by Mary Gentle
“Too noisy to sleep if I do it up here, boss?”
He stood taller than her, now, Ash realised; by half a hand-span. She found herself looking slightly up to look into his eyes.
“Get Jean to start on the armour. You go over to St Stephen’s for me.”
Instructions came automatically, now; she didn’t listen to herself telling him what she wanted. The great yellow-and-red chevrons painted on the walls loomed, obscurely, through the gloom; and the smoke of tapers caught at the back of her throat.
“See I’m not disturbed,” she added, and noted that he gave her an immense, excited grin in the dim light, as he turned to carry the Milanese harness down to a corner of the main hall.
He’s too young for this. Too young for tomorrow. Hell, we’re all too young for tomorrow.
She did not bother to change out of her arming doublet and hose, careless of the points dangling from its mail inserts. Hauling the oldest of her fur-lined demi-gowns over the top of it, she moved the tapers in their iron stand closer to the hearth, and squatted down, prodding with a piece of firewood at the embers, until a warmer flame woke.
The smell of old sweat from her own body made itself apparent to her, as she grew less cold. She scratched at flea-bites under her doublet. Cessation of movement made her drowsy, I’ve talked myself dizzy, she thought; feeling as if her feet in their low boots still thumped continually against flagstones, stone steps, cobblestones. With a grunt, she sat down on the palliasse one of the pages had dragged close to the fire, and dug still-numb fingers into the stiff, cold leather of her boots, easing them off one by one. Her hose, black to the knee, stank of dung.
And all of it can be gone, in an instant – every smell, every sensation; the me that thinks this—
She reached out for the pottery cup, left covered by the fire, and sniffed at the contents. Stale water. Perhaps with a very slight tinge of wine. Realising, now, how dry her mouth was, she drained it, and dragged her doublet-sleeve across her mouth.
“Boss,” a man’s voice said cheerfully, from the doorway.
She looked away from the fire. Even that small light left her night-blind, in the dim hall. She recognised the voice of the guard: one of Giovanni Petro’s Italian archers.
“Let her in.”
“Okay, boss.” And in Italian, crudely: “Drain the bitch dry, boss!”
A cold wind sliced in as the leather curtain slid open, then dropped back. She reached out for her belt, where Rickard had laid it down, and tiredly buckled it around her waist, over her demi-gown. The use-polished hilt of her bollock dagger rested neatly under her palm.
A female voice, from the direction of the doorway, said, “Ash? Why do you want to see me?”
“Over here. It’s warmer over here.”
Oak floorboards creaked. Ash heard a chink of metal. A human figure hobbled into the dim illumination of tapers and fire, bringing the sharp scent of frost, and a whirl of surrounding cold air. The sound of metal on metal came again as the figure lifted its hands and pushed back its hood, and became – in the light – the Faris, her wrists and ankles encircled with heavy iron cuffs, and short, rough-forged chains run between them.
Firelight put a red glow on her cheeks, still filled out with the flesh that comes from adequate rations, and gleamed back from her eyes.
Ash pointed silently at the floor beside her. The Visigoth woman glanced around, and cautiously sat, instead, on a heavy iron-bound chest that stood on the other side of the hearth.
Ash made to protest, and then grinned. “You might as well. If you can find anything in it other than spiders, you’re welcome to it!”
“What?”
“It’s my war-chest,” Ash said. She watched the sitting woman; the light on the iron chains. “Not that money would be good for much, right now. Nothing to buy. And even on my best day, I never earned enough to bribe the King-Caliph!”
The Faris did not smile. She glanced back over her shoulder, into the vast darkness of the hall. Walls and rafters were invisible now, and it was only apparent that windows existed in the alcoves behind the access corridors when the wind rattled the shutters.
“Why are you talking to me?” she demanded.
Ash raised her voice. “Paolo?”
“Yes, boss?”
“Bugger off down to the next landing. I don’t want to be disturbed.”
“Okay, boss.” The archer’s laugh came out of the darkness. “Let me and the boys know when you done with her – we got something to give her!”
