Ash: A Secret History (38 page)

“Sisters,” she said, blurrily. The wooden stool lurched forward. She came to her feet, rather than fall sprawling, and halted with one armoured hand outstretched, catching the Visigoth woman’s shoulder for support. “Christ, woman, we could be twins! How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

Ash laughed shakily. “Well, there you are. If I knew the year I was born, I could tell you. I must be eighteen or nineteen or twenty-ish by now. Maybe we
are
twins. What do you think?”

“My father interbreeds his slave stock. I think we probably all look alike.” The Faris’s dark brows frowned. She reached up with her bare fingers and touched Ash on the cheek. “I did see some others, as a child, but they went mad.”

“‘Went mad’!” A flush spread up over Ash’s face. She felt the heat of it. Entirely unplanned, entirely genuine: her face grew red. “What am I supposed to tell people? Faris, what do I say? That some crazy lord-
amir
down in Carthage is breeding slaves like
stock,
like
animals?
And that I was one of them?”

The Visigoth woman said softly, “It still could be a coincidence. One shouldn’t let a likeness—”

“Oh, fucking hell, woman! We’re
twins!
”

Ash looked into eyes exactly the same height above ground as her own, the same dark colour, searching her features for kinship: for the curve of lip, shape of nose, shape of chin; a pale-haired foreign woman with the sunburn and odd scars of military campaigns, and a voice that, while not quite her own, might (she supposed now) be her own voice as others heard it.

“I’d rather not have known,” Ash said thickly. “If it’s true, I’m not a person, I’m an animal. Bloodstock. Failed bloodstock. I can be bought and sold – by
any
body – and I can’t say a word about it. By
law.
You’re a farm animal too. Don’t you
care?
”

“It isn’t news to me.”

That brought her up short. Ash closed her hand over the woman’s mailed shoulder, squeezed once, and let go. She stood swaying, but upright. The high hedges of the
hortus conclusus
shut out Basle, the company, the army, the world in darkness: and Ash shivered, despite armour and the padding under it.

“It doesn’t matter to me who I fight for,” she said. “I signed a contract with you, and I suppose this isn’t enough to break it – assuming all my people here are unharmed, and not just Thomas. You know I am good, even if I don’t have your ‘Stone Golem’.”

The lie came with an ease that might have been role-playing, might have been numbness, but in any case, Ash felt, couldn’t delude anybody. She pushed on doggedly:

“I know you’ve razed half a dozen essential commercial cities in Italy, I know the Swiss cantons are wiped out as a fighting force, and that you’ve frightened Frederick and the Germanies into surrender. I also know the Sultan in Constantinople isn’t currently expecting trouble, so your army is intended for Christendom – for the kingdoms north of here.”

She let her gaze rest on the general’s face, trying to detect any emotion. An impassive face looked back at her, chiaroscuro shadows shifting across it from the light of the golems’ torches.

“Intended for Burgundy, Daniel de Quesada said, but I expect that means France as well. And then the
rosbifs
? You’re going to be overextended, even with the numbers you’ve got. I know what I’m doing, I’ve been doing it for a long time, let me get on with it. Okay? And then some time in the future, when I’m not under contract to you, I’ll let your Lord-
Amir
Leofric know exactly what I think of him breeding bastards.”

—
And this would probably work with anyone else,
Ash concluded in the privacy of her own mind. How like me is she? Is she going to spot when I’m lying? For all I know, this would sound like bluff to anyone, let alone a sister I didn’t know I’d got.

Fuck me. A sister.

The Visigoth general bent down and picked up the Brazen Head from where it dented the turf, shook it, shrugged, and placed it back on the trestle table beside Ash’s sallet. “I should like to keep her as my sub-commander here.”

Ash opened her mouth to reply, and registered the ‘her’. ‘Her’, not ‘you’. That, and the precise diction, and the woman’s unfocused eyes, brought a sudden stab of realisation to her gut:
She is not talking to
me.

Fear flooded her body.

