by Mary Gentle
“We’ll stay out here,” the woman Margaret said. “No, don’t you worry, your Grace; I’ve brought some sewing with me; Culariac will wake me if I sleep, and I’ll wake him.”
“Oh.” Florian looked blank. “Right.”
A faint, almost imperceptible vibration ran through the stone floor. Ash identified it as a trebuchet strike, not far from the palace itself. The old woman touched her breast, making the sign of the Horns.
Falling in beside Florian as she walked towards the far doorway, Ash murmured, “Where the fuck did they find her?”
“Chosen by lot.” Florian kept her voice equally low.
“God give me strength!”
“That, too.”
“Your damn bishop had better give us some answers.”
“Yes.”
“You picked a real worldly priest there.”
“Why would I want a devout one?”
Jolted by the answer, Ash shoved aside the curtain embroidered with oak leaves. The granite facing of the walls and ceiling gave way to natural limestone. The floor of the passage dipped, so that they walked down a long series of very wide and shallow steps. Ash saw that the torch-holders spiked now into undressed, grey-white stone; the marks of chisels still plain in the walls. Smoke wavered in the draught from air-vents carved into living rock.
“Won’t be so cold if we’re underground,” she remarked pragmatically.
Florian hauled up the train of her gown, where it scraped along the limestone floor, and bundled the cloth up in her arms in front of her as she walked. “My father had his knighthood vigil here. I remember him telling me about this, when I was very young. It’s almost all I can remember of him.” She glanced up at the vaulted ceiling, as if she could see through stone to the ancient palace above. “He was a favourite of Duke Philip. Before he changed his loyalties to the Emperor Frederick.”
“Hell. I knew Fernando had to get it from somewhere.”
“My father was married in Cologne cathedral.” Florian turned her head; smiled briefly at Ash’s evident shock. “We got the news, in the end, from Constanza. Another good reason for me not to have come to your wedding.”
Ash caught her shoe on the uneven stone, stumbling over the threshold in Floria’s wake, and for a second she did not see the smoky, tiny chamber that they entered, but the soaring pillars and gothic arches of the cathedral, the shafts of light, and Fernando reaching out to touch her and say I smell piss…
Worse than a whore! she thought fiercely. He wouldn’t have laughed at a whore.
Ash made the sign of the Horns automatically, aware that Florian was standing stock-still in front of her now, her head raised, staring. The chapel’s terracotta tiles felt uneven, worn by centuries of men walking to the iron grille to celebrate the blood-mass. Ash shivered, in a room barely twenty feet square: claustrophobia not eased by the torchlight falling from above, through the ceiling-grating.
“My feet are cold,” Florian whispered.
“If we’re in here all night, more than your feet will get cold!” Ash kept her voice low with an effort. As her vision adjusted, and filled with dully glittering luminescence, she added, “Green Christ!”
Every free square foot of the walls was covered in mosaic, each square of the mosaic not glass, but precious gem; cut to glow in the shifting torchlight.
“Look at that. A king’s ransom. More than a king’s ransom!” Florian muttered. “No wonder Louis’s jealous.”
“King’s ransom be buggered, you could equip a dozen legions if this lot’s real…” Ash leaned in close, peering at a mosaic of the birth of the Green Christ – his Imperial Jewish mother sprawled under the oak, half-dead from bringing forth her son; the Baby suckling at the Sow; the Eagle, in the oak’s branches, lifting up his head, depicted about to take wing on the flight that will – in three days – bring Augustus and his legions to the right spot in the wild German forest. And in the next panel, Christus Viridianus heals his mother, with the leaves of the oak.
“Might be rubies.” Ash winced at the wax running from the candlestick over the back of her hand. She held the light closer to the wall, studying the neat squares that delineated a puddle of birth-blood. She felt a sudden nausea. With an effort, she added, “Might just be garnets.”
Florian walked a quick circuit of the walls, glancing at each panel briefly – Viridianus and his legion in Judea, gone native after the Persian wars; Viridianus speaking with the Jewish elders; Viridianus and his officers worshipping Mithras. Then Augustus’s funeral, the coronation of his true son, and, in the background, the adopted son Tiberius and the conspirators, the desire for the oak tree upon which they will hang Viridianus – bones broken, no blood shed – already plain on their faces.