Cold air burns her face: cold sweat springs out under her arms. The memory of men’s voices above her, the exact same tone of contempt, shudders through her body.
“You’ll treat her like a human being or I’ll have your back stripped: is that clear?”
There is a perceptible pause before the archer’s ungrudging, “Yes, boss.”
Slowly, her system calms.
Listening carefully, Ash heard his footsteps going down the spiral stone stairs.
She switched her gaze back to the Faris.
“I’ve got everything you can tell me, in de la Marche’s reports. You’re here because I can’t talk to him,” she indicated the place where Paolo had stood. “Or Robert. Or Angelotti. Or anyone in the company. For the same reason I can’t talk to de la Marche, or that Burgundian bishop. Confidence is a – precarious thing. So there’s…”
Florian’s left. John de Vere’s gone with her.
Godfrey’s dead.
“…there’s you.”
“Haven’t we talked enough?”
The depth of feeling in the woman’s accented voice surprised her. Ash reached back among the pottery cups and wooden plates, searching for more food or drink that might have been left out for the Burgundian commander-in-chief. More by touch than sight, she found a pottery flask with liquid in it, and heaved it back over into the firelight.
“We’ve never talked. Not you and me. Not without there being something else going on.”
The Visigoth woman sat perfectly still. A threadbare demi-gown covered her badly fitting doublet and hose, and her hands were white with cold. As if conscious of Ash’s gaze, she cautiously extended her fingers towards the fire’s warmth.
“You should have killed me, before,” she said, at last; this time in Carthaginian Latin.
Ash sloshed brackish water into two moderately clean wooden cups, and knelt up beside the hearth to offer one of them to the Faris. The woman gazed at it for a long minute before reaching out for it with both hands together, the weight of the iron links making her clumsy.
“And the Duchess, your man-woman,” the Faris added, “she should kill you, now.”
Ash said, “I know.”
The feeling of acting as if Florian were still in the city was curiously unsettling.
The taper guttered and began to give off a thicker black smoke. Ash, not willing to call for a page, made to get up, winced at stiff muscles, and limped across the room to find another tallow-dip, and light it at the hearth. Even a yard away from the flames, it was freezingly cold.
Firelight made the woman’s chopped-short hair red-gold, not silver – as it must do mine, Ash realised. It blurred the dirt on her skin. If someone came in now, would they know which one was her, and which is me?
“We spend far too much time keeping each other alive, when circumstances don’t demand it,” Ash said sardonically. “Florian, you, me. I wonder why?”
As if she had thought a lot about the matter, the Faris said, “Because my qa’id Lebrija has a brother dead in this war, and another alive in Alexandria, and a sister married to a cousin of the lord-amir Childeric. Because Lord de la Marche of Burgundy is brother-in-law to half France. And all I have is you; and what you have, jund Ash, is me.” She hesitated, and with a wry expression, added, “And Adelize. And Violante.”
This is family? Ash thought.
“I could never quite kill you. I should have.” Ash set the taper in its stand, and walked back to look into
the hearth-fire. “And Florian – won’t execute me. Rather than kill one person, she’ll risk thousands. Thousands of thousands.”
“That’s bad.” The Faris looked quickly up. “I was wrong. When I had you among my men at the hunt? I was not willing to accept that one person should die. My father Leofric, the machina rei militaris, they would have told me how wrong that was – and they would have been right.”
“You say that. But you don’t quite believe it, do you?”
“I believe it. How else could I order an attack, in war? Even when I win, people will die.”
Ash’s eyes watered. She coughed, waving a hand as if the taper’s thin trickle of smoke bothered her, and lifted the wooden cup and drank. Sour-tasting water slid down her throat, past the tightness there.
People will die.
“How do you live with it?” Ash asked, and suddenly shook her head and laughed. “Christ! Valzacchi asked me that, in Carthage. ‘How do you live with what you do?’ And I said, ‘It doesn’t bother me.’ It doesn’t bother me.”
“Ash—”
“You’re here,” Ash said harshly, “because I can’t sleep. And there isn’t any wine to get drunk on. So you can damn well sit there, and you can damn well answer me. How do I live with what I do?”
