by Mary Gentle
Then, you found the Sible Hedingham manuscript, and Isobel’s team found the ruins of Carthage.
I’ve been so deep in translation work – when I haven’t been glued to the images the ROVs are transmitting – that it didn’t occur to me to think
No, I didn’t want to think.
It wasn’t until today, just now; until James Howlett said to me – ‘I think the important question is, why are these discoveries appearing?’
And I immediately, without thinking, corrected him: ‘*Re*-appearing.’
If there has been a ‘previous state’ of the universe, if we are a ‘second history’ – if any of this is even possible, and not utter nonsense – then that ‘fading of a first history’ cannot be the whole story. What we’ve found – the ruins of Carthage on the floor of the Mediterranean sea, and the machina rei militaris: the Stone Golem – were they actually *here* before this December?
You see, Vaughan Davies notwithstanding, I can’t begin to formulate a theory that accounts for why some of the evidence should appear to be *coming back*.
Anna, if this is true, then things are still changing.
And if things are still changing, then this isn’t ‘dead history’ – _it isn’t over_.
– Pierce
PART THIRTEEN
16 November–23 November AD 1476
The Empty Chair1
I
Sleet began to blind her the moment they rode out of the forest and galloped for Dijon’s north-west gate.
Wet ice whipped into Ash’s face as she spurred the pale bay, under a sky clouding up from grey to black, mixed rain and sleet slashing down.
“Get her into the city!” Ash bawled over the gathering storm, throat hoarse. “Now! Get her through those fucking gates: go!”
She crowded in, riding knee-to-knee with Florian – Christus Viridianus! Duchess Florian – and the rest of the mounted Lion men-at-arms, the soaked swallow-tail banner cracking overhead.
Sudden hooves thudded, cutting up the sodden earth behind her on the road down to the bridge over the moat. A stream of war-horses and riders went past and around her, in Burgundian blue and red and draggled plumes – de la Marche’s men! she realised, a hand on her sword-hilt.
Come out to escort us in.
Enclosed in that armed safety, they thundered back between the paths, trenches, barricades and buildings of the Visigoth camp – between the chaos of Visigoth troops running in all directions – new, wet mud spraying up from iron-shod hooves.
Just before the narrow bridge, the horses slowed, milled about; and she hit the pommel of her saddle in frustration. Two hundred mounted men. She stared at their backs, swore out loud, turning the pale bay with her spurs, gazing back into the slashing sleet and rain that now hid the Visigoth camp, hid everything more than fifty yards away. No more than ten minutes to get through this choke-point, over the bridge, through the gate; but an aching wait, fretting itself into half an hour in her mind.
Visigoth mounted archers! she anticipated. As soon as they sort themselves out— No, not in this weather.
The skin at the nape of her neck shivered.
It’ll be golems, with Greek Fire flame-throwers, like at Auxonne – we’re bunched up here, we’ll fry like wasps in a fire!
The stress of the wait made the pit of her stomach hurt. Moving again, at last – men shouting, horses’ hooves: all echoed under the arched stonework of the city gate. The breath of the animals went up white into the wet air. She swung her mount around, following Florian’s winded and limping grey gelding, was briefly aware of the darkness in the tunnel of the gate; and then burst out into drenched daylight, and Antonio Angelotti grabbing at her bridle.
“The Duke’s dead!” he yelled up at her, face streaming with rain. “Time to change sides now! Madonna, shall I send a messenger out to the Carthaginians?”
“Stop panicking, Angeli!”
The high steel-and-leather saddle creaked as she sat back, shifting her weight to stop the bay dancing sideways across shattered, flooded cobbles.
“There’s a new Duke – Duchess!” she corrected herself. “It’s Florian. Our Florian!”
“Florian?”
From behind Angelotti, Robert Anselm growled, “Fuck!”