Ash took two steps back, skidded on the frosty grass, and stumbled backwards down the grassy bank, barely keeping her footing, falling, ramming her back hard into the marble surround of the fountain. She heard the metal of her backplate creak. A copper taste flooded her mouth. She blushed, blushed red as fire, as hot with shame as if she had been publicly discovered having sex; feeling in the one second
It was never real until now!
and in the next,
I never
expected to see someone
else
doing this!

Golems stared down from the top of the bank. The nearest one to Ash now had a spider’s web linking its arm to the hedge, a frost-rimed white strand running from trimmed privet leaves to the shining brass mechanism of its elbow. She stared at the featureless oval face, the hen’s-egg shape of the head delineated by guttering torches.

The Faris’s voice protested, “But I would prefer to use her and her company now, not later.”

She is not talking to me. She is talking to her voices.

Ash blurted, “We’re under contract! We’re fighting for you here. That was the arrangement!”

The general folded her arms, now with her head raised, watching the southern constellations in the sky over Basle. “If you order me to, then I will.”

“I don’t believe you hear voices at all! You’re a bloody heathen. This is all play-acting!” Ash made an attempt to climb back up the steep bank. The soles of her riding boots glided over the cold grass, and she slid down, pitching forward in a rattle of metal; catching herself on her hands, and gazing up from on all fours at the Visigoth woman. “You’re putting me on! This isn’t
real!
”

Her protests were verbal floodwater. She stuttered, jabbering, and in the most private part of her mind, thought
I must not listen!
Whatever I do, I mustn’t speak to my voice, I mustn’t listen, in case it is the same—

—In case she’ll know if I do.

Between keeping up a continuous protest and the clamped-shut determination in her mind, she neither heard nor felt anything as the Visigoth woman continued to speak aloud into empty air.

“Yes. I’ll send her south on the next galley.”

“You will not!” Ash got quickly and carefully to her feet.

The Visigoth general lowered her gaze from the night sky.

“My father Leofric wants to see you,” she said. “You’ll reach Carthage within a week. If he doesn’t keep you long, I’ll have you back here before the sun moves into Virgo.
²²
We shall be some way further north, but I can still use your company. I’ll send your men here back to your camp.”

“
Baise mon cul!
”
²³
Ash snapped.

It was pure reflex. In the same way that she had played camp’s-little-mascot at nine, so she knew how to play bluff-mercenary-captain at nineteen. Her head swam.

“This wasn’t in the contract! If I have to take my people out of the field now, it’ll cost you – I’ve still got to feed them. And if you want me to go all the way to fucking North Africa in the middle of your war…” Ash made an attempt at a shrug. “That wasn’t in the contract either.”

And the second you take your eye off me, I’m out of here.

The Visigoth woman picked up Ash’s sallet from the table, stroking her bare palm over the curve of metal from visor to crest to tail. Ash automatically winced, anticipating rust on the mirror-finished steel. The woman knocked her knuckles against the metal thoughtfully, and pushed the visor down until it clicked.

“I’m giving some of these to my men.” A brief glitter of laughter, her eyes meeting Ash’s. “I didn’t order Milano razed until I’d cleared it out first.”

“You can’t get better than Milanese plate. Except for Augsburg – and I don’t suppose you’ve left much of the south German foundries, either.” Ash reached up and took her helmet from the woman’s hands. “You send word to me out at the camp when you want me to board ship.”

For a whole second, she was convinced that she had done it. That she would be allowed now to walk out of the garden, ride out of the city, put herself squarely in the middle of eight hundred armed men wearing her own livery, and tell the Visigoths to go straight to whatever might be the Arian version of eternal damnation.

The Visigoth general asked, aloud, “What do I do with someone my father wants to investigate, and I don’t trust not to escape if I let her leave here?”

Ash said nothing aloud. In that part of herself where voice was potential, she acted. It was no decision, it was gut-level reflex, taken in despite of any risk of discovery. Passive, Ash listened.

