by Mary Gentle
Simon Tydder she found with the dead, his helmet missing and his head cut open from skull to lower jaw. The third of the brothers, Thomas, knelt by his body in the abbey chapel and would not be comforted.
Euen Huw lived sixteen hours.
She sat with him three times, an hour each, leaving Anselm or de la Marche in charge; sat in the grey-lit upper chamber of the abbey hospice, warmed by braziers and the hearth-fire, and felt his hand that she held grow colder and colder. Examined, they found both his legs were lacerated, one shin cut to the bone; but the wound from the spear thrust up by a fallen man into his groin finally killed him. He died, body shaken by his death-rattle, in the early hours of the twenty-ninth day of December. The twin passing-bells rang.
“Amir Lion!” Leofric’s woman physician said, catching her at the door, “let me salve your eyes.”
Not all of the blurriness of her sight is from tears. A sudden fear pulsed through her gut: to be blind and helpless—!
She sat by a window, and submitted to the administration of a soothing herb; the very smell of the woman’s robes bringing back House Leofric’s observatory and a pain low in her belly.
“Bandage over them at night,” the woman added. “In four days, you should improve.”
“You might as well see to this, then.” Ash held out her hand. The woman pulled the ring-finger of her right hand about, snake-hissed under her breath at Frankish butchers, set the bone, and bound it to her middle finger.
“You should rest it for ten days.”
Like I have ten days to rest…
“Thank you,” she said, surprised to hear herself speak.
Coming down the stone stairs from the hospice, she heard voices below, and came out on to the landing to be faced by Fernando del Guiz and the Faris.
Neither of them spoke. The identical brightness of their faces told her what she needed to know. A genuine numbness dulled her reaction. She smiled, faintly, and made to move on past them.
“We wanted you to know,” Fernando said.
For a second, she is caught between seeing him very young and vulnerable, and the knowledge of how many similar young men are dead outside Dijon.
The Faris said, “Will your priest marry us?”
Ash couldn’t tell if her own expression were a smile, or something closer to weeping.
“Digorie Paston’s dead,” she said, “a golem killed him; but I expect Father Faversham will do it. He’s upstairs.”
The woman and the man turned, eagerly; she could feel herself slip from their attention. Wrapped up in each other, insulated from the death and grief…
“Ah, why not?” she said, aloud, softly. “Do it while you can.”
‘STILL IT GROWS COLD, LITTLE THING OF EARTH—’
‘—COLD—’
‘—WE WILL PREVAIL!’
The voices of the Wild Machines in her head whisper their own panicky confusion. In fierce satisfaction, she thinks, No Faris, no Stone Golem, not even out-of-date second-hand reports. You’re fucked. You don’t know a damn thing, do you!
A rider came back from the east, on the thirtieth, accompanied by Bajezet’s second-in-command. Robert Anselm reported, “He says, yes. Florian’s coming back. She’ll sign a treaty, if de la Marche okays it.”
“What do you think?” Ash asked the Burgundian.
Olivier de la Marche blew on his cold hands, and glanced from the fallen city wall to the Visigoth camp. “No doubt there are men over there who still think the Lord Leofric mad. There are enough who do not think him mad, and enough who follow whichever way power flows, that he will hold the Caliphate. In my judgement, at least until he returns to Carthage and amirs who will challenge this. I say, it is time for the treaty to be signed.”
She watched the golems harrowing the ground in the cathedral yard. Their stone hands dug graves. Human bodies lay piled for burial on the human-impenetrable ice.
The memory comes to her, with a sting of adrenalin: the first corpse she had ever seen. Not as decorous as these washed white bodies under the motionless grey sky. She had run through all the sweet moving air of summer, in a forest where sun shone down through green leaves, and rounding a spur of rock – large to her – had all but stepped on the body of a man killed in the prior day’s skirmish.
It was a glittering, green-black hummock, unrecognisable as a dead body until the flies that covered it completely rose up in high-pitched flight.
Like walking into a wall, the way I stopped! But I was different then.