Ash wheeled the lathered gelding, bringing it under her control. Every instinct swore at her to muster her men now, abandon all baggage but the essential, and leave this city to the natural consequences of a bungled transfer of power.
How can I? Her fist hit the saddle pommel. How can I!
“Demoiselle-Captain!” Olivier de la Marche rode in close, leaning across from his war-horse to clasp her arm: gauntlet against vambrace. “See to the defences of this gate! I give you authority over Jonvelle, Jussey, and Lacombe; take up your place from the gate here, north along the wall to the White Tower! Then I must speak with you!”
“Sieur—!” She did not get it out in time: his chestnut stallion was already clopping away into the downpour, in with his men-at-arms.
The crossbowman Jan-Jacob Clovet, taking the bay’s reins from Angelotti, shrugged and spat. “Son of a bitch!”
“Now is that putting the mercenaries up the sharp end, as usual? Or is that giving us the place of honour, because it’s going to be hit hardest when they come?”
“God spare us from ducal favour, boss,” Jan-Jacob Clovet said fervently. “Any fucking Duke. Or Duchess. Are you sure about the doc? She can’t be, can she?”
“Oh, she can! Florian!” Ash bawled.
De la Marche’s sub-captain and his men brought steaming, caparisoned war-horses between her and Florian, shouldering the woman surgeon and her broken-down mount out and across the devastated zone of the city behind the walls, heading at the trot for the ducal palace.
“Florian! ”
She caught one glimpse of Floria del Guiz’s white face, between the pauldrons of the armoured knights surrounding her. Then the household of Olivier de la Marche closed in.
Shit! No time!
Ash spun the uncooperative bay on its heels, facing the gate again.
“Angeli! Thomas! Get ’em up on the walls! Rickard, warn Captain Jonvelle – the Visigoths are gonna come right over those fucking walls behind us!”
II
“Why don’t they come!”
Ash stood at a slit window in the Byward Tower, squinting out into slanting water. Rain splintered down on to the walls of Dijon. The tower’s flint and masonry breathed off cold.
Rain beat in: solid, intense storm-rain. Rivulets ran down off her steel sallet and visor. Her breath and body warmth made the safety of armour stickily humid, despite the biting cold wind.
“‘Nother couple of hours, it’ll be dark.” Robert Anselm shouldered into the window embrasure, his rust-starred armour scraping against hers. “Fuck, I thought the whole fucking rag-’ead army was coming in after you!”
“They should be! If I was them – there’s never been a better chance—!”
The thunder of the city gate shutting behind them still tingles in her bones.
“Maybe they’re having a mutiny out there! Maybe the Faris is dead. I don’t know!”
“Wouldn’t you … know?”
Carefully, she probes in that part of her soul that she shares.
Almost beyond hearing, there are voices – the machina rei militaris, Godfrey, the Wild Machines? For the first time in her life she can’t tell. And there is an echo of that intense pressure, subliminally sensed, felt in the bones, that racked her when the hart was hunted and the sun dimmed in the autumn sky. Voices as weak, or weaker, than at that moment of the unmaking.
“There’s been some … damage, I think. I don’t know what or to who. Temporary, permanent – I can’t tell.” In fear and frustration, Ash added, “Just when we could do with hearing Godfrey, right, Roberto? Hey, maybe the Faris has died! Maybe her qa’ids are running around like headless chickens trying to sort out the command structure: that’s why they haven’t attacked…”
“Shit…”
Ash peered out of the gap between tightly mortared stones. Her breath made grey plumes in front of her face. The intensity of the lashing water came in bursts, slapping the stone rim of the window. She did not flinch back.
“Price isn’t even a fucking cavalryman… Nobody’s to go out after them.” Her voice sounded curt in her own ears.
Anselm protested, “Girl—”
Ash cut him off. “I don’t like it any more than you. Nothing happens until we can see what’s going on. The Duke’s dead. This city could fall apart from the inside, any second! I want a command meeting with de la Marche; I want to see Florian! After that, maybe we’ll send a man out through one of the postern gates.”
