by Mary Gentle
“If I’m not in the infirmary, I’ll be in the almonry; they wanted to talk to me about food stocks,” Floria del Guiz said unemphatically. “When there’s news from the wall, come and find me.”
II
It became mercifully dark not long after the abbey bells rang for Nones.
The short winter day died to dusk. Ash stretched her leg as she leaned back against the hearth-surround in the company’s tower. Green ivy still hung on the stonework. Burned flesh stabbed pain into the back of her thigh. It is still the day of Christ’s birth, she thought, dazed.
The Christ’s Mass massacre.
Blanche, her yellow hair matted under a filthy coif, wiped her now-thin hands on her kittle. “We’ve run out of goose grease in the infirmary. Too many Greek Fire burns.”
Ash clenched her fists behind her back. Under the bandage, raw flesh yelled pain at her. Peeling the plate and cloth from her injured thigh had made her bite deep teeth marks into the wooden grip of her dagger.
“How many incapacitated?”
“You know men,” Blanche snapped. “All of them say they’ll fight tomorrow. I’d say six of them will still be in bed next week. If the walls are standing!”
The woman’s asperity, Ash saw, was not directed at her. Part of it was plain concern and an evident affection for the injured. The rest was self-blame, even in the face of lack of materials.
Ash wanted to say something comforting, could think of nothing that was not condescending.
“Any that can walk, send them down here. I’ll be talking to the lads.”
Blanche limped away. Ash noted a respect in the way that archers and billmen stood aside for her: a middle-aged woman with bad teeth, growing gaunt from starvation, who in easier times they may each have paid a small coin to fuck. With a sense of sadness, she thought, I should have seen that in her before. Not left it to Florian to find.
Angelotti, approaching the fire as Blanche left it, said, “How many civilians did we save?”
“We never got out of the dead ground in front of the postern gate. They saturated the area with Greek Fire from the engines. You were up on the walls: what happened?”
The gunner, his astonishingly beautiful face powder-blackened, shrugged lithe shoulders. “The golems tore people apart. They began a little way beyond our gate and went through them like herd-dogs. Those men and women that ran as far as their camp lines were shot down with bows. We shattered one golem with cannon fire, since it obliged us by walking straight towards the wall for the space of five minutes; but for the rest we shot with bow and arquebus, with no success…”
“The burns are bad,” Ash said, into his silence. “Digorie and Richard Faversham are upstairs praying, not to much answer, I think. No tiny miracles, Angeli. No loaves and fishes, no healing. Being on Burgundy’s side has its problems.”
The Italian touched his St Barbara medal. “It would have taken more than a small miracle. The intercession of all the saints, perhaps; there are six hundred dead out there.”
Six hundred men, women and children, jointed like the fowls Henri Brant cooks in the cauldrons in the kitchens, and lying on the cold, black earth between the city walls and the besieging camp.
And what will Gelimer do now?
“De la Marche is still debriefing the Faris. I left them to it.” Ash flinched again, putting weight on her burned leg. “Let’s get everybody in here, Angeli. I’m going to talk to them, before I talk to the centeniers. Make sure they understand what’s going on. Then I’ll tell them what we’re going to do now.”
From one corner of the hall, Carracci’s recorder ran through a sequence of notes, halted; ran through them again. One of the pages touched him on the arm and he fell silent. The stink of tallow-dip tapers rose up. With the slit windows shuttered, and the faint lights, Ash could not see as far as the back of the hall. Men filed in, sitting down on the heaps of belongings on the flagstones, exchanging quiet words. Men-at-arms; men, women and children from the baggage train; some faces – Euen Huw, Geraint ab Morgan, Ludmilla Rostovnaya – still greasily smoke-stained from the abortive rescue sally.
The lances of the company filed in, sat down, watching her; and the talk died down to a waiting silence.
“What we have to think about,” Ash said, “is a long-term solution.”
She did not speak loudly. There was no need. Other than her voice, the only noise came from a few drops of melted ice falling down the throat of the chimney behind her, and hissing into the fire. Their faces watched her, with intent attention.
