by Mary Gentle
That’s – interesting.
A pantler bowed his way past Florian, and servers with dazzling white linen for the oak table followed, and a dozen men with silver dishes. Floria del Guiz turned and strode the remaining few steps towards Ash, with a gait not used to wearing a robe and underrobe long at the front. Her slippered toe caught the fur-trimmed hem of the black velvet overrobe. She stumbled, her feet tangled in glorious cloth.
“Watch it!” Ash reached out, grabbing very solid weight, stopping Floria from falling. She stared into the so-close, so-familiar face. She realised that she smelled no wine on the woman’s breath.
“Merde!” Florian swore in a whisper. Ash saw her gaze flinch away from the mass of men around them.
Ash let go of the tall woman’s arms. Florian’s tight sleeve snagged the edges of her gauntlet plates as the woman got her balance. Florian reached down to shake out her skirts, exposing an underdress of silver brocade all sewn with sapphires and diamonds and silver thread, and tugged at the high belt, settling it under her bust-line. The high-waisted black velvet snugged tight over her shoulders, arms, and torso. Under it, brocade laced at the front in a vee over a shift of so fine a linen it was translucent to the pink flesh of her breasts beneath. As a surgeon, Floria del Guiz stooped; as a woman in court mourning, she stood very tall and very straight indeed.
“Christus Viridianus, why couldn’t I look like that in my wedding dress?” Ash said wryly. “And you’re telling me Margaret Schmidt turned you down?”
The flash of a glance from Florian’s eyes made Ash think That was over-hearty. Jesus. What do I say to her? Something about Florian standing in front of her in women’s dress unsettled her. Maybe seeing her with Margaret Schmidt wasn’t so odd when she looked like a man.
As if what Ash had said had not been spoken, Florian demanded, “In the cathedral – is boss hearing voices again?”
“I heard Godfrey. Florian, I think he’s been – hurt, somehow. As for the Wild Machines … nothing yet: not a fucking word.”
“Why not?”
“Yeah, like I’d know. Godfrey doesn’t think they’re dead – if that’s the term. Maybe they’re damaged. You’re Duchess. Why don’t you tell me!”
Floria snorted, as familiar as if she had still been surgeon, still been in a sagging, blood-boltered tent back of some field of battle, digging steel out of meat.
“Christ, Ash! If I knew, you’d know! Being ‘Duchess’ doesn’t help me with that.”
They had made her wash, Ash realised; no dried blood under her fingernails.
“We have to talk, ‘Duchess’.” Ash glanced up at the tall woman – Florian’s fair hair scraped back under her horned headdress to expose a broad white brow; left hand now automatically holding up the front of her over-gown, folds of velvet falling gracefully down.
Difficult to believe she’s a surgeon; you’d swear she’d stayed a noblewoman all her life.
Ash realised the woman was perfectly conscious of how many people were watching her – watching both of them, now.
Automatically turning her back towards the crowd to conceal her expression, she caught Florian’s reflection in the chill, leaded window-glass. A long-featured woman in court splendour, Valois jewellery bright at her neck and wrists and veiled headdress; only the dark marks in her eye-sockets hinting at confusion or exhaustion. And beside her, crop-haired, in field-filthy plate, a woman with scarred cheeks and stunned eyes.
“Give the word,” Ash said abruptly. “I’ll get you out of here. I don’t know how, but I will.”
“You don’t know how.” The woman gave her a sardonic grin that was all Florian, all surgeon; a grin familiar from a hundred months under canvas in the field.
“There’s no military problem that hasn’t got a solution!” Ash stopped. “Except the one that kills you, of course…”
“Oh, of course. The Wild Machines,” Florian began, and a woman crossed the emptying room and stepped between Ash and her surgeon, narrow eyes tight with fury, interrupting without any hesitation.
It took Ash a second to recognise Jeanne Châlon, and another second to realise she herself was looking around for men-at-arms to have the woman removed.
Jeanne Châlon said shrilly, “I have ordered you funeral bake-meats – they brought me two saddles of mutton, a boiled capon, tripe, chitterlings, and three partridges – it is nothing fit for a Valois Duchess! Tell them we must be served more, and more fitting food!”