She came back to the scentless cathedral yard and Abbot Muthari and Abbot Stephen, voices chanting, and Leofric standing beside her. His robes were musty, the embroidery stiff; he blinked at the implacable open air. Small clouds of white breathed from his lips.
Visigoths inside Dijon. Peace treaty or no, it jumped and curdled in her gut.
“But why isn’t it dark here?” the Visigoth lord said, apropos of nothing. She followed his gaze; couldn’t see even a ghost-disc of sun.
“About the peace treaty.” Dank, cold air chilled the flesh of her face. “I’ve been thinking, lord Father. I think we need to sign a treaty of alliance.”
“What the Ferae Natura Machinae, the Wild Machines, do, is undoubtedly material.” Leofric began to sniff a little, the circles of his nostrils reddening. His voice thickened with his cold. “If Burgundy preserves the real, as you say, should it not be sunless here, too?”
“An alliance of equals,” Ash pressed on.
“The original is better, don’t the Franks say? For we poor inheritors of the Romans, the past is always better than this degenerate present.”
His look might have meant to draw her in, she couldn’t tell.
“And Burgundy clings to the past?” Ash muttered sardonically.
Deliberately, it seemed, mistaking her meaning, Leofric gave her a quick, friendly, older man’s smile. “Not always. Peace with Carthage—”
“Alliance. We won’t be the only people after the Wild Machines – but we might be the only people who want to actually destroy them. We do,” Ash said, “want to destroy them.”
To the implied absence of a question in her tone, Leofric added a shudder. “Oh yes; destroy them. It’s evident the fire is no blessing. Amir Gelimer’s dead; God shows His will in battle. Around the pyramids themselves, the stone is fusing – to plants, to small beasts, to the melted bodies of men and horses. We must hold off; use your master gunners’ cannon to destroy them.”
Gratefully at home in military speculation again, Ash said, “When it stops being quite so hairy close up, we could think about planting some petards?”
“If it stops.” Leofric huddled his long, furred cloak over his shoulders with a shrug. Waved away, his staff of Caliph’s advisers hung back. “An alliance. That would say much of how we regard Burgundy.”
“Wouldn’t it, though.”
The chunk-chunk of dropped earth – too cold to split into clods – beat rhythmically back from the front face of the cathedral. Paired mass funeral services sounded from the abbots’ lips, each heretical to the other.
Ash frowned, replaying memory. “What did you mean, ‘the original’?”
“Who tells their story first?” Leofric demanded. “Whoever it is, theirs becomes the yardstick – others are judged by how close or far they are from the original details. The first telling has an authority all its own.”
He brought his gaze back to Ash’s face. She saw plain excitement: the vision of a man working on theory, without caring whom the truth might benefit: him or another. All his experiments up to now have benefited the Caliphs, not him. Is that Leofric? Truly King-Caliph by accident?
This is the man who would have cut me up and killed me. Happily have done it.
“I don’t forgive you,” she said, with her lips barely moving.
“Nor I, you.” And at her shock: “An experiment half a century in the making, and you go and—”
“Spoil it?” Irony, or bitter black humour, just outweigh her outra
ge.
“Modify it.” There is still the weighing quality in his glance when he looks at her. “To prove, perhaps, only that an area of ignorance exists.”
“And … inside that area?”
“Further study.”
For a second she thinks of the house in Carthage – not of the examination and medical rooms, but the cell, and her own voice howling loud enough to drown the echoes of those same howls.
“Haven’t you studied enough?”
“No.” Familiar arrogance in his expression – not only for her, now, but for a young man suddenly at his side, walking up past a group of advisers that (she sees) contains both the doctor Annibale Valzacchi and his brother Gianpaulo: Agnus Dei.
“Sisnandus,” Leofric said mildly, under the plainsong of the funeral masses.
Ash recognises him now as one of the faces around the table on the cloth of gold. A thin young man, battle-hardened, with Leofric’s mouth; nothing else to mark him as the ex-commander of House Leofric except the livery.
“House Leofric’s and House Lebrija’s messengers have left for the capital,” he reported.
Be polite: this is one Leofric’s grooming for power, or he wouldn’t have had Sisnandus take over when he was feigning madness.
