Ash: A Secret History (181 page)

God bless you, John de Vere! Everything you said is right. He’s here because he has to have Burgundy, and because he thinks he has to look as though he’s not afraid of us in front of them.

Ash smiled to herself, and glanced back to grin reassuringly at Florian. She whispered in the woman’s ear, her lips touching the soft hair under the hart’s-horn crown:

“Gelimer would have done better to just pile in, never mind a parley – and he hasn’t done it, and they’re watching him now, like a hawk, to see what he does next.”

“Can we keep him talking, Ash?”

Looking at Gelimer, and his closed expression under the gold-rimmed helmet he wore, brought memory vividly into her mind: the man riding in driving snow in the desert, with his son – his son – the boy’s name was gone from her.
Is it still snowing in Carthage?

She formed a fast and brutal judgement. “He’d be all right if this was armies. Maybe all he did three months ago was talk himself into a job he can’t hold down – but if it was just a matter of telling his generals and his legions what to do, he could win this one. But it’s the dark, and the cold. I don’t know how much he knows. He’ll hesitate if we give him half a chance.”

“Keep talking,” Floria murmured. “Let’s spin this out as long as we can.”

The Visigoth King-Caliph turned to listen to a man speaking at his shoulder, appearing not to hear what Ash said. He nodded, once. The air, growing warm with the number of bodies crowding the mine, caught at the back of Ash’s throat. The kneeling slaves holding the Greek Fire globes in their padded iron cages appeared bleached by light: fair brows and lashes air-brushed from weather-beaten faces.

The mass of armed men parted, with difficulty letting others through from the back of the King-Caliph’s party. Ash could not at first make out faces among the blaze of heraldry, the glint of mail and sword-hilts and helmets.

Greek Fire reflected back from a river-fall of hair the colour of pale ashes, robbed of all silver in this light. Ash found herself looking again into the Faris’s face.

“Faris.” Ash nodded a greeting.

The woman made no reply. Her dark eyes, in her flawless bright face, regarded Ash as if she were not present. Her flat gaze brought a momentary frown to Ash’s face. About to comment, Ash realised that King-Caliph Gelimer was – while apparently listening to his advisor – watching her with a complete and total avidity.

Disturbed, she contented herself with another nod; which the Faris again ignored. The Visigoth woman, armoured and in black livery, had a dagger at her belt; Ash could not see a sword-hilt, in among the crush of bodies.

Why is Gelimer watching
me?
He should be watching the Duchess.

Is this some kind of diversion, so he can try to have Florian killed?

She inhaled, surreptitiously, trying to catch the scent of slow-match on the air, to discover if there were arquebuses hidden in the mass of Gelimer’s men. Movement caught her eye; brought her sword-hand across her body. She stopped.

Two Visigoth priests came pushing through the crowd in the Faris’s wake. They held the elbows of a tall, thin bareheaded
amir
, a man with unruly white hair and the expression of a startled owl. Behind the
amir
stumbled a pudgy Italian physician – she recognised Annibale Valzacchi.
And the
amir
is Leofric.

“Green Christ…!” Ash became aware that she had closed her hand around Floria’s arm only when the woman winced.

“That’s the lord-
amir
that had you prisoner? The one who owns the Stone Golem?”

“Yeah: you never saw Leofric in Carthage, did you? That’s him.” Ash did not take her eyes from Leofric’s face, watching the elderly man across the space of perhaps five yards. “That’s him.”

Not just my sister, but this.

A pain came deep in the pit of her stomach. Stairways, cells, blood; the intrusive painful stab of examination: all sharp-edged in her mind. She rode the ache out, not letting it show on her face.

Leofric wore the rich furred gown of a Visigoth lord, over mail. He appeared unaware of the priests’ grip on his arms, and frowned at Ash with a puzzled expression.

“Greetings, my lord.” Her mouth sounded dry even to her.

John de Vere whispered encouragingly in her ear, “Madam, yes, talk. It is all time gained.”

Two slaves stood with the Lord-
Amir
Leofric behind the front row of Visigoth troops; one a child, and one a fat woman. Ash could see neither clearly. The child cradled something in the front of her stained linen robe, and shivered. The adult woman drooled.

In the fierce, flat white light, Leofric’s eyes focused on Ash. His face crumpled. Into the silence, he wailed, “Devils! Great Devils! Great Devils will kill us all!”

