by Mary Gentle
“No,” Ash said, shaking her head absently, ignoring the hard edge to the Faris’s tone, “I came to see my mother.”
It was not what she intended to say. Certainly it was not what she intended to say in front of other people. Her hands chilled with shock. She stripped off her gauntlets, re-buckled the straps, and hung them off the grip of her sword. Crossing the floor, she squatted down in front of Adelize. Her scabbard’s chape scraped the floorboards.
“She doesn’t know who I am,” she said.
“She does not know me, either,” the Faris said. “Did you expect her to recognise you as a daughter?”
Ash did not answer the Faris immediately. She squatted close enough to Adelize to smell the old-urine-and-milk stench from her skin. An unguarded,. wild lurch of the idiot-woman’s arm had her up on her feet, automatically, combat reflexes triggered, hand gripping her dagger.
Adelize reached out. She stroked the muddy leather of Ash’s boot. She looked up. “Not to be afraid. Not to be afraid.”
“Oh, Jesu.” Ash wiped her bare hand across her face. It came away wet.
One of the rats, a curly-pelted white one, ran up to Adelize. Delighted, the woman forgot everything else in petting it with heavy fingers. The animal licked her.
“Yes.” Ash looked away, bewildered. She stepped back, finding herself standing beside the Faris. “Yes, I thought she’d know me. If I’m her daughter, she ought to know me. I ought to feel she’s my mother.”
Very tentatively, the Faris put her hand into Ash’s and gripped it; clasping her with cold, identical fingers.
“How many children has she had?”
“I looked in our records.” The Faris did not remove her hand. “She littered every year for the first fifteen years; then three more litters after that.”
“Christ! It almost makes me glad I’m barren.” A flick of her gaze to the Faris, Ash’s sight blurring. “Almost.”
Another of the rats – patched fur dim in this light, but she was almost sure it was Lickfinger – ran up Adelize’s arm to her shoulder. The woman cocked her head, chuckling as the rat’s whiskers tickled her face. She paid no attention to Ash.
“Does she even know she’s had babies?”
The Faris looked affronted. “She knows. She misses them. She likes small, warm things. What I believe she does not know is that babies grow. Since hers were taken away at birth to wet-nurses, she does not know they change to become men and women.”
Blankly, Ash said, “Wet-nurses?”
“If she nursed, it would hinder conception. She has given birth eighteen times,” the Faris said. “Violante was her next-to-last. Violante does not hear the Stone Golem.”
“You do,” Ash said sharply.
“I do. Still.” The Visigoth woman sighed. “None other of Adelize’s children were – successful, except for me. And for you, of course.” She frowned; and Ash thought Do I look like that? Older, when I frown? The Faris went on, “Our father Leofric wonders now, how many others he culled too young. He has kept all of Leovigild’s siring, now, and all of Adelize’s children born this spring. We have two living brothers, and another sister.”
Ash became aware that she was gripping the Faris’s hand tightly enough to hurt. Embarrassed, she stared down at the crooked floorboards. Her breath came short, her chest burned.
“Fucking hell, I can’t take it in.” She lifted her gaze to the Faris’s face, at her side; thought, She’s nineteen or twenty, the same as I am, and wondered why the Visigoth woman should suddenly appear so young.
“It need not be twenty years before there’s another Faris,” Ash speculated, voice flat in the cold room. “If Leofric weren’t mad as a March hare now, and if Gelimer believed even half his intelligence about the Wild Machines… Maybe, if they looked at what they’ve got, there’d be another one of you in a few months: next spring or summer.”
The Faris said, “I will tell you what my lord Caliph Gelimer would do, if he credited what we say of the Wild Machines. He would think them a superior kind of Stone Golem. He would think them wise voices of war, advising him how to spread the Empire to all civilised lands. And he would be seeking a way to build more Stone Golems, and breed more of me, so that he could have not one general and not one machina rei militaris but dozens.”
“Sweet Christ.”
The Faris’s hand was warm and slick in her own. Ash loosened her grip. She said, her eyes still on Adelize, “Could House Leofric build another Stone Golem?”