“We’ve been thinking too close to home, and too short-term.” Ash shifted her shoulder off the wall and began to walk between the groups of seated men. Heads turned, following her in the smoky hall. She folded her arms, walking with a deliberateness that concealed the pain of the burn-wound. “Hardly surprising – we’ve been having our asses kicked from here to breakfast. We’ve had to fight our own battles before we could do much thinking ahead. But I think now is the time. If only because, as far as Gelimer is concerned, we don’t know if we’ve still got a truce.”
She became aware of Robert Anselm and Dickon de Vere by the door; nodded acknowledgement but didn’t speak, not breaking her train of reasoning. She continued to walk, a woman in armour, among men sitting with their arms around their knees, lifting their heads as she passed.
“We’ve been concentrating on keeping a Duke or Duchess of Burgundy alive. Because Burgundy is what stands against the great demons in the southern desert, Burgundy is what stops them using their miracle-worker to wipe out the world. And now we have their miracle-worker right here, in Dijon.”
There was no overt dramatisation in the way she spoke: she could have been in her own command tent, thinking aloud. A baby cried, and was hushed. She touched Carracci briefly on the shoulder as she walked past him.
“So it ought to be simple. We kill the Faris. Then it doesn’t matter if Burgundy falls, because she’s dead, and the Wild Machines have lost their – channel,” Ash said, choosing the Visigoth woman’s own word. “Their channel for what they’re going to do: put out the sun and make the world as if we had never been. Except that it’s not simple.”
“Because she’s your sister?” Margaret Schmidt spoke up.
“She’s not my sister. Except by blood.” Ash grinned, altered her tone, and said, “The only close relatives I have are you lot, God help me!”
There was an appreciative chuckle at that.
“It’s not simple.” Ash cut off the noise. “We’re not thinking ahead. If the Faris is dead, but the war here is still lost, then the Visigoths will raze Burgundy from sea to sea – they have to. If for no other reason, then because they don’t want Sultan Mehmet in Carthage with the army that took down Byzantium.”
“Fucking right,” Robert Anselm rumbled.
“And if Burgundy’s gone, if the blood of the Dukes of Burgundy no longer exists, then it won’t matter if the Wild Machines take a thousand years to breed another Faris – as soon as they do it, the world is gone. Wiped out, changed, the moment they succeed. And everything we’ve done here will be gone – as if we had never been born.”
Plainly, those men who had been present in the abbey had been talking; there was little surprise at what she said.
“And so we have to win this war,” Ash added.
She couldn’t stop a smile. It was answered here and there: Geraint ab Morgan; Pieter Tyrrell.
“Sounds simple, doesn’t it?”
“Piece of piss!” an anonymous voice remarked, from the ill-lit gloom.
“You think only the Burgundians care about the war here?” Ash turned in the direction of the voice, and picked out John Burren. “You have a stake. You all have countries; all mercenaries do. You’re English, Welsh, Italian, German. Well, the Visigoths have fucked most of those lands, John Burren, and they’ll get across the Channel yet.”
Dickon de Vere opened his mouth to say something and Robert Anselm’s elbow landed heavily in the boy’s ribs
. The youngest de Vere shut up with surprising good grace.
“If Burgundy gets wiped out, every one of us who’s died in this campaign has died for no reason. This is what we’re going to do.” Ash reached the middle of the hall again, still cupping her elbows in her hands. She looked around at the men. “We’re going to fight back. When I left de la Marche, he had five separate scribes there to keep up with everything the Faris is telling him. We’re going to take the war to the Visigoths. And we have to do it first – before that lot out there roll right over us!”
She glanced up into the smoke-blackened rafters, paused, went on:
“We know what their weak points are, now. So. First, we need to raise the siege – I grant you that’s the difficult part. We need to get our Duchess Florian out of Dijon, and away.” Ash smiled at the low noises of approval. “Then, we’re going to fight beside the allies that we’ll have. And we will have allies, because Gelimer is looking weaker every hour. We’ll have the Turks and the French, minimum.”