Anselm, grimly sardonic, said, “We got no idea what the fucking rag-heads are doing. Or the Burgundians. You don’t like it. Nor do I.”
The hissing slash of water against stone increased. Ash pressed up closer to the slit window, hands braced against the cold stone either side. Across the empty air, she realised she was seeing only a few yards of broken earth.
She shifted as far to one side as she could, to let Robert cram in beside her. He hawked, spat: white mucus spraying the stone sill.
“At least this shitting weather gets in their powder, and stretches the siege-machine ropes…”
Promptly as he spoke, a shrill whistle and roar sounded; each man in the tower room flinching, automatically. Ash jumped down from the window embrasure and clattered to where she could see out of the door. A faint thump, and a glow through the rain, down in the ruined part of the city, made her skin shiver by what it implied.
“Rain’s not going to stop the golem-machines,” she said. “Or the Greek Fire.”
Robert Anselm did not move from the window. After a moment, she strode back and stepped up to rejoin him.
He grunted. “They got Charlie’s funeral going yet?”
“Fuck, who’s going to tell us anything!”
“You heard anything from the doc?”
Ash took her gaze away from the shrouded grey lumps on the puddled earth beyond the moat – discarded ladders, dead and bloated horses, one or two corpses of men. Slaves, probably; not thought worth the recovery. All a uniform mud-grey; all motionless.
“Roberto – whatever it means – she is Duchess.”
“And I’m the fucking King of Carthage!”
“I’ve heard the Wild Machines,” Ash said, her gaze steady on him. “In my soul. And I’ve seen them – I’ve stood there while they shook the earth under my feet. And I saw Florian’s face, and I heard them, Robert – they tried to make their devil’s miracle, and they were stopped. Cold. Because of her; because of our Florian. Because she made Burgundy’s Heraldic Beast into … meat.”
On his face, what there is visible of it under sallet-visor and sopping wet hood, she sees an expression of cynical disbelief.
“What that means to the Burgundians, I don’t know yet. But… You weren’t there, Robert.”
Anselm’s head turned. She saw him only in profile now, looking out from the window slit. His voice gravel, he protested, “I know I fucking wasn’t there! I prayed for you! Me and the lads; Paston and Faversham, up on the wall—”
Push it or not? she wondered, diverted. Yes. I need to know how bad it is: I’m going to depend on this man.
“If you’d come on the assault, you might have seen what happened on the hunt. You bottled out.”
Jerking round, his face red, he jabbed a finger two inches from her breastplate. “You don’t fucking say that!”
She was aware that the escort and banner men-at-arms by the tower door looked over; signalled them with a gesture to stay where they were.
“Robert, what’s the problem?” She loosened and removed one gauntlet, and raised her bare hand to wipe at her wet face. “Apart from the obvious! We’ve seen shittier sieges. Neuss. Admitted it’s better being on the outside…”
His confidence was not to be got by humour. His expression closed up. This close, she could see the hazel-green colour of his eyes, the thread-veins on his nose and cheekbones; sallet and shadow making his face unreadable.
Ash waited.
A renewed wind took the rain in great gusts, beating against the walls like surf. Ash is momentarily reminded of the sea beating against the cliffs of Carthage harbour, below the stone window-slits of House Leofric; is conscious of a similar great void, the other side of this wall; vast empty air, filled with freezing grey torrents. Faint spray dampened her cheeks. She reached up, with a left-hand gauntlet that – despite being scoured in sand and rubbed with goose-grease – was already orange-spotted with rust, and tilted her visor down.
“What is it, Roberto?”
The man’s body beside her crushed her further into the window embrasure as he heaved a great sigh. He looked out at the ever-moving rain. He spoke, at last, with an apparent acceptance of her right to make demands of him:
“I didn’t know if you were alive or dead after Auxonne. No one could get any news of your body being picked up off the field. I expected to see your head on a spear. Because if you were dead, the Goths were going to show your body off, damn fucking sure!”
