Ash: A Secret History (103 page)

“Much good may it do him to know!
Ask.
”

As concisely as she could make it, under the roaring noise of the stairwell chimney, she said, “There is more than one machine, my lord.”

“More—”

“Far more than one. I heard them. It’s not the Stone Golem. It’s not another Stone Golem. These are
other
voices. They talk through the machine, use it as a – a channel.”

“God’s blood!” The whites of John de Vere’s blue eyes showed bright in his dirt-streaked face. He sprung the pin, dropping his bevor down, and said more quietly, “
Another
machine? If your men hear that, they won’t fight here, it’s only desperation keeping them in this place! The desperate knowledge that what they do is crucial, that there is one devil’s engine to destroy. If many other
amirs
have Stone Golems—”

“No. These aren’t like the Stone Golem! They’re – different. They know more. They – answer…” Ash wiped at her mouth. “Wild Machines.
⁷
Not tame; not devices. They’re feral. I heard them … today … for the first time. At the moment of the earth tremor.”

“Demons?”

“They could be demons. They speak to me through the same part of my soul as the Golem-machine does.”

“What has this to do with asking advice of your voice, now that we need it?”

Ash became aware that her hands were shaking. Stinking, chill, adrenalin dying down; it is not yet two hours since the great palace of the King-Caliphs fell.

“Because
they
might hear me asking the Stone Golem. And because, when the Wild Machines spoke to me – that was the exact moment that the earth tremor happened. The city fell down, my lord.”

John de Vere scowled.

“Ask! We need to know, it is worth the risk.”

“No! I was in that; it is
not
worth the risk, not with my men here—!”

“My lord! You must come! Quickly!” a voice shouted outside the house. The Earl of Oxford broke off, rumbled, “Here!” and strode over the rubble towards the cratered alley outside.

“Get hurdles, doors, whatever.” Ash turned to Floria. “I want the wounded to be carried out when we go. Faversham, help her; Euen, get your lads busy on this too!”

“Are we pulling back?”

She ignored her lance-leader’s question, striding off out after the Earl of Oxford.

How can I ask my voice? If the others – the voices that say
Burgundy
—

Plumes of black smoke billowed out from the stairwell.

“Geraint, pull the archers back, use that as cover!” She picked a careful way out, and across the demolished building opposite, to where new scaling ladders had been set up on the Citadel wall, a hopefully safe fifty yards along from the breach.

Oxford’s scarlet, gold and white livery tabard shone plainly visible in the light of many lanterns, climbing one of the hooked ladders. Ash jogged to the foot of the ladders.

“Shit. I knew it. We’ve lost one of the gates, haven’t we?” she muttered to herself, watching de Vere climb. “Tell
me,
I’m only the fucking company captain!”

She put all thought of the
machina rei militaris
into the back of her mind. Burgundy, she thought. She reached for the wooden rungs, climbed up after the Earl. Burgundy: huge voices which had insisted on
Burgundy,
voices in her head before which she felt the size of a louse.

No. Don’t think about it. And don’t ask questions. Above all, be
quiet.

The sunless sky of Carthage was black. For all that her body insisted that it must be sunset, or close on that time, there was nothing around her but darkness. Shouting came up from the centre of the city, and from the harbour, clearly heard now that she climbed higher. As she came over the lip of the wall, with assistance from one of the picket there, she caught a sound like distant surf, or a wind through a beech wood; and realised that it was fire.

Not only the harbour, but Carthage town burning, burning in the sunless dark.

“If we go
now,
we might just get out of here in one piece,” Ash emphasised, coming up with John de Vere and his brother. “If you want my advice, this is where we leave. We can’t get to the Stone Golem now. It’s impossible!”

“After such effort?” The Earl of Oxford hit his steel fist into his palm. “Two and a half hundred men, across the Middle Sea, and for
nothing?
God rot Leofric! Leofric and his daughter, Leofric and his Golem! We
must
try again.”

Ash met his gaze, which was not blustering, not at all; but bitterly angry and frustrated beyond all reckoning.

“This is where we get real,” Ash said. “My guys down there have heard what’s happened, that we’ve lost people, that we can’t get down the stairs, never mind down to the sixth floor. My lord, contract or not, they’re not going to die for you under these conditions. And if I tell them to, they’ll tell
me
to fuck right off.”