There were nods of agreement. She tapped her fist in her palm, went on concisely:
“We can kill the Faris, but that’s just a precaution – in time, there’ll be more where she came from. We can’t reach the Stone Golem – they won’t let us raid Carthage like that twice! So what we have to do – the only thing we can do – is take the war to the Wild Machines. Win here, and take the war to Africa. Give the Visigoth Empire to the Sultan, if we have to! We have to take the war south, and we have to destroy the Wild Machines themselves.”
She paused for a moment, to let it sink in. She picked Angelotti and the other gunners out of the gloom, and nodded towards them:
“Once we get through the people around them, the Wild Machines can’t fight. They’re rocks. They can’t do anything except speak to the Faris and the Stone Golem. I dare say Master Angelotti, and as many dozen powder-ships and bombards as we can muster, can reduce them to a lot of confused gravel in very short order.” Ash nodded, acknowledging Angelotti’s bright, sudden grin. “So that’s where we’re aiming – North Africa. And we aim to be there by the spring.”
Those that had been in Carthage would have talked to those men who remained in Dijon. Ash looked keenly around in the gloom, watching faces; seeing determination, apprehension, confidence.
“There’s no other way to do this,” Ash said. “It won’t be easy, even with what we know. If, once we’ve raised this siege, some of you want to go back to England, or travel further north out of the darkness, I won’t stop you: you can leave with your pay. What we’re doing is dangerous; trying to fight back and get to North Africa will get a lot of us killed.”
She lifted her hand, cutting off what several people began to say.
“I’m not appealing to your pride. Forget it. I’m saying this is as dangerous as any other war we’ve fought in, and like every other time, those who are going to quit should do it now.”
She could already identify some who might: a few of the Italian gunners, maybe Geraint ab Morgan. She nodded thoughtfully to herself, hearing a black joke or an ironic comment made in an undertone; three hundred and fifty able-bodied soldiers regarding her with the blank, bland faces of men who are at once afraid and practical.
“So when are we going to kick three legions’ asses?” The English crossbowman, John Burren, jerked a thumb at the masonry walls; plainly intending to indicate the Visigoth legions encamped around Dijon.
Before she answered him, Ash nodded a general dismissal. “Okay. Lads, get your kit sorted. Talk to your officers. I want an officer meeting first thing tomorrow morning.”
She turned back to the English crossbowman.
“‘When’?” she repeated, and grinned at John Burren. “Hopefully, before Gelimer decides we haven’t got a truce any more, and all three legions come right over these fucking walls!”
She visited the quarters of the Burgundian commanders, going from house to barracks to palace; holding much the same conversation everywhere in the dark winter afternoon of Christmas Day. Where possible, she spoke with the Burgundian men who would be fighting. She covered miles on the cobbled streets of Dijon, changing her escort every hour.
The light cloud cover cleared, stars came out; all that did not change was the crowd in front of the almonry, holding at a steady thousand strong all through the night, waiting for the tiny dole of dark bread and nettle-beer.
The seven stars in the sky shone bright in the frost: the Plough clearly visible over the spires of the abbey of St Stephen’s.
Ash left her escort outside the two-storey red-tiled building in the abbey grounds that did duty as the Abbot’s house; entering and passing through guards and monks alike with unquestioned authority.
The sound of a Carthaginian flute echoed down the cramped stairs. She unbuckled her helm, and shook out her short hair. Her eyes, that had been blurred with thought, with attention to others’ words, sharpened. She scratched through her hair with bitten-nailed fingers, and gave a kind of shrug that settled her shoulders in her armour. That done, she bent her head and walked up the narrow, low-ceilinged stairs to the upper room.
“Madam – Captain,” a tall, lean monk corrected himself. “You have missed the Abbot. He was just here, praying with the mad foreign woman.”
“The Abbot’s a charitable man.” Ash didn’t break step on her way to the door. “There’s no need for you to come in. I’ll only be a few minutes.”
She ducked her head under the thick oak lintel, entering the further room, ignoring the monk’s very half-hearted protest. The floor of the house was uneven under her boots, warped boards creaking. As she straightened, she took in pale beams gold in a lantern’s light, white plaster between them, no scrap of furniture, and a heap of blankets beside the diamond-paned window.