“It is not impossible. In time.” The Faris shrugged. “If my father Leofric lives.”
“Oh, Jesu,” Ash said, aware of the chill air freezing her fingertips, of the stars outside the window, of the smell of unwashed bodies subdued by the cold. “The Turk won’t like that. Nor will anyone else. A machine for talking to the great war-demons of the south – they wouldn’t rest until they had one too. Nor would the French, the English, the Rus…”
The Faris, watching Adelize, said absently, “Or if our knowledge were lost, and Leofric dead, and the House destroyed, so that there were still only the one Stone Golem – they will not let us keep it.”
“They wouldn’t rest until they’d taken Africa, taken Carthage, destroyed it utterly.”
“But Gelimer does not credit it. He thinks it all some political plot of House Leofric.” The Faris shivered under her blanket. She said thickly, “And I have nothing more to do with the fortune of the Visigoth Empire, do I? Nothing more to do, myself, than sit here and wonder if I am to be killed, come morning.”
“Shouldn’t think so. What you’re telling de la Marche is far too useful.”
It rang false as she said it. Ash took her eyes off Adelize and finally let herself realise, I am standing in the same room as this woman, she is unarmed, I have a sword, I have a dagger; if her death were a fait accompli, Florian would just have to wear it. There probably wouldn’t be a civil war.
She expected agonising indecisiveness.
Kill her. In front of her mother, her sister? My sister? She is my sister. This, for all of what it is, is still my blood.
What she felt was a warm relaxation of tension.
Ash said with rough humour, “Sweet Green Christ! Haven’t you got enough troubles without worrying if your sister’s going to kill you? Faris, I won’t. Right now, I can’t. But I know I should.”
She rested her hand across her face again, briefly; and then looked up at the Visigoth woman.
“It’s Florian. You see. The danger to Florian. I can’t let that carry on.” The words stuck on her tongue; sheer weariness tripping her up. She found herself waving her arms as excitedly as an Englishman. “Can you keep them out?”
“The Wild Machines?”
“Keep them out. Not listen.”
The expression on the Faris’s face, dimly visible now in the lamplight, shifted between fear and confusion. “I – feel – them. I told the King-Caliph I did not hear the Stone Golem, and I do not; I have spoken no word to it in five weeks. But I feel it. And through it, the Machinae Ferae … there is a sensation—”
“Pressure,” Ash said. “As if someone were forcing you.”
“You could not withstand them, when they spoke through the Stone Golem to you, in Carthage,” the Faris said softly. “And their power is growing, their darkness spreading, they will reach me, here; use me to change—”
“If Florian dies.” Ash squatted again. She reached out, carefully, and touched Adelize’s greasy grey-white hair. The woman stiffened. Ash began small stroking movements. “It’s Florian. I can’t let you go on being a danger to her. If you live, and the Wild Machines use you…”
“While we besieged you, I tried to break the link with the machina rei militaris,” the Faris said. “I used a slave-priest, so he could tell no one and be believed. He prayed, but the voice of the machine stayed with me.”
“So did I.” Ash stopped stroking Adelize’s matted hair. “So did I! And it didn’t work for me either!”
Astonished
laughter: she found herself grabbing the Faris’s hands, the two of them laughing, and Adelize looked around, gazing from one to the other, from Ash to the Faris, and back again.
“Same!” she crowed triumphantly. She pointed from face to face. “Same!”
Ash bit her tongue. It was quite accidental; it stung; she tasted blood in her mouth. She thought, Please say you know me.
The fat woman reached up and stroked the Faris’s face. She moved her fingers towards Ash. Ash’s stomach twisted. The soft, plump fingers touched her skin, stroked her cheek, hesitated at the scars, retreated.
“Same?” Adelize said questioningly.
Ash’s eyes filled. No water spilled down her cheek. She touched Adelize’s hand gently, and stood up.
“There may well be more bred the same as you,” Ash said, “but if you’d gone back and destroyed the Stone Golem – there’s only one machina rei militaris. That would have cut you off from the Wild Machines. And it would have cut them off. They’d have to wait for another Gundobad or another Radonic, to build them another machine. Harder than breeding brats.”