Ash finally caught Roberto’s eye: jerked her head. Floria said nothing, giving her aunt a little push towards the chamber door.
“The lady is right!” Olivier de la Marche’s baritone cut through the chamber. “Bring better food for the Duchess.” He gestured to the servants.
Ash caught a look close to triumph as the other woman walked away.
“You let her in here?”
“She’s been kind to me. The last two days. She’s the only family I have.”
“No,” Ash said, reflexively, as to any member of the Lion Azure, “she isn’t.”
“I wish this was like organising the surgeon’s tent, Ash. In the tent, I know what I’m doing. Here, I have no idea what I’m doing. I just know what I am.”
The servants and pages had almost finished setting the table: the odour of wine-sauce brought water into Ash’s mouth. Anselm arrived, heavy tread making the boards creak; Angelotti at his armoured shoulder. Both men looked at the surgeon with deliberately blank faces.
Moving rapidly, Floria stepped up on to the dais, laying a hand on the carved oak arm of the ducal throne. “I know what I am. I know what I do.”
Standing over the bleeding body of the hart, hearing her surgeon say I maintain the real: all this is startlingly clear to Ash. Not to these two of her officers – nor are they Burgundian.
“’Ow?” Robert Anselm demanded.
“I don’t know how I do it, or why!” Exasperated, Florian met his gaze. “It really doesn’t matter what you call it! Except that it does. They call it ‘being Duchess’ here. They believe I’m their Duchess. Ash, if we leave, this town falls.” She stopped: corrected herself. “If I leave.”
“Are you sure?” Antonio Angelotti asked.
Florian kept her gaze fixed on Ash. “Do I have to tell you about morale?” Her fingers tightened on the arm of the throne. “I don’t want this. Look at it! Talk about Welcome to the hot seat…”10
The surgeon lifted her head, gazing down the chamber. Ash saw her look at the old chamberlain-counsellor, at de la Marche, at a bishop, at the departing servers.
“If I didn’t know what I am, I’d run. You know me, Ash. I might just run anyway.”
“Yeah. You might. If only into a bottle.”
Florian took her hand away from the ducal throne, and the waxed oak that she had been stroking with one clean thumb. She stepped down from the dais again, standing between Anselm and Angelotti. It was clear to Ash that they would not be approached, not while the surgeon made her desire for privacy apparent; that, if anything, broke the surface tension of her sleepless exhaustion, made her think again This place is on borrowed time – one of my company’s tied here – what do I do?
Ash looked desperately around the long bright chamber, at the still-clustering men in rich robes and armour; at the food set out on the sun-bleached cloth.
“When I made the hart…” Florian looked down at her scrubbed hands, as if she expected to find them bloody. “It hurt Godfrey.”
Ash met her gaze, seeing something there that might have been self-blame. “He’s recovering, I think.”
“So maybe whatever happened damaged the Wild Machines. Destroyed them.”
“Maybe. But I wouldn’t count on it. I heard them after the hart was dead.”
Robert Anselm grunted. “If we’re very, very lucky, they were damaged…”
Picking up his words, Angelotti completed: “…if what happened when the hunt aborted their miracle hurt them, madonna. So: if they are damaged … they might recover to
morrow. Or it might take fifty years. Or we might be fortunate: it might never happen.”
Florian looked questioningly at her. Ash shook her head.
“Godfrey says he hears ‘silence, not absence’. I can’t make myself believe they’re gone. They might not even be hurt. Who knows why they’re silent? The only way we can be safe is to act as if I’ll hear them again tomorrow.”
A bare forty-eight hours of funeral, lack of sleep, and the sheer impact of the Burgundian court; all this made Florian seem subdued. She drew in a breath, twisting the bezels of the gold rings on her fingers, and looked up at Ash. Her expression was the same as it had been in the wildwood, soaked in hart’s blood, staggered by the certainty of her knowledge.
“Would we have heard,” she said, “if the sun had come up on the other side of the Burgundian border, in the past two days? Beyond Auxonne?”
“Oh, shit.” Anselm’s disgusted bellow made the remaining Burgundian noblemen startle, and shift back towards the hearth end of the chamber.