One circuit of the room, back to where Ash stands by the birth; and the last panel is Constantine, three centuries later, converting the Empire to the religion of Viridianus, whom the Jews still consider nothing more than a Jewish prophet, but whom the followers of Mithras have long and faithfully known to be the Son of the Unconquered Sun.
“Doesn’t look like anyone’s held mass yet,” Ash said doubtfully.
In the centre of the room, two stone blocks are set, to chain the bulls. Between them, an iron grate is let into the floor, stiff with old black debris of sacrifices. Featureless darkness showed beneath. The iron bars were not wet.
Ash tried the iron gates that closed off the shallow passage leading up towards the air. The heavy chains hardly rattled. She stared, for a moment, at the ridged stone slope, down which the bull is led into this box-like room.
When she turned back, she saw a glimmer in Florian’s eye – recognisably laughter. Half-frowning, half on the verge of a giggle, Ash muttered, “What? What? ”
“They bring a bull for the mass,” the older woman said, and snuffled, sounding all herself again. “Wonder what they’d make of a couple of old cows?”
“Florian!”
Without any hesitation, the surgeon crossed to the remaining exit: a small wooden door set into the corner of the room. She opened it. The dark stairwell beyond flared with torchlight stirred up by the draught of the door’s opening. One glance over her shoulder, and Florian hauled up her gowns and robe clear of her feet, and sidled through the door. Ash stared for a long minute, watching her coiffed head sink lower, walking down the cramped spiral of the stair.
“Wait up, damn it!”
The narrow stair, set into the thick wall, turned back so swiftly on itself that she could never have come down it successfully in armour. The chill granite left damp marks on her furred demi-gown. Florian blocked the light from below. Ash groped in her wake, feeling the wood of a door jamb, and then came out suddenly into an open space with a vast drop in front of her.
“Shiiit…”
“This is old. Monks’ work.” Florian, beside Ash, also stared out into the brick-lined shaft. “Maybe God’s grace kept them from falling off!”
Torchlight came down from above through the iron sacrificial grille. It barely stirred the shadows on the walls of the shaft. Far below, more lights glowed – the steadier, less smoky glow of many candles.
The door that Ash had come out of opened all but sheer on to the shaft. Now her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she saw that a stair ran down, deosil, along the side of the wall. Descending…
“Let’s go.” She touched Florian’s arm, and slid herself along the tiny platform to put one foot on the first step.
A knee-high wall, studded with mosaic, was the only barrier between the stair and the drop – by no means high enough to be reassuring: one slip, and a body would pivot straight over the stonework.
“Bugger this!” Florian muttered. Glancing back, Ash saw her face shiny with sweat. Her own breath caught in her throat.
“Hang on to my belt.”
“No. I’ll manage.”
“Sooner we’re down, the better.”
Inhaling the scent of pitch and beeswax, and the dampness of stone and brick, Ash took a bre
ath, set herself a mental pace, and began to walk down the stairs with as much ease as if they were defender’s stairs in any castle. The steps were shallow, worn away in the middle with the tread of countless years. At the corner of the shaft, the stairway made a sharp right-angle; continued on down. Her eyes adjusting more now to the light from below, she could see the sketched lines on the far walls: the glitter of mosaic: the stair that they would have to descend. She kept her gaze away from the dark void on her right-hand side. Down and turn. Down and turn. Down: turn.
“There has to be another way in!” Florian snapped, behind her.
“Maybe not. Who’s going to come down here but the priests?” Another turn. Pulling off her glove and letting her hand stray out to brush the wall, she kept her orientation; counteracting the pull of the drop. “There’s your qualification for the Duke’s chaplain, Florian – doesn’t suffer from vertigo!”
Another snuffling giggle from behind. “‘Duchess’s chaplain’!”