Violante and the Faris sat together on the floor by the lantern. Ash saw their heads turning as she came in.
The blankets moved as the boards shrieked underfoot. Sweat-darkened grey hair became visible: Adelize sitting up and rubbing at her eyes with a chubby fist.
“I didn’t know you were here.” Ash stared at the Faris.
“Your abbot has put the male slaves in another room. I am here with the women.”
The sound of the flute came again as the Faris spoke, plainly from somewhere else in the Abbot’s house. Ash moved her gaze to Violante, to Adelize; back to the woman who now – hair cropped short, and in someone’s over-large Swiss doublet and hose – seemed even more her twin.
“There’s a family resemblance,” Ash said, her mouth drying.
She could not take her eyes off the idiot woman. Adelize sat wrapped in many woollen blankets, rocking and humming to herself. She began to bang her fist on her knee. It was a second before Ash realised that she was keeping time with the flute music.
“Shit,” Ash said. “She’s why they killed so many of us, isn’t it? They thought we’d end up like that. Shit. You ever wonder if that’s what you’ve got to look forward to?”
The child Violante said something rapid.
“She doesn’t understand you, but she doesn’t like the tone of your voice,” the Faris explained.
As if disturbed by the voices, Adelize stopped rocking and clutched at her stomach. She began to whimper and mew. She said a word. Ash barely understood the slaves’ Carthaginian; made it out at last: “Pain! Pain!”
“What’s the matter with her? Has she been injured?”
Violante spoke again. The Faris nodded.
“She says, Adelize is hungry. She says, Adelize has never known hunger before. She was cared for, in the birthing-rooms. She doesn’t understand the pain of an empty gut.”
Ash stepped forward. The rattle of her armour, which she no longer much heard, sounded loud in the enclosed space. The middle-aged woman scrambled up on to her feet and backed away, shedding blankets.
“Wait—” Ash stopped moving. She said, in a deliberately soothing tone, “I’m not here to hurt you. Adelize. Adelize, I’m not here to hurt.”
“Not like!” Violante began rearranging the blankets around the woman. Adelize absently lifted the cloth up, picking at her sagging belly under her tunic, and scratching at grey pubic hair. A great web of white lines and stretch-marks seamed her thighs, belly, and breasts. Violante pulled the blankets down, adding something in rapid Carthaginian.
“She says, Adelize is frightened of people in numbers, and in war-gear.” The Faris at last got to her feet. “The child is correct. Adelize will have seen few men other than those my father Leofric bred to her, and few people in number at all.”
Ash stared at Adelize in the poor light. Do I look like her? The woman was heavy around the jaw, and her eyes were sunk in puffy flesh; she might have been anywhere between forty and sixty. Or even older: there was something naive about the unlined softness of her cheeks.
A wrenching pity moved her, overlain by disgust.
“Christ!” Ash said again. “She’s retarded.2 She really is.”
Adelize’s blankets moved. In the lantern light, Ash caught a brief glimpse of something wriggling back into the folds; and the faint smell in the room made sense to her. Rat. Violante spoke, unintelligibly.
“What?”
The Faris bent to pick up a blanket and wrap it around her own shoulders. Her breath huffed white in the air. “She says, show respect for her mother.”
“Her mother?”
“Violante is your full sister. And niece,” the Faris added, with a quiet smile on her face at Ash’s disturbance. “My father Leofric bred our brother back to our mother. Violante is one of the children. I brought two of the boys away with me.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Why? ” Ash burst out.
The woman ignored that. Ash had a moment to muse, You would think, when she has my face, that it would be easy for me to read it; then the Faris said, “Why are you here?”
“What?”
“Why have you come here?” the Faris demanded. At some time in the past few hours, she had washed her hands and face; the skin was pale in the guttering lamp’s light. Dark-eyed, clear-skinned; and now with hair that barely covered her ears. She spoke in a voice hoarse with long explanations. “Why? Am I to be executed now? Or do I have as long as to tomorrow? Have you come here to tell me what your Duchess Florian decrees?”