His voice became quieter, barely audible to her, never mind to the men-at-arms by the door.
“If you were a prisoner, they’d’ve shown you in chains… You could have been off in the woods, wounded. You could have crawled off to die. No one would have found you.”
He turned to look at her. The rain made him squint, under his raised visor, flesh creasing around his eyes.
“That was how it was, girl. I thought you’d been shovelled into a grave-trench, without being recognised. Those fire-throwers… A lot of the men came back saying bodies were burned black. Tony said you might have been taken prisoner at Auxonne and carted off to North Africa, because of how interested they were at Basle in getting hold of you. But they wouldn’t care if they’d had to take a dead body. Scientist-magi give me the willies,” Anselm added, with an unselfconscious shudder.
She waited, listening to the slash of rain on flint, not prompting him.
“Three months, and then—” His gaze fixed on her. “You had to be dead, there was no other way to behave – and then, out of nowhere, three days ago, a message on a crossbow bolt—”
“You’d got used to leading the company.”
His hands slammed into the wall either side of her, pinning her into the window embrasure. She glanced down at the steel of his arms; then up into his face.
Spittle sprayed from his mouth, dotting the front of her livery tabard. “I wanted to come to Africa! I didn’t want to stay in Dijon! Sweet Green Christ – What do you think happened, girl? I had John de fucking Vere saying, the Duke’s sending half the company to Carthage, I need a man I can leave in command here—”
The men at the tower door stirred uneasily. He broke off, deliberately lowering his voice again.
“If you were anywhere, dead or alive, it had to be Carthage! Only I didn’t have a fucking choice! I got ordered to stay here! And now I find out you were there, alive—”
Ash reached up and put her hands on his wrists, and gently tugged them down. The steel of his vambrace was slick with rain, cold against her one bare palm.
“I can see Oxford doing it that way. He’d need to take Angeli, for the guns. You’d been my second-in-command, you were in command, there wasn’t anyone else he could leave behind with safety. Robert, I could have been dead. Or if not dead, then anywhere. You were right to stay here.”
“I should have gone with him! I was sure you were dead. I was wrong!” Robert Anselm punched his fist hard into the flint lining of the window embrasure. He looked down at his scratched, dented gauntlet, an
d absently flexed his fingers. “If I’d pulled the company out with me, Dijon wouldn’t be standing siege now, but I’m telling you, girl, I should have come to Carthage. For you.”
“If you had,” Ash said, measuring the thoughts out in her mind, “we might have taken House Leofric. With that many more men and guns. We might have destroyed the Stone Golem; we might have broken the only connection the Wild Machines have with the world – the only way they can do their miracle.”
His eyes flicked towards her, small behind the incongruously long lashes.
“But then.” Ash shrugged. “If you hadn’t been here, Dijon might have fallen before you’d got as far as the coast – then the Duke would have been executed, and we’d know by now what it is the Wild Machines are going to use the Faris for. Because they’d have done it, three months ago!”
“And maybe not,” Anselm rumbled.
“We’re here, now. What does it matter what you didn’t do? Robert, none of what you’re telling me explains why you didn’t come on the attack against the Faris today. None of it tells me why you’ve lost your bottle. And I need to know that, because I depend on you, and so do a lot of other people here.”
She was frank, forcing herself to mention fear aloud. What she saw on his face as he turned his head away was not shame.
He muttered, “You went out expecting to be killed.”
“Yes. If I had, but if I’d killed her—”
So quietly she almost missed it, Robert Anselm interrupted. “I couldn’t ride out with you today. I couldn’t see you get killed in front of me.”
Ash stared at him.
“Not after three months,” he said painfully. “I held masses for you, girl. I grieved. I carried on without you. Then you came back. Then you ask me to ride out and watch you get killed. That’s too much to ask.”