IV

The Janissaries in front of Ash did not move, their alert surveillance intense. Florian looked taken aback; de Vere, although he did not show it, no less so. Ash shifted her gaze from Leofric to the King-Caliph. No surprise showed on the Visigoth ruler’s face.

“The head of House Leofric is unwell,” Gelimer said. “If he were himself, he would apologise for such a discourtesy.”

“
Ask her!
” Leofric swung round imploringly towards Gelimer, the two priests gripping his arms even more firmly. “My lord Caliph, I am not mad! Ask her. Ash hears them too. She is another daughter of mine, Ash hears them as this one does—”

“No.” The Faris’s voice cut him off. “I cannot hear the
machina rei militaris
any longer. I am deaf to it.”

Ash stared.

The Visigoth woman avoided her gaze.

With complete certainty, Ash thought
She’s lying!

“You said she wasn’t talking to the Stone Golem…” Floria whispered, her tone one of rueful admission.

“Not because she can’t.” Ash watched Gelimer wince and glance at the foreign envoys.

Frederick of Hapsburg was smiling a little, with the haughty and calculating smile she remembered from the summer at Neuss; and he caught her eye and lifted a brow slightly.

“To our business, lords.” Gelimer fixed his gaze on Floria. “Witch-woman of Burgundy—”

The Lord-
Amir
Leofric interrupted obliviously. “Where did I go wrong?”

Floria, who looked as if she had been about to make some dignified ducal response, stopped before she started. The surgeon-Duchess put her fists on her hips with difficulty in the crowded space, and stared at the Visigoth lord. “‘Go wrong’?”

Ash peered down the mine, between the shoulders of the Turkish Janissaries, the blue-white blaze of the Greek Fire making it paradoxically harder to focus on Leofric’s face. Something about the shape of his mouth made her shudder: adult men in their right minds do not have such an expression. She remembered Carthage, was overwhelmed suddenly between contradictory revulsion, hate and pity.

He’s not right. Something’s happened to him, since I was there. He’s not right at all…

She cut the emotions away from herself, concentrating only on the tunnel, the armed men, the sounds of voices, the shifting of feet and hands.

Leofric gazed down at the child-slave in front of him. He drew one arm from the priests’ grip, reached down, and plucked a white-and-liver-coloured patched rat out of the child’s arms. He held it up and stared into its ruby eyes. “I keep asking myself,
where did I go wrong?
”

The child – recognisably Violante; taller, thinner – lifted up her hands for the animal. Ash recognised the rat when it wriggled in mid-air, thrashed its tail from side to side, and dipped its furry head down to lick the girl’s fingers.

She felt eyes on her: switched her glance to see Gelimer watching her again with avid, analytical care.

“Oh, fuck…” Ash breathed.

Gelimer signalled. The two priests closed around Leofric again. Valzacchi pulled the
amir
’s hand down, shrinking from the animal.

The white-haired man looked vague, and relinquished the rat absent-mindedly to his slave-girl. “Lord Caliph, the danger—”

“You put on this madness as an excuse for treachery!” the King-Caliph said, in a rapid Carthaginian Latin that Ash thought only she and de Vere, apart from Gelimer’s Visigoth followers, understood. “If I have to kill you to silence you, I will.”

“I am not mad,” Leofric answered in the same language. Ash saw Frederick of Hapsburg look puzzled, and d’Amboise too; the other Frenchman, Commines, smiled quietly.

Ash glanced at de Vere. The English Earl nodded. She waited until she was sure he was watching the French and German delegations, and then reached up and unbuckled her helmet.
Time to stir the pot.
She took the sallet off and shook out her short hair, facing the Visigoths under the harsh light.

“My God, but they are
twins!
” Charles d’Amboise exclaimed. “A Burgundian mercenary and a Visigoth general? Their voices, their faces – what is this?”

“Sisters, I hear,” de Commines put in sharply, staring at the Visigoth King-Caliph. “Lord Gelimer, his Grace the King of France will ask, also, why you have your generals fighting both sides of this war! If it
is
a war, and not some conspiracy against France!”

“The woman Ash is a renegade,” Gelimer said dismissively.