Morale is as fluid as water, as subject to such changes, and she has had practice enough at judging it. Undoubtedly, what she says is true. It also gives a gilding of morality to her conscience:
The sooner I am out of here, the better! Whatever Carthage is – slave-breeding, Stone Golems, tactical machines, blood-kin – I want no part of it! I am only a soldier!

Slowly, the Earl of Oxford inclined his head. He looked about him, at the city wall, at the broken roofs and buildings of the Citadel. Ash looked with him at the earthquake damage.

Something tugged at her attention. She became aware that she was staring at the slash of destruction that lay through Carthage, from here, through the King-Caliph’s palace, to the city beyond the Citadel’s southern gate. It is plain to see, from this vantage height. The tumbled buildings are all on a straight line, that runs away to the south.

“We cannot leave this undone,” de Vere said bleakly, before she could mention it; and turned his head to look down at her face. There was nothing of pride in his voice. “I have done a thing here which only the foremost soldier of this age could have done: taking and holding this House, while the Stone Golem is destroyed. Carthage is not destroyed. Carthage, after this—”

“Carthage will be shut up tighter than a duck’s arsehole,” Ash said brusquely. She spat, to get the taste of smoke out of her throat. Below, in the broken alleys, her men pulled back to House Leofric’s breached walls; by the heads jerking down, a strong fire was being kept up from inside the House itself.

“There will be no other chance to do this,” Oxford warned.

“But I don’t believe the Faris can’t be defeated. Let her keep the Stone Golem! She’ll make mistakes—” Frustration boiled up in Ash, hearing her own words. “Shit! All right, my lord, I don’t believe it either. She’ll carry on being the young Alexander, if only because her men
believe
that she is. I can’t believe we’ve come this close, and failed! I can’t believe there’s nothing we can do!”

Slowly, John de Vere said, “But we have not failed in one thing, madam. We know, now, that there is more than one machine – she may be nothing to the purpose, the Faris. Are there other generals? If there are other machines in Carthage—”

“In Carthage? I don’t know
where
they are. I just know I heard them.” Ash touched her temple, under her visor; then rubbed her mail gauntlets together, the chill air beginning to freeze her fingers and chill her body now that she had stopped fighting. “I don’t know
anything
about the Wild Machines, my lord! I haven’t had time to think – it’s hardly been an hour. Demons, gods, Our Lord, the Enemy, the King-Caliph … they could be anything! All I know is that they want to wipe out Burgundy. ‘Burgundy must be destroyed’ – that’s it: the sum total of my knowledge.”

She met his gaze: a veteran of many wars gazing down at her, his face framed by helmet and padding, the skin pinched together between his brows.

“I sound like a lunatic,” she said bluntly, “but I’m telling the truth.”

Footsteps pounded along the walls, Angelotti and Geraint ab Morgan; Floria del Guiz limping along behind them. The three of them ducked down beside Oxford, panting.

“There’s men gathering inside, over the far side of the courtyard.” Geraint gulped breath. “Boss, they’re getting ready to make a sally. I swear it!”

“No shit? Who’s daft idea is that?”
Not Alderic’s,
Ash guessed. But there are soldiers in the other quadrants of the house, and they can’t communicate with this one; they don’t know what the Franks might be doing. “If they do sally, they’ll get killed, but they’ll take some of us with them.”

“I have twenty wounded men,” Floria said crisply. “I’m moving them out.”

Ash nodded. “No point waiting around for an attack – since we’re pulling out anyway. Aren’t we, my lord?”

“Yes,” the Earl nodded. “And with dawn coming—”

“
Dawn?
” Ash spun around to look where the Earl looked. “That
can’t
be dawn, not here in Carthage – and that’s south!”

“Then, madam, what is it?”

“I don’t know. Shit!”

She, Geraint, Angelotti and Floria ran crouching to the inner edge of the wall, gazing south across Carthage. Winter-iced air blew into her face, whipping at tufts of short hair that stuck out from her helmet padding. She snatched a breath. What had been, when they entered House Leofric, an empty black sky, was no longer empty.

The south glowed with light.