She expected a pause, for reflection, but the Faris’s voice came instantly out of the shadows.
“If God is good to us, you have little time to live with it. King-Caliph Gelimer will execute you tomorrow morning, after you surrender. I only pray that I can reach him first – or else that the lord-amir my father Leofric can – and tell him that he has to wait to execute Duchess Floria until after you are dead.” The Faris leaned forward into the firelight, her gaze resting on Ash. “If you do nothing else, at least send me out to him first tomorrow! Pray that I live long enough to tell him, before he executes me.”
A snort of laughter forced its way out of Ash’s mouth. She wiped her sleeve across her face again, and squatted down in front of the fire, still cradling the empty cup.
“You’ve heard about the surrender, then. That the siege is over.”
“Men will talk. Priests no less than any other. Fer— Brother Fernando spoke to the monks.”
Catching that hesitation in the other woman’s voice, Ash said, under her breath, “Predictable!” and added, before the Faris could question her: “I don’t give a shit about what happens tomorrow! This is now. I want to know – how do I live with people I know … with friends getting killed.”
“Why?” the Faris said. “Do you plan to go down fighting, at the surrender?”
The cold in the tower’s upper hall bites at her fingers, and her feet, so that she is glad, momentarily, to avoid the Faris’s dark stare by sitting to put her stiff, cold boots back on. For a second, she feels it all – the slight warmth the fire has put into the sewn leather, the ache of exertion in her muscles, the numb grind of hunger under her breastbone – as if it is the first time.
“Perhaps,” Ash said, finding herself unwilling to lie, even by misdirection. Not that it’ll matter: it’ll all be over before anyone can find you.
“Maybe,” Ash said.
The Faris put her chained hands neatly together in her lap. Staring into the poor excuse for a fire, she said, “You live with knowing you’ll die in war.”
“That’s different!”
“And enough things will kill them in peacetime – drink, pox, fever, farm-work—”
“I know these people.” Ash stopped; said again: “I know these people. I’ve known some of them for years. I knew Geraint ab Morgan when he was skinny. I knew Tom Rochester when he couldn’t speak a word of anything but English, and they told him his name was Flemish for arsehole. I’ve met Robert’s two bastard sons in Brittany – fuck knows whether he thinks they’re alive or dead, now! He doesn’t say anything, he just carries on. And there’s guys on the door here, and downstairs; I’ve known most of them since I left England after Tewkesbury field. If I order an attack, they’ll die.”
As objective as if she were neither prisoner nor partisan, the Faris said, “Don’t think about it.”
“How do I stop thinking about it!”
After a moment, the Faris began tentatively, “Perhaps we can’t. Brother Fernando said—”
“What? What did he say?”
“—he said, it’s more difficult for a woman to be a soldier than a man; women give birth, and therefore find it too difficult to kill.”
Ash found both her hands clasped tight over her belly. She hugged her blue velvet demi-gown to her, caught the Faris’s eye in the shadowy light, and coughed out a loud, harsh burst of laughter. The other woman clamped her fingers across her mouth, gazing with wide dark eyes, and suddenly let her head go back as she gave a high peal.
“He s-said—”
“—yes—”
“Said—”
“Yes!”
“Oh, shit. Did you tell him – what crap—?”
“No.” The Faris wiped the edges of her hands delicately under each eye, smoothing away water. Her chains clinked. She could not keep the enjoyment off her face. Snuffling, she said, “No. I thought I might let my qa’ids talk to him, if I survive. They can tell this Frankish knight how much easier it is for a man to stand covered in the brains and blood of his dearest friend—”
Laughter died, not instantly, but slowly; sputtering as they looked at each other.
“There’s that,” Ash said, “there is that.”
The woman wiped her face, fingers touching dirty but flawless skin. “I have always had my father, or my qa’ids, or the machina rei militants with me; not like you, Ash. Even so, I have seen enough of what war does to people. Their hearts, their bodies. You have seen more than I. Strange that it should hurt you more, now.”
“Were they ever more than men on a chessboard to you?”
“Oh, yes!” The Faris sounded hurt.