“
Is she?
” Charles d’Amboise’s shout made the young slave-girl in front of him flinch, and huddle the piebald rat to her chest. He bellowed at the King-Caliph: “
Is
she? What shall I tell my master Louis? That you and Burgundy conspire together, and this sham of a war is fought on both sides by you! That Burgundy is France’s ancient enemy, and has you for an ally! And, worse than
all
this—” The French nobleman flung out his hand, pointing at John de Vere, Earl of Oxford: “—
the English are involved!
”

Ash whooped. It was drowned out in the guffaws, cat-calls, and congratulatory comments to de Vere that echoed from Thomas Rochester’s lance. Rochester himself wiped streaming eyes.

Gelimer’s hand stroked his beaded beard.

When the applause, boos, and cries of “God rot the French wanker!” died down, the King-Caliph said in a measured tone, “We do not bring our legions to raze the city of an ally, Master Amboise.”

Plainly alerted by the sound of Gelimer’s voice, the Lord-
Amir
Leofric suddenly bellowed out loud, his voice blaring in the low-roofed tunnel: “You must ask her! Ash! Ash!”

A dribble of earth fell down between planks, touching his face, and he winced and wrenched himself back with a cry. Panting, he fixed his gaze on Ash.

“Tell my lord the King-Caliph!
Tell him.
The stone of the desert has souls! Great voices speak, speak through my Stone Golem, and
she
has heard them, and
you
have heard them—” Leofric’s voice lost depth. His face saddened. “How can you let this petty war keep you from speaking of such danger?”

“I—” Ash stopped. Floria’s shoulder was pressing against hers, hard against her backplate; and de Vere had one thoughtful hand to his mace’s grip.

“Tell him!” Leofric yelled. “My daughter betrays me, I am asking you – begging
you
—” He wrenched both arms free of the priests, stood for one second, then raised his head and stared straight at Ash. “The Empire is betrayed, we’re all to die soon, every man of us, every woman, Visigoth or Burgundian –
tell my lord Caliph what you hear.
”

Ash became aware again of Gelimer’s intense stare. She looked away from Leofric; took in all the Visigoth group, the foreign envoys; stood for a moment in a complete state of indecision.

The faintest hiss came from the Greek Fire globes. Violante, cuddling her rat, looked up from under her chopped-off hair at Ash, her expression unreadable. The adult woman-slave began to pick at the girl’s tunic, dribbling without wiping her wide lips, and whining like a hound.

“Okay.” Ash rested her hands on her belt, a few inches from sword and dagger. With a sense of immense relief, she said, “He might be mad, but he isn’t crazy. Listen to him. He’s telling the truth.”

Gelimer frowned.

“There are—” Ash hesitated, choosing words with care. “There are great pyramid-golems in the desert, south of Carthage. You saw them when we rode there, Lord Caliph.”

Gelimer’s lips twitched, red in the nest of his beard, and he stroked his hand across his mouth. “They are monuments to our holy dead. God blesses them now with a cold Fire.”

“You saw them. They’re made of the river-silt and stone. Stone. Like the Stone Golem.”

He shook his head. “Nonsense.”

“No, not nonsense. Your
amir
Leofric’s right. I’ve heard them. It’s their voices that have spoken to you through the Stone Golem. It’s their advice that has brought you here. And believe me, they don’t care about your Empire!” With a curious sense of release, she nodded towards the white-haired Visigoth lord. “
Amir
Leofric isn’t crazy. There are devils out there – as far as we’re concerned, they’re devils. And they won’t rest until the whole world is as cold and dead as the lands beyond Burgundy.”

She had little hope of convincing him. She saw from his face that she probably had not. Nonetheless, she felt the release in herself: simply to be able to speak of it aloud. From behind the ranks of Janissaries, she watched Gelimer, and he could not look away from her.

“Which is the more likely?” he said. “That this talk of devils is true, when we so plainly have God’s visible mark of favour? Or that House Leofric has some factional plot against the throne? Which his slave-general joined, at his command. And now you. Captain Ash, you should have died in my court, dissected for the knowledge you would bring us. That is how you will die, when I have taken Dijon.”

“When,” Ash remarked dryly.

Florian, at Ash’s side, interjected, “Lord-Caliph, she’s telling you the truth. There are golems in the desert. And you’ve been fooled by them.”

“No. Not I. I have not been the fool.”