“Some men would have followed me. The ones I led in Iberia, who’ve known me many years. Most would not. And Carthage is well prepared against its victorious generals returning to overthrow a King-Caliph.”
“You might have tried!” Ash grinned at herself, then, and shook her head ruefully. “Okay. I take your point. But if you’d destroyed the Stone Golem, I wouldn’t be worrying about whether I should kill my sister now.”
“Not kill!” Adelize said fiercely.
Ash glanced down, startled. Violante knelt at Adelize’s side, obviously whispering a translation; the retarded woman glared up, pointing her finger at Ash, and then at the Faris. “Not kill!” she repeated.
A physical pain hurt her. There is something wrong with my heart, Ash thought. Her clenched fist pressed against her armour, over her breast, as if that could relieve her. The sharp, hollow pain hurt her again.
She reached out and ruffled Violante’s hair. The child flinched away from her. She touched Adelize’s hand. Stumbling, she turned and walked out of the room, ducking the lintel, striding past the thin monk; saying nothing when she picked up her escort outside the Abbot’s house, nothing until she reached the palace, and the Duchess’s quarters.
“I’m here to see Florian.”
The bead-bright eyes of Jeanne Châlon peered around the carved oaken door. “She is not well. You cannot see her.”
“I can.” Ash leaned one plate-covered arm up against the wood. “Are you going to try and stop me?”
One of the waiting-women, Tilde, peered around Jeanne’s shoulder. “She is not well, Demoiselle-Captain. We’ve had to ask my lord de la Marche to come back tomorrow.”
“Not well?” Ash’s mind sharpened, came into focus. She demanded curtly, “What’s wrong with her?”
Tilde glanced at Jeanne Châlon, embarrassed. “Captain-General…”
“I said, what’s wrong with her? What’s her illness?— never mind.” Ash shoved her way past them. She ignored the other servants and waiting-women, shouldering her way through them, leaving them to quarrel with her escort. She crossed to the ducal bed and threw back the hangings.
A stench of spirits made her cough.
The Duchess Florian, fully dressed in man’s doublet, shirt and hose, lay sprawled face-down on the bedding. Her mouth was open, dribbling copiously on the sheet. She breathed out a stink of alcohol. As Ash stood gazing down, Florian began stertorously to snore.
“She was up on the wall this afternoon, wasn’t she?”
Jeanne Châlon’s white face appeared at Ash’s side. “I told her not to. I told her it was not befitting a woman, that she should watch what God Himself turns His face away from. But she wouldn’t heed me. Floria has never heeded me.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” Ash bent down and pulled wolf furs gently over Florian’s legs. “Except in this case. How long was she drinking herself into insensibility?”
“Since sunset.”
Since the hostage massacre.
“Well, she won’t do this again.” Ash’s lips quirked. “We haven’t got the drink. Okay. If she wakes, send for me. If she doesn’t – don’t disturb her.”
She was thoughtful on the way out of the palace, conscious of Ludmilla Rostovnaya’s escort chatting among themselves, and conscious that her legs ached, and that her burned thigh-muscle was throbbing. A haze of weariness floated her along. Not until she stepped out into the bitter, freezing night did she wake to full alertness.
The Plough had sunk around the pole of the sky. A few hours now and the day of Christ’s Mass would be over; the feast-day of Stephen dawning.
A fierce blue light illuminated the night sky, travelling at high speed.
“Incoming! ”
A bolt of Greek Fire hissed in an arc and fell to earth in the square, splashing an inferno across the stone cobbles. A man ran out in the spirit-blue light and raked thatch down from a corner of an outbuilding.
Shit! Is this it? Gelimer’s lost his general, and he’s tired of holding to the truce—?
Another bolt shot high; vanished outside the walls of Dijon on its downward arc.
“Take cover!” Ash ordered, stepping smartly back into the palace’s gatehouse. Another shot – stone, not fire; an impact that jarred up from the flagstones through her feet.
