock up on the wall – I never expected I’d see her with the gunners. I thought she’d be one of your surgery assistants.”
Floria del Guiz said quietly, “She isn’t ‘my’ Margaret Schmidt.”
Conscious of feeling taken aback, Ash said, “Oh.”
Floria looked at her with an expression between grimness and bitter amusement. “Whatever I may have been expecting – no. She… It seems she’s signed on the company books as a gunner’s apprentice.”
“She’ll be all right,” Ash offered, somewhat at a loss, still waiting for the blessing to finish. “She was with one of Angelotti’s best men; he’ll train her.”
Florian kept her gaze on Ash. “I can’t make you understand it, can I? They’re teaching her to kill other men! Not for defence, not even for her lord. For money. And because she’ll get to like it. Or if she sickens of it in the end, what is there for her? She can’t go back.”
Ash said quietly, “I didn’t make her join us.”
“She’s too young to know her own mind!”
Digorie Paston and Richard Faversham re-entered the main chamber, a scent of incense with them; singing together a solemn blessing.
“Okay,” Ash said authoritatively, “I’ll do what I do with very young recruits. I’ll put her on guard tonight, up on the east wall, over the Ouche river. No one’s going to come in on that side, but it’s going to be fucking freezing.”
She looked away from the priests, back to Floria.
“Most of the young lads quit after that. They can say they’ve been at the front, so th
eir pride’s okay. If she wants out, I’ll let her go. But if she doesn’t, Florian, I won’t make her. Because we’ll need her. Unless we can get supplied up and out of this city, we need everyone we can get.”
In the sudden silence, Ash realised the blessing had finished.
Faversham and Paston glared at her.
Floria switched her gaze to the waiting priests. “Girl – you haven’t got the piety of a rabbit. Have you?”
Ash’s lips twitched in what would have been a smile, if her face had not been stiff with fear. “You’d be surprised.”
Digorie Paston said, “The – surgeon – should attend while we do this. It may be dangerous.”
“Right.” Ash put her hands to her belt; missed it; realised it still lay on her bed, purse and dagger threaded on it; so that she stood without weapons. “Digorie, Richard; I want you to pray for me, while I do this. And, when I ask it – I want you to pray for God’s grace to silence the voice between my soul and the Stone Golem.”
Floria’s dark gaze came up. “You’re going to try to cut yourself free of the Wild Machines? The Duke won’t like that.”
“I’ll ask the questions he wants me to ask. If Godfrey’s right, and I’ve scared the Faris off the machina rei militaris for now, I’m not going to get any answers about her tactics. And we know what Carthage’s grand strategy is.”
“It may change. If you do this, we won’t know.”
Ash’s voice thinned. “They just – turned me around, Florian. They made me walk towards them. Okay, we’re a long way from Carthage. But that isn’t happening again. It is not. I have people depending on me.”
“And Godfrey?”
Before Ash answered – the implications of that stark in her mind – Digorie Paston reached out and took her hand in his bony grip, and led her to the hearth. Flames leaped, dazzling. The dusty, cluttered chamber was full of cold wind and leaping shadows. At his insistent push, Ash knelt. Ancient carvings glared down from the lintel above the hearth. Shadows moved in the eyes and foliage of Christus Viridianus.
Digorie Paston took a loaf of dark bread and broke it. Richard Faversham sprinkled water and salt.
“Fire and salt and candlelight: Christ receive thy soul—”
Ash shut her eyes. She closed out the anxious faces of the two priests; shut out Floria, pacing at the edge of the candlelight, and the voices of Anselm and Angelotti. The floor was painfully hard under her knees, bruised from the assault on the walls of Dijon.
– And you had no business to be leading an attack, child! It is a sin to tempt Death that way.
Salted bread touched her lips. She took it into her mouth. It formed a solid, gelatinous lump.
“How the hell—” she swallowed “—do you know what I was doing up there today, Godfrey?”
– You were praying. To Our Lord, or to the machina rei militaris: perhaps both. I heard you. ‘Keep me alive until the rest get here!’ I have no knowledge of where you fought, or how; but I am not a fool, and I know you.
“Okay, so I was out in front. Sometimes you have to be. It wasn’t suicidal, Godfrey.”
– But hardly safe.
She laughed at that, swallowing down the bread and almost choking. With her eyes shut, every sense strained, she listened. In that part of her self which she has been used to sharing, there is a sense of amusement, kindness, love. Tears prick at her eyes: she blinks them back. In the hollow of her mind there is a sense of potential for more voices than this one: Godfrey Maximillian, alone in the dark.
“What comes after death?”
It was not the question she meant to ask. She heard, with her ears, Digorie Paston’s sharp, “Blessed be!”, and Richard Faversham’s “Amen!”
– How can I say? This is Limbo; this is Purgatory. This is pain! Not the Communion of the Blessed!
“Godfrey—”
Anguish flooded through her, with his voice.
– I need to see the face of Our Lord! It was promised to me!
She felt pain, and blinked her eyes open for long enough to see her nails dug into her palms.
“I will find you.”