“Yeah, you got it. Euen. Shit! Euen Huw,” Ash explained to Florian. “He was out in their camp. He’d have brought the rumour back in with him. Something like that would be through the rag-head camp inside fifteen minutes!”
Ash shrugged. The steel of her armour squealed, rust scraping off with the movement.
“I’m being dumb. If that had happened, the Goths wouldn’t care about being overheard by me, they’d use the Stone Golem to tell the Faris! And Godfrey would have told me. If there was sun over Christendom, now, we’d know. It’s dark. And if it’s dark, the Wild Machines are still with us.”
“Either that, and they’re silent,” Florian said, “or the darkness is permanent without them.”
“Better hope not,” Ash said grimly. “Or next year’s going to be hell.”
“So nothing’s changed. Whatever you’re not hearing from the Wild Machines.”
“Then why am I not hearing it!”
Angelotti ticked off words on his powder-black fingers with surprising, delicate grace: “No Duke. Perhaps a Duchess. Still dark. No assault on the walls. No threats from the Ferae Natura Machinae. If there is a pattern, madonna, I can’t see it.”
Ash ignored the crowd and clatter behind her.
“They may have reasons for silence. They might be hiding damage. How can we know? It’s what I really hate,” she said. “Making decisions, on not enough information. But there’s never enough information. And you have to make the decisions anyway.”
She took a breath.
“We need to ensure Florian’s safety. That comes first. Burgundy or no bloody Burgundy, Duchess or no Duchess, Florian is what’s stopping the Wild Machines—” She broke off. “Unless there is no need, any more—”
Florian smoothed her robe down, with long-fingered, spotless hands. The sheer linen of her veil concealed nothing of her expression, only misted it, gave it paradoxical clarity.
“Out in the desert,” she said.
“What?”
“You forced them to talk to you. You told me.”
Angelotti nodded. Robert Anselm’s scowl, unconscious, was almost a snarl.
“So do that now,” Florian said. “Find out. I need to know. Am I doing what Charles did? Am I the obstacle? Am I maintaining the real against anything?”
“When I tried it before the hunt – they’d learned to shut me out of their knowledge.” Ash hesitated. “But they still spoke to me.”
If I think about it, I won’t do it.
There is a brief second of memory in her mind: of the lord-amir Leofric’s face when she drew the words of the machina rei militaris into her soul; and of the bitter chill sand outside Carthage as she hits it, face-down, the first time that she did more than listen to the Wild Machines. When she wrenched knowledge from them, all in a heartbeat.
Inside herself, she prepares. It is more than passive, more than emptying herself for voices to come; she makes herself a void that pulls, that compels itself to be filled.
Closes her eyes, shuts out the tower room, Florian, Roberto, Angeli; directs her speech beyond and through the machina rei militaris, hundreds of leagues away, in Carthage:
“Come on, you motherfuckers…”
And listens.
A faint sound, in the shared solitude of her soul; no more than an unwilling whisper, overlain by Godfrey’s anguish. A voice, woven of many voices, heard now for the first time since the hart lay bloody on the turf in front of her:
‘PLAN WHILE YOU CAN, LITTLE THING OF EARTH, WE ARE NOT YET CAST DOWN.’
The chamber wall felt bitter cold, cooling her scarred cheek where she leaned against the masonry.
“Let me take that, boss.”
Shifting, she realised Rickard stood beside her, prising her sallet out of her hands. She let him take it. With a sigh, she straightened, and let him unspring the pins on her pauldrons, and remove the rust-starred shoulder defences. He tucked the plates under his arm. Awkwardly, he unbuckled her belt and took sword and scabbard, staring at her anxiously.
“Boss…”
She turned her back on him, moving with greater ease. The window’s reflection showed her the chamber, Anselm sombrely speaking to the rest of the Lion escort as they left; Antonio Angelotti with one beautiful hand resting on Florian’s arm.
I’d forgotten. Even after two days, I’d forgotten. How – their voices feel, speaking to me.
She reaches out. When she touches her fingers to the glass, it is bitter cold through the linen of her gauntlets.