I wish it was that easy. ,
The yellow glow of candles encompassed them. Feeling their heat, Ash glanced up, realising that their light now blocked out the view of the Mithras grating above. She was no more than fifteen or twenty feet above floor-level now. Above tiles marbled red and black – no: terracotta, but with the traces of every day’s mass still spilling down from the plain stone block that is the altar.
The last corner: the last steps: the little wall ending; and she stepped out on to the bottom of the shaft, into the chapel, the skin on the pads of her fingers worn rough. Pulling her glove on, Ash said, “Thank God for that!”
Florian jostled her, coming off the stairway in haste. She reached up and wiped her sweating face. Her fair hair glowed in the light of dozens of candles.
“Thank God indeed,” a voice said, from the shadows beyond the altar, “but with more devoutness, possibly, demoiselle?”
“Bishop John!”
“Your Grace,” he acknowledged Floria del Guiz.
Surprised to find her knees a little weak, Ash took a few determined steps about the chapel that stood at the bottom of the sacrificial shaft. Now, in the candlelight, she could see that it was wider than the shaft itself to east and west: continuing on under a low brick barrel vault either end, one vault containing church plate, the other a painted shrine.
How long before we can ask him why Burgundy? And how long before he’ll answer?
A novice in a green and white cassock bowed his way past his bishop, carrying a lit wax taper, vanishing up the narrow stairs that clung to the walls. Ash smelled the sweetness of beeswax candles. Within a minute, every inch of this lower end of the shaft glittered. Masons had squared off the limestone; craftsmen had laid mosaics of the Tree, the Bull, the Boar, and – around the marble altar slab, dark with congealed blood – a square of floor taken up by an oval-eyed Green Christ.
With almost simultaneous movement, Florian reached up and dragged the linen coif from her head, and Ash pushed back her hood and took off her hat. She stifled a grin – both of us have been dressing as men for too long! – and felt her chilled body relax in the growing heat from the candles.
Beside her, Floria looked questioningly at the Burgundian bishop. “Do we celebrate a mass now?”
“No.”
The little round-faced man’s voice fell flatly.
“We don’t?” Ash realised that she could hear the footsteps of other priests or novices, the sound coming from above, through the grating; but neither the smell nor the sound of a bull-calf.
“I may be accused of trying to repopulate Burgundy on my own,” the Bishop of Cambrai said, small black eyes gleaming with something that might have been amusement, “and of loving the fair flesh far too much, but one thing I am not, Madame cher Duchesse Floria, is a hypocrite. I had the opportunity to observe not just your captain here, but yourself, during our meeting in the Tour Philippe. I need not repeat what you said. You’re so far estranged from your faith that I think it will take more than one night to bring you in charity with God again.”
“Surely not, your Grace?” Ash said smoothly. “The surgeon – the Duchess – here has always taken field-mass with us, and she works with deacons in our hospital—”
“I’m not the inquisition.” Bishop John shifted his gaze to her. “I know a heretic when I see one, and I know a good woman driven from God by the cruelty of what circumstances have caused her to do. That’s Floria, daughter, and it’s you too. If you ever had any faith, I think you lost it in Carthage.”
Ash’s lips pressed together for a second. “Long before that.”
“Yes?” His soft black brows went up. “But you’ve come back from Carthage talking of machines and devices, a woman bred like one of Mithras’s bulls – and nothing at all of the hand of God in this. ‘Maid of Burgundy’.”
Ash shifted, under her cloak, rubbing one fist absently across her belly under the demi-gown.
Bishop John turned back to Florian. “I can’t withhold communion if you ask for it, but I can strongly advise that you don’t ask.”
Beside Ash, Floria del Guiz huffed an exasperated breath, folding her arms across her body. The cloth of her full gown fell down in sculptured folds about her, trailing on the uneven terracotta tiles. The warm light of the candles put a deeper gold into her hair, that fell to her shoulders now it was unconfined by her linen coif; limned her profile; but did little, even warming her skin-tone, to hide the gauntness of her face now.
“So what do we do?” Floria asked acidly. “Sit around down here for the night? If that’s all, I could be much more use to your duchy if I had some sleep.”