Assuming Sisnandus realises it was put on.
Ash could not tell from his surprisingly active expression whether he resented his lord-amir’s return to health and his own consequent demotion from commanding House Leofric, or whether being deputised to control the House while Leofric handles the duties of King-Caliph contents him.
Politics: all politics. She caught the eye of a man directly behind Sisnandus, in his escort. The man looked away. Guillaume Arnisout: too ashamed to approach her after his failure to follow her back into Dijon. And I shall talk to him too, in the next day or so.
“An alliance for the Spring campaign.” Leofric breathed warm whiteness on to the air, his gaze on the golems now loading the dead into the ground. “I might persuade the French to it. And might you bring the Turks in, as similar temporary allies? The treaty awaits only the Duchess’s signature.”
The morning of the third day of January dawned clear, very cold; the winter earth iron-hard enough that a horse should not be risked at anything more than a walk.
“Do you need to take so many of the fit men to ride out and bring Duchess Floria back?” Olivier de la Marche questioned.
Ash, on a borrowed Visigoth mare, grinned down at him from her war saddle. “Yup,” she said cheerfully.
“You are taking the better part of three hundred men. To meet Bajezet’s five hundred mounted Janissaries.”
Ash glanced back at the hundred and ten men under the Lion Azure standard, and Lacombe’s Burgundians. “We don’t know that Bajezet’s Turks won’t turn round and ride straight back to Mehmet. I’m paranoid. Peace has broken out – but I’m still paranoid. Look at it out there. No food. Dark, over the border. Breakdown of law. It’s going to be years before this country’s quiet. How would you feel if I lost her to some roaming gang of bandits?”
The big Burgundian nodded. “I grant you that.”
Over these four days, dozens of men and women from nearby burned villages and towns have trickled in to Dijon; as the news spreads out across the countryside. Some from caves in the limestone rocks, some from the wildwood; all hungry, far from all honest.
He added, “And I grant you, the men that bore the weight of the battle for our Duchess should have the honour of seeing her home to us.”
Any day now, I can be done with this ‘Lioness’ crap. Just as soon as we start planning a southern campaign.
“But - her?” De la Marche looked at the Faris, where the Visigoth woman rode between two of Giovanni Petro’s men.
“I prefer to have her where I can see her. She used to command this lot, remember? Okay, it’s over, but we don’t take chances.”
Not that I haven’t taken steps to encourage her co-operation.
On the edge of the crowd of citizens around the open north-east gate, she caught sight of a man in priest’s robes: Fernando del Guiz. His escort of Lion billmen flanked him in a business-like manner. He lifted a hand in blessing – although whether to his current or past wife was not apparent.
Ash glanced away, up at the sky. “There aren’t many hours of light. We won’t get to them before tomorrow, at the earliest – if we find ’em that easy! Expect me in three, maybe four days. Messire Olivier, since the Visigoths are being so generous with their food and drink and firewood – do you think we could have a celebration?”
“Captain-General, Pucelle, truly,” Olivier de la Marche said, and he laughed. “If only to prove the truth of what I have always said: employ a mercenary and he will eat you out of hearth and home.”
Ash rode out over the eastern bridge, passing below the Visigoth gunners camped up on the rough heights. She waved, touched a spur to the mare, and rocked in the creaking saddle, moving up the column.
Cold snatched the air from her mouth. She acknowledged, in a cloud of white breath, the new lance-leaders as she passed: Ludmilla with Pieter Tyrrell and Jan-Jacob Clovet riding with her, instead of Katherine Hammell; Vitteleschi marching at the head of Price’s billmen; and Euen Huw’s third-in-command, Tobias, leading his lance. Thomas Rochester rode led by his sergeant, Elias; bandages over his blind right eye, and a covering of forge-black steel over the still-weeping hole in his face. Other lance-leaders – Ned Mowlett, Henri van Veen – looked newly serious, newly senior.
The faces change. The company goes on.
With scouts out before and behind and to the flanks, Ash’s force rode out of Dijon, into the deserted hamlets and strip-fields, through outflung spurs of the ancient wildwood, into the wasteland.