Outside the city.
It’s too far off to be the city burning, and there is no smoke, no flame. Further south—

The southern horizon glowed, with a fluctuating brilliance some colour between silver and black. Her men up here on the wall swore obscenely, watching the light grow.

Far south, further than the broken dome of the Caliph’s palace, further than the Citadel gate and the Aqueduct Gate out of Carthage itself.

The sky ran with ribbons of light.

Purple, green, red and silver: towering curtains of brilliance, against the blackness of the daytime sky.

Armed men beside her dropped to their knees. She became conscious of a faint vibration in the stone wall under her feet: an almost imperceptible vibration, keeping time with the fluctuations of the silver-black light, with the beat of her heart.

John de Vere crossed himself. “Brave friends, we are now in God’s hands, and will fight for Him.”

“Amen!” Several voices.

“Get moving,” Ash croaked. “Before they realise in House Leofric that we’re standing here gaping at the sky!”

A foot-soldier came sprinting along the city wall, not hers, one of the Earl of Oxford’s forty-seven men in white and murrey. He kept his body half-flinched away from the light in the south.

“My lord!” he bawled. “You
must
leave, my lord! The Citadel gate is being taken from us! The
amirs
are coming!”

IV

Ash and Oxford did not need to exchange glances.

“Officers,
to me!
” Ash yelled, without hesitation. “Angelotti, Geraint; covering fire! Euen, Rochester,
get ’em moving!
Don’t get hung up in this one! We’re going straight through this gate and
out.
Don’t get caught up in the fighting!”

A withering fire of bolts and arquebus-balls swept the roof of House Leofric. She moved towards the edge of the Citadel wall, urging the mass of her men below to come up. Orders can barely be heard. No Visigoths can be seen: the fire keeping their heads down.

She hauls men up, in the middle of a hundred and fifty archers and bill; heaving them bodily on to the Citadel’s defensive wall – wide enough to drive two chariots – among a chaos of soldiers shifting equipment, carrying screaming wounded men; all under a black, coruscating sky.

“God’s pity!” Oxford, grunting, loped back along the wall in a clamour of armour, his drawn sword in his hand. “Dickon holds the gate! What is that? Is it some weapon?”

From the height of Carthage’s walls, Ash stared south. The wind drew heedless frozen tears from her eyes, confronted with the bleak empty land beyond the city. The southern desert – where a furry brown mare took her riding with Fernando, with Gelimer and ’
Arif
Alderic.

Riding, among the pyramids.

They lay between the city and the southern mountains, small from here: regular geometric shapes that sway, in her vision, as things sway under water. Their sharp edges glow silver, wavering in the light. Vast planed surfaces of stone, bright against the unnatural black of the Eternal Twilight.

“The tombs of the Caliphs…” she breathed.

“Well, madam, we have no time to watch them!”

Night vision momentarily gone, she stumbled off along the wall with her escort. Euen Huw’s voice reported, panting, “Citadel gate – skirmish is over – we’re clear to the city gate!”

Carthage, ancient city, victor over the Romans,
⁸
great African ruin of what was once an empire covering Christendom – Carthage is a mess of fire, shrieking and running men and woman, fire in the streets and the harbour, looters pelting off, stampeding horses, the frightened bellowing of cattle; men in mail, men in iron collars; all the high stone walls echoing deafeningly to their shouting.

At the city gate they are met by the white, unbloodied face of Willem Verhaecht at the head of fifty of her men: this gate not taken, not even attacked.

The aqueducts of Carthage run out across the city, dizzyingly high over roofs.

“Out,” she ordered briefly, “on the aqueduct. My lord Oxford will lead you to the camp you made coming in!”

“I hear, madam.” Two words of command to his own men: ropes slung down for the gate-guards in the street, men in Lion and Oxford liveries being hauled up on to the ancient brickwork, archers and crossbowmen and arquebusiers covering them as they climb.

“
Up!
” Ash reached down, grabbing arms, hauling men up; her sheathed sword battering against her breastplate as she moved. The edges of her armour cuts the hands of men she helps, but they don’t notice, throw their lance-mates up within reach of the top of the aqueduct, tumbling over the walls, clutching weapons, down on – amazingly – green grass.