Bishop John watched her with a brilliant gaze. “Your Grace, I’m a man of the church, with a very large family of hopeful bastards; and more to come, I should think, flesh being what it is. How should I cast the first stone at you? Even without a mass, this is still your vigil.”
“Which means?”
“You’ll know that, by the end of it.” The Bishop of Cambrai reached out, touching the altar as if for reassurance. “So will all of us. Pardon me if I tell you that Messire de la Marche is as anxious as I am to know what you make of this.”
“Bet he is,” Ash murmured. “Okay, so no mass: what does she do, your Grace?”
The flames of the candles flared and dipped, shadows racing across the mosaic walls. The acrid smoke caught in the back of Ash’s throat, and she stifled a cough.
“She takes up the ducal crown, if God wills it. I advise some time be spent in meditation.” Bishop John bowed his head slightly to Floria.
Ash gave way and cleared her throat with a hacking cough. Wiping at her streaming eyes, she said, “I expected this all to be planned out, your Grace. You’re saying Florian can do what she likes?”
“My brother Charles spent his night in prayer here, in full armour, fourteen hours without a break. That told me, at least, what Duke we were getting. I remember my father told me he brought wine, and roasted the Bull’s flesh.” The bishop’s small pursed mouth curved in a smile. “He never said, but I suspect some woman kept him company. A night in a cold chapel is a long time to be alone.”
Ash found herself grinning appreciatively at Charles’s half-brother; Philip’s son.
“You,” he added, to Floria, “bring a woman with you; one who dresses like a man.”
Ash’s smile faded.
“As you’ve guessed,” Bishop John of Cambrai said, “your aunt Jeanne Châlon has spoken to me.”
“And what did she say?”
A quite genuine distress showed on the churchman’s face at Florian’s sharp demand. Ash – who has enough experience of men like this, in positions of power like this – thought, What’s that old cow been saying to him? Two minutes ago it was ‘Madame chère Duchesse’!
The bishop spoke directly, and with distaste. “Is it true that you have had a female lover?”
“Ah.” There was a smile on Florian’s face, but it had very little to do with humour. “Now let me guess. T
here is a noblewoman and a spinster – her niece is made Duchess – but there’s a terrible scandal in the family. She comes to tell you before it all gets out as rumour. Tells you she has to confess all this, it’s her duty.”
“Cover your ass,” Ash rumbled, startled to find herself sounding very like Robert Anselm. She added, “Jesus, that cow! You didn’t hit her hard enough!”
Floria did not take her eyes off the bishop.
“More or less,” John admitted. “Should she have preferred family loyalty to warning me that as well as dressing like a man, you act like a man in other ways?”
A few seconds of silence went by. Floria continued to stare at the bishop. “The technical charge was that she was Jewish, treating Christian patients.”
“‘She’?”
“Esther. My wife.” Florian smiled very wryly, and very wearily. “My female lover. You can find it all out in the records of the Empty Chair.”
“Rome’s under darkness, and you’d never make the journey,” Ash cut in. “Don’t say anything you don’t want to say.”
“Oh, I want to say it.” Florian’s eyes were fiery. “Let the bishop here know what he’s getting. Because I am Duchess.”
Ash thought the Bishop of Cambrai flinched at that one.
“Esther and I became lovers when I finished studying medicine at Padua.” Floria folded her arms, the cloth of her robe bundled up to her body. “She never, not for one instant, thought I was a man. When we were arrested in Rome, she’d just had a baby. We weren’t getting on too well. Because of that.”
“She had a baby—?” Ash stopped and blushed.
“Just some man she fucked one night,” the surgeon said contemptuously. “He wasn’t her lover. We had fights about that. We had more fights about Joseph – the baby. I was jealous, I suppose. She gave so much time to him. We were in the cells for two months. Joseph died, of pneumonia. Neither of us could cure him. The day after that, they took Esther out and chained her up and burned her. The day after that, I had a message that Tante Jeanne had paid my ransom: I was free to go. So long as I left Rome. The abbot there said they’d have to burn male sodomites, but what did it matter what a woman did? So long as I didn’t practise medicine again.”