“Do we know which way Bajezet went?” she asked Robert Anselm. “I wouldn’t like to try getting across the Alps, they’re too fucked to even think of crossing!”
“He said they’d ride north, through the Duchy,” Anselm rumbled. “Then east; Franche-Comté, over the border to Longeau in Haute-Marne, then northwest through Lorraine. Depending on how they could live off the land. He said if they had no word the war was over, he’d ride towards Strasbourg, then cut across to the east, and hope to run into the Turks coming west across the Danube.”
“How far do the messengers say they got?”
“Over the border. Into the dark. They’re on their way back from the east.” Anselm grinned. “And if neither of us is lost, we might even be on the same road!”
Towards the end of the day, flakes of snow began to fall from a yellowing sky.
“Make it as hard as you like,” she murmured under her breath as she rode, with the icy wind finding gaps between bevor and visor and numbing her face.
‘HARD, YES, COLD—’
‘WINTER-COLD, WORLD-COLD—’
‘—UNTIL WINTER COVERS YOU, COVERS ALL THE WORLD!’
She heard a note of panic in their voices.
Ash thought, but did not say aloud, We’ve won. You can turn Christendom into a frozen wasteland, but we’ve won. Leofric’s Caliph. We sign this treaty, and we leave for the south – we’re coming for you.
She rode east and north, among the clink of bridles in the bitter snowy air, smiling.
The following day, after much frustrated wandering in snow-bound featureless countryside, Janissary outriders encountered Lion Azure scouts a mile outside what Ash found – as they were escorted into it – to be a burned and deserted village. Diminishing smoke still rose from the ruins of the manor house and church. Snow covered the hill-slopes, that had been covered in vines.
With visibility closing in, she rode with Anselm and Angelotti and the Burgundian Lacombe, over a frozen stream by a shattered stone bridge. Perhaps two of the eleven wattle-and-daub houses still stood, thatch weighed down under snow; and the Janissaries led them into a surprisingly neat military camp of tents around the intact buildings and a mill.
Two men came out of the high, half-timbered bu
ilding. A man in armour, with a Blue Boar standard; another man taking off his helmet to disclose sandy hair and a lined face, that split into a broad grin as he saw her liveries.
“She’s safe,” he called up.
Ash dismounted, gave her helmet to Rickard, and went forward to meet John de Vere, Earl of Oxford. She said, “It’s peace.”
“Your rider told us.” His faded blue eyes narrowed. “And a bad field, before it?”
“I’m beginning to think there are no good fields,” she said, and at his acknowledging nod, added, “Florian?”
“You will find ‘brother Dickon’ by the mill’s hearth,” John de Vere murmured, grinning. “God’s teeth, madam! An Earl of England is not to be shoved aside like a peasant! What’s the matter with the woman? You’d swear she’d never seen a Duchess of Burgundy before!”
The snow ceased in the night. The next morning, the fifth day of January, they rode south-west, in column, as soon as there was light.
Riding knee by knee with Florian, she told the cloaked surgeon-Duchess, “Gelimer’s dead,” and let herself be drawn, skilfully, into what details of fighting and death of friends Florian might want to know. She found herself answering questions about the wounded: how Visigoth doctors had treated Katherine Hammell, Thomas Rochester, others.
“It’s peace,” Ash finished. “At least until they assassinate Leofric! That should give us a few months. Until spring.”
“It’ll take years. Recovering from this war.” Florian dug the folds of her cloak in around her thighs, attempting to shield her body from a wind that is colder now that the snow has stopped. “I can’t be their Duchess. Dispose of the Ferae Natura Machinae, and I’m done.”
The Visigoth mare wuffled, softly, at snow clogging her hooves. Ash reached forward to pat the sleek neck under the blue caparisons.
“You won’t stay in Burgundy?”
“I don’t have your sense of responsibility.”
“‘Responsibility’—?”
Florian nodded ahead, at Lacombe, and Marie’s men. “Once you’ve commanded them, you start to feel responsible.”
“Aw, what crap!”