“Motherfuckers!” Rostovnaya murmured something caustic about Visigothic marksmanship: her men growled agreement. “At Christ’s Mass, too! Boss, I thought we had a truce until Lord Fernando goes back to them tomorrow?”
Straining her hearing, praying for sounds to carry in the frozen night air, Ash hears nothing now – no shot dropping on other quarters of the city.
Visigoth siege-engines, placement and ammunition-loads, orders of infantry assault troops! Ash formulated the thought in her mind, not speaking it out loud, and shook her head.
Even if I could speak to the Stone Golem, it wouldn’t be any use my asking. Its reports from here are dependent on courier; it must be two or three weeks out of date.
At least that means Gelimer can’t use it for tactical advice against us. Even if the Wild Machines can use it, he can’t. And Godfrey would hear him. Small mercies—
She stopped, stunned.
“Captain?” Ludmilla Rostovnaya said, in the tone of someone who has said the words before.
“What?”
Ash registered dimly that she heard no more bombardment: that these desultory shots are not the opening barrage before an assault – only some bored gun-crew, probably Gelimer’s Frankish mercenaries. Her realisation blocked out any thankfulness that the truce remains unbroken.
“Do we go back to the tower?” The Rus woman peered through the night and the gatehouse’s gloom, illuminated by guttering Greek Fire. No other impact shook the ground. “Captain? What is it?”
Ash spoke numbly.
“I’ve … just realised something. I can’t think why I didn’t see it before.”
III
The striped boarlet nosed at the snow, whip-thin tail wagging furiously. Ash watched its nose strip up the ice-crust from the soft white beneath. A flurry of black leaf-mould went up. The animal grunted, in deep content, trowelling up acorns.
A man with an acorn-coloured beard put back his hood and turned to look at her.
– Ash.
“Godfrey.”
Exhaustion carried her along the edge of sleep. It was no great difficulty to be simultaneously aware that she lay on her straw palliasse beside the tower’s hearth, the noise of squires‘ and pages’ voices fading in and out as sleep claimed her; and to know that she spoke aloud to the voice in her head.
The dream brought her his image, clear and precise: a big man, broad in the chest, his gnarled feet bare under the hem of his green robes. Some of the grizzled hairs of his beard were white; and there were lines deeply cut at the side of his mouth, and around his eyes. A face beaten by weather; eyes that
have squinted against the outdoor light in winter and summer.
“When I met you first, you were no older than I am now,” Ash said quietly. “Christ Jesu. I feel a hundred.”
– And you look it, too, I’ll lay money on it.
Ash snuffled a laugh. “Godfrey, you ain’t got no respect.”
– For a mangy mongrel mercenary? Of course not.
The dream-Godfrey squatted in the snow, seeming to ignore the ice caking his robe’s hem, and put one hand wrist-deep into snow to support himself. His breath whitened the air. She watched Godfrey tilt his head over – shoulders down, bottom up, until he seemed about to fall – to peer between the legs of the rootling three-week-old boar.
“Godfrey, what the fuck are you doing?”
The dream-figure said, “Attempting to see if this is a boar or a sow. The sows have a better temper.”
“Godfrey, I can’t believe you spent your childhood in the Black Forest trying to look up a boar’s arse!”
“She is a sow.” The snow shifted, and the boar’s head came up, as he shuffled closer.
Ash saw her gold-brown eyes surveying the world suspiciously from under straw-pale lashes of incredible length. The dream-Godfrey talked quietly to her, for a lost amount of time; Ash drifted. She saw him finally reach out a cautious, steady hand.
The sow turned back to rootling. The man’s hand began to scratch her in the place behind her ear where the thick, coarse winter coat is absent, and only soft hairs cover the grey skin. Her nose came up. She snorted: an amazing small, high squeak. He exerted more pressure, digging into the hot skin.
With a soft thump, the female piglet fell over on her side in the snow. She grunted in contentment as the man continued to scratch, her tail wagging.
“Godfrey, you’ll have me believing you were suckled like Our Lord, by a boar!”
Without taking his hand away from the boarlet, Godfrey Maximillian looked back towards her. “Bless you, child, I have been rescuing God’s wild beasts all my life.”