– I am … nowhere. Not to be found. I have no eyes to see, no hands to touch. I am something that listens, something that hears. Everything is darkness. Voices … pry at me. Expose me to them… The hours, the days – is it years? Nothing but the voices, here—
“Godfrey!”
– Nothing but the dark, and the Great Devils eating away at me!
Ash reached out. Hands took hers; a man’s hands rough with chilblains and work, and cold with the November chill. She gripped them as if they were the hands of Godfrey Maximillian.
“I won’t leave you.”
– Help me!
“There’s nothing we won’t do. Trust me. Nothing! I’ll get help to you.”
She spoke with complete conviction, with the utter determination of combat. That such a rescue might be unknown or impossible is nothing, now; nothing beside the need to reach him.
His voice became gentle laughter.
– You have said that to us many times before, little one, in the most impossible of fights.
“Yeah, and I’ve been right, too.”
– Pray for me.
“Yes.” She listens, inside. In the hollow of her shared soul; listening for voices louder than God.
– How long is it, since last you spoke to me?
“Minutes… Not even an hour.”
– I cannot tell, child. Time is nothing where I am. I read once in Aquinas that the duration of the soul in Hell may be only a heartbeat, but to the damned it is eternity.
Momentarily, she lets herself feel his desolation. Then, harshly: “You hear my sister. Has she spoken to the Stone Golem again, yet?”
– Once more. I thought at first that it was you. She spoke to it, to Carthage, saying that you live. Saying that whatever she asks the machina rei militaris, you can ask, and be told. She tells her master the King-Caliph that they are overheard, now.
In her ears, her own heartbeats sound; and the whispered addendum of the voice in her head:
– You are very different, you and she.
“How? No: tell me later.”
The boards beneath her knees brought pain, focusing her.
“Tell me what troops she’s got deployed here. What recent messengers she’s had from the armies in Iberia and Venice. And how strong she is in the north – I know she had another two legions with her when we were at Basle: they must be in Flanders!”
– I … can tell you what reports have been made to the machina rei militaris, I think.
Ash bowed her head, her hands still tightly gripping the hands of the man in front of her; her eyes closed.
“And… I have to speak with the Wild Machines, if I can. Will you stand by me?”
There was, for the first time, a hiatus in her mind. His sadness suffused her. Godfrey Maximillian’s voice sounded, soft as thistledown:
– When I was a boy, I loved the forests. My mother vowed me to the Church. I would have stayed under the sky, with the animals. I loved my monastery no better than you loved St Herlaine, Ash, and they beat me as they beat you, brutally. I still do not believe God intended me for a priest, but He gave me the grace to perform small miracles, and the gift of being in your company. It was worth it. On earth, or here, I stand with you. If I regret anything, it is only that I could not gain your trust.
The it was worth it she shoved into a dark part of her mind, wiped out, ignored. A tight, cold ball of muscle knotted under her breastbone. Before she could lose the courage and the warmth of him, she said, “Visigoth troop dispositions, siege of Dijon, main units, give position.”
The machina rei militaris, in Godfrey’s voice, began to speak:
– Legio VI Leptis Parva, north-east quadrant: serf-troops to the number of—
‘IT IS SHE…’
The same silence that had blanketed her mind among the pyramids of the desert numbed her. For a second, she lost t
he feel of the boards under her shins, and the grip she had on Digorie Paston’s hands.
“Son of a bitch—” Ash opened her eyes, screwing up her face. Richard Faversham held her shoulders; Digorie Paston her hands. As far away as if they had been at the other end of a field of combat, faces surrounded her: Anselm, Angelotti, Floria.
She gripped Digorie’s bony hands. “Godfrey!”
Nothing answered. A chill inside her mind began to spread. She reached into herself, meeting only numbness, deafness. They can reach this far, then.
Christ, all the way over the seas from Carthage; across half of Christendom…! But the Stone Golem can, so why shouldn’t they?
“Godfrey!”
Faint as a dream, Godfrey’s voice whispered:
– I am here, always.
‘IT IS SHE. IT IS YOU, LITTLE ONE…’
It is not enough, now, that there are men and women – Thomas Rochester, Ludmilla Rostovnaya, Carracci, Margaret Schmidt – whose lives may be rescued or ruined by her decisions.
She thinks, No one is indispensable.
Now it is Ash, a woman, alone, after nineteen years; kneeling on hard wood in a cold wind, with the searing flicker of the hearth-fire hot on the sleeve of her doublet. A woman who prays, suddenly and separately, as she has not done since she was a child: Lion protect me!
She recalls painted plaster crunching under the hooves of a brown mare, in snow, in the south, riding between the great pyramids. If she is numbed, now, it may be with silence or with cold. The voices in her head – and they are plural, multiple, legion – whisper as one:
‘WE KNOW THAT YOU HEAR US.’
“No shit?” Ash said, mildly acid. She let go of the priest’s hands, her eyes still shut, and heard his gasp of pain released. She sat back on her heels. There is no compulsion to stop performing any of these acts. In utter relief, she says, “But you can’t reach me. I could be anywhere.”
‘YES. YOU COULD BE. BUT YOU ARE IN DIJON. GUNDOBAD’S CHILD TELLS US SO.’