From here, in this morning light, she sees Dijon’s heterogeneous walls and towers from high inside the city. White-plastered masonry here, missile-smashed brick there; the blue-grey flint of a tower by the mills still pouring black smoke into the air. The city below her is a mass of red tiled roofs. South, between the double spires of a hundred churches, she can see the Suzon snaking away in a white gleam, between the wooded, grey limestone hills. The air is empty of birds. Distant church bells ring.
She can see nowhere – the banks of the western river, the ground beyond the moat, the road running up towards the western bridge – that is not blocked by newly turned earth. The Visigoths’ ditches and banks, so small from up here; the pavises and mantlets set up along them barely visible. Distant cornicens sound in the enemy camp.
It is as if there is a precipice, now, a verge in her mind, beyond which is a drop more vertiginous than this one from the tower. And in that depth, the presence of voices.
Robert Anselm, his voice bluff with shock and mordant humour, said, “We’ll take it there’s no fucking good news, right?”
That’s the first time he’s seen me speak to the Wild Machines.
Shit, Robert, I wish you’d come to Carthage!
“You got that right…”
What she seeks for is the welcome numbness of action, her old ability to cut off self from feeling. The closest she can come is to maintain an interest in watching her hands, which are shaking.
“Madonna.” Angelotti reached out and took her arm, drawing her with surprising strength into a walk. She stumbled across the oak boards, past the hearth; caught her balance as the Italian master gunner shoved her into one of the chairs lining the long table – and stepped back, gracefully, to give Florian his hand and seat the Duchess of Burgundy almost as swiftly.
“Eat,” he said. “And drink – madonna Florian, there must be wine?”
With shaking hands, Ash unbuckled her gauntlets, dropped them heavily on to the linen cloth, and reached for one of the gold, ruby-studded goblets.
She was aware of Burgundians seating themselves – few now: the chamber very empty – and servers and panders complaining about lack of ceremony; but all she wanted was the thick sting of wine on her tongue. When served meats, she took the plate much as she would have done in camp, and did not realise until whole minutes later that she was stabbing up mutton not with her eating-knife, but with her bollock dagger.
Ah, that’s mercenaries for you…
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The taste of onions, and ortolan,11 and pease pottage in her mouth; their weight in her stomach; all this and she began to be aware of herself, her surroundings, the sheer solid reality of linen, table, armour, doublet, plate. She belched.
They can’t reach me. No more than they could when I spoke to them before the hunt. All they can do is speak.
“I don’t know if they’re damaged or not.” She spoke to Florian through a mouthful of frumenty,12 spattering the linen. “How would I tell? But they’re there.”
“Oh God.”
Not like Florian to sound devout, Ash observed; and put down her spoon, and wiped her bare finger around the all-but-empty bowl, and sucked on the last sweetness as she looked at Floria del Guiz.
Florian said, “That makes me Charles Valois.”
Ash, instantly grimly cheerful, said, “Look on the bright side. Now there’s four hundred of us determined you’re going to stay alive.” She glanced down the table at Olivier de la Marche. “Make that the better part of two and a half thousand.”
“It isn’t a joke!”
“Don’t think about it.” Ash softened her voice. “Don’t think about it. Think about staying alive. That’s normal: everybody wants to do that. Don’t think about what happens if you die—”
“The Faris does her miracle. The Wild Machines force her.” Florian spoke in a strained undertone. “Burgundy’s a wasteland. And then so is everything—”
“Don’t think about it.”
Ash closed her dirty hand over Florian’s, tightening her grip until she knew she must be hurting the surgeon.
“Don’t think about it,” Ash repeated. “You can’t afford to. Ask Roberto. Ask Angeli. If you think about what depends on you, yourself, you’d never be a commander, never make yourself crucial to any assault. Just assume you’ll stay alive, Florian. Assume that we don’t care what we have to do to keep you that way.”
In Robert’s growling agreement there is only loyalty; Angelotti’s swift glance has more in it of awareness, of Carthage – and of Burgundy, too, as his blond curly head turns, briefly looking at Olivier de la Marche, at Philippe Ternant, and the bishop.