A whisper – the merest whisper of a whisper – sounded in her head. The quietest, most familiar voice imaginable—

‘
Strip her of armour and weapons. Keep her under continuous close guard. Escort her immediately to the nearest ship.
’

V

A
nazir
²⁴
and his guards kept a literal grip on her, walking from the castle garden down through the streets, to a long tall row of four-storey houses that Ash recognised from her scouts’ reports as the main Visigoth headquarters in Basle. Mail-covered hands held her arms.

Above the lime-washed plaster and oak beams of the gables, the stars were being swallowed up in darkness. Dawn coming.

Ash made no effort to break their hold on her. Most of this
nazir
’s unit were young, boys no older than her, with tan-creased faces, tight bodies, and long legs with calves thin-muscled from being so much on horseback. She gazed around at their faces as they hustled her into the nearest building, through an oaken door. If not for the Visigoth robes and mail, they could have been any men-at-arms from her company.

“Okay, okay!” She stopped dead in the entrance, on the flagstones, and shaped her mouth into a smile for the
nazir.
“I have about four marks in my purse, which will buy you guys drinks, and then you can come and tell me how my men are doing.”

The two soldiers released her arms. She felt for her purse and realised that her hands were still shaking. The
nazir
– about her age, half a head taller, and male, of course – said, “Motherfucking mercenary bitch,” in a fairly businesslike tone.

Ash mentally shrugged. Well, it was either that or
she’s our boss’s double!
and I get treated like the local demon…

“Fucking Frankish cunt,” he added.
²⁵

House guards and servants came out into the hall, carrying candles. Ash felt a hand jerk at her belt as she was shoved forward, knew her purse would be missing when she looked for it; and then in a clatter of boots and shouted orders in Carthaginian, she found herself bustled towards the back of the house, through rooms full of armed men, down stone-floored passages, into a tiny room with an iron-barred door made of two-inch-thick oak, and a window about a foot square.

Two solemn-faced pages in Visigoth tunics indicated they were to help her off with her armour. Ash made no protest. She let herself be stripped down to her arming doublet and hose, with its sewn-in mail at armpits and crutch; her request for a demi-gown brought nothing.

The oak door closed. A sound of iron grating down into sockets told her that bars had been secured in place.

One candle guttered, its holder placed on the floor.

By its light she examined the room, padding around it in bare feet. The oak floorboards felt chill. The room was bare, containing neither chair nor table nor bed; and the window-slot had thumb-thick iron bars set into its walls.

“Fuckers!” Kicking the door would hurt: she hit it with the heel of her hand. “Let me see my men!”

Her voice bounced back flat from the walls.

“Let me out of here, you motherfuckers!”

With the thickness of the wood, it was not even possible to tell if there was a guard posted outside; or if he could hear her if there was. She used the same voice she would have used to call orders across a battle-line.

“
Cocksuckers!
Sweet Christ, I can
pay
a ransom! Just let me send a message out!”

Silence.

Ash stretched her arms above her head, and then rubbed at the sore spots where her harness had chafed. She missed both her sword and her steel protection so keenly that she could all but feel the shape of the metal between her hands. She backed across the room, slid down the wall, and sat beside the sole light: pale wax and primrose-yellow flame.

Her hands prickled, as if the blood in them was cold as the water in alpine streams. She rubbed her palms together. A part of her mind insisted, no, it’s not true, this is all some weird story, this isn’t real life. You’re a soldier’s brat, that’s all. It’s coincidence. Your father was probably some Visigoth
nazir
who fought with the Griffin-in-Gold, and your mother was a whore. That’s all: nothing out of the ordinary. You just look like the Faris.

And the other, stunned, part of her mind kept repeating:
She hears my voice.

“Fucking hell.” Ash spoke aloud. “She
can’t
take me prisoner. I’ve got a fucking
contract
with the woman. Green Christ! I’m not going to Carthage. They might—”

Her mind refused to consider it. This was a new sensation: she tried to force her thoughts to consider being taken overseas to North Africa, and they slid away. Again and again.
Like trying to herd eels,
Ash thought, with a quick grin, and her teeth rattled together.