“Ah. Yes. Because, if you don’t know them as human and fallible,” Ash completed, “how do you know where to put them in battle? Yeah. I know. I know. What are we? Bad as the Stone Golem. Worse. We had the choice.”
She sat back, arms hooked around her knees.
“I’m not used to this,” she said. “If I think about it, Faris, you probably owe your life to me not being used to it. Maybe it’s only sentimentality that stopped me killing you.”
“And your Duchess, she is sentimental not to kill you?”
“Maybe. How would I know the difference between sentimentality and—” Ash will not say the word. It sits immovably heavy in her mind. Even to herself, she cannot say love.
“Shit, I hate sieges!” she exclaimed, lifting her head and looking around the cold, dark hall. “It was bad enough in Neuss at the end. They were eating their own babies. If I’d known, in June, that I’d end up this side of a siege six months later…”
Iron links shifted, with a pouring sound, as the Faris slid herself down the great multi-locked war-chest to sit on the floorboards in front of it, and lean back wearily. Ash momentarily tensed, out of instinct, even recognising that the chains were – by her order – made too short to allow the wearer to throttle anyone.
Automatically, she got her feet under her, and the hilt of her dagger back under her palm. She squatted, staring into the fire, her attention pricklingly conscious of the woman in the edge of her vision – that state of mind where any movement will trigger a drawn weapon.
“I will never forget seeing you for the first time,” the Faris said quietly. “I had been told, ‘twin’, but how strange it was, even so. A woman among the Franks – how could you not know yourself born of Carthage?”
Ash shook her head.
The woman continued, “I saw you in armour, among men who owed you loyalty – you, not your amir or King-Caliph. I envied that freedom you had.”
“Freedom!” Ash snorted. “Freedom? Dear God… And envy didn’t stop you packing me off to Carthage, did it? Even knowing what Leofric was likely to do.”
“That.” The Faris pointed a slender, dirty finger at Ash. “That. That’s it.”
“What’s it?”
“How you do it,” the woman said. “Yes, I knew – but I didn’t know. You might have been used, not killed. That’s how you have to do it in battle – your men might live, they might not be killed. Some of them will live. It’s a matter of not letting yourself know.”
“But I do know!” Ash’s fist hit the palliasse beside her. “I do, now. I can’t get rid of it – that knowing.”
A knot in the burning wood cracked, making her jolt, and the Faris too. A gold ember fell out of the fire-irons, turning swiftly grey, then black, on the edge of Ash’s demi-gown. She flicked it off, brushing at the cloth. She gazed up at the blackened brick lining the chimney behind the fire, feeling the draught of the air, and smelling the scorched velvet.
“Let’s say,” Ash said, “that there is going to be a fight. Let’s say I’ve been driven out of Genoa, and Basle, and Carthage itself by you guys, and halfway across southern France, and let’s say I’m finally going to turn around, here, at Dijon.”
The Faris held out her wooden cup. Ash automatically poured more of the stale water into it. The Faris looked down at her chained wrists, which she could not move very far apart. Lifting the cup between her hands, she sipped at it.
“I see how it is. Tomorrow, you will fight to get yourself killed,” she said coolly, with something of the authority she had had in Visigoth war-gear among her armies. “That will deprive the Ferae Natura Machinae of their victory. Even if you fight for some other objective, I’ve learned enough of you to know that you’re aware of who the true enemy is.”
Ash stood, flexing pain out of her leg muscles. The warmth of the fire faded, the wood being consumed. She wondered idly, Should I feed the fire again or leave it to the morning? and then, her mind correcting her, No need to ration it out, now; either way.
“Faris…”
Cold air chilled her fingers, her ears, her scar-marked cheeks. Another stretch, this time rolling her head to get the stiffness out her neck. The trestle table stood mostly in the shadows, the one taper not sufficient to illuminate the stacked papers, muster-rolls, sketched maps and plans at the far end of it. Someone – Anselm, possibly – had been using a burnt stick from the fire: the tabletop was scratched in charcoal with lines delineating the north-west and north-east gates of Dijon, and the streets of the Visigoth camp beyond them.
