by Mary Gentle
The voice, and the apprehension of the image in her mind – two white circles of chopped bone in red spurting flesh – came instantaneously. Ash swallowed bile. Nausea and lassitude swept through her like the tide.
A small pointy furry face stared down at Ash from Amir Leofric’s shoulder. Black eyes surveyed her. A spray of whiskers twitched. As Leofric bent down to speak to her, the rat shifted its pink-toed feet, and settled back to groom one pale blue flank – neither wet, nor dirty, nor infested with fleas.
“Give me something, Ash!” the Visigoth amir Leofric pleaded in an undertone. “My daughter tells me you’re a woman of great value, but I have only hope, not proof. Give me something I can use to keep you alive. Theodoric knows he’s dying and he’s become very careless of other people’s lives these last few weeks.”
“Like what?” Ash gulped, tried to see through tear-wet eyes. “The world’s over-full of mercenaries, my lord. Even good, valuable ones.”
“I cannot disobey the King-Caliph! Give me a reason why you shouldn’t be executed! Hurry!”
Ash watched in fascination as the blue rat twitched its whiskers and washed behind its ears with delicate pink paws. She shifted her gaze six inches, to Leofric’s imploring expression.
Either this will mean I’ll be released. Or it’ll mean I’ll be killed, probably quickly. Quickly is better; sweet Christ I know it’s better, I’ve seen everything you can do to the human body, this is just children playing rose-in-a-ring! I don’t want them to start on what professionals do.
She heard her own voice, thin in the cold stone-walled room:
“Okay, okay, I do hear a voice, when I’m fighting, I always have, it’s the same as your – daughter – hears, it might be, I’m obviously blood-kin to her, I’m just a discard from your experiment, but I do hear it!”
Leofric thrust his fingers through his hair, spiking up his white curls. His intense eyes narrowed. She realised that the amir was regarding her with an expression of scepticism.
After all this, he doesn’t believe me?
She whispered, hard and urgent, “ You have to believe I’m telling you the truth!”
Sweating, shaking, she remained staring into his blue eyes for a long minute.
The amir Leofric turned away.
If a hand had not caught her around her body, she would have fallen: the nazir Theudibert supported her across her bare breasts with a wiry, hard-muscled forearm. She felt him laugh.
Leofric said, “She hears the Stone Golem, sire.”
The amir Gelimer snorted. “And so would you claim that, now, in her place!”
The King-Caliph’s mouth had whitened, and his attention wandered from the conversation to the abbot at his side; Ash saw his eyes snap back to Leofric at Gelimer’s comment.
“Of course she says it,” the King-Caliph Theodoric remarked, scornfully, “Leofric, you are trying to save yourself with some fable of another slave-general!”
“I hear tactics – I hear the Stone Golem,” Ash said aloud, in Carthaginian Latin.
Gelimer protested. “You see? She had no knowledge of what it was called until you named it!”
The nazir’s arm pinned her. Ash opened her mouth to speak again, and Theudibert’s free hand clamped over it, digging fingers hard into the hinges of her jaw so that she could not bite him.
The amir Leofric bowed very low, his rats scurrying for refuge into his robes, and raised himself up again to look at the dying King-Caliph.
“Sire. What the amir Gelimer says may be true. She may be saying this only for fear of pain or injury.”
Leofric’s pale faded eyes became bleak.
“There is a way to decide this. With your permission, now, Sire – I shall have her tortured, until it becomes clear whether or not she is speaking the truth.”
III
One of Theudibert’s mates said something in Carthaginian which Ash heard as, “Let’s have a bit of fun with her. You heard the old boy. It doesn’t matter so long as she don’t end up dead.”
It might have been a blond one, or his comrade; Ash couldn’t tell. Eight men – nine, with their nazir – all very familiar, despite their light horse-mail and curved swords kit. They could have been any men in Charles’s army, or Frederick’s, or the Lion Azure if it came to it and where am I being taken? she asked herself, her bare feet bruising on stone steps, staggering, pushed down – down?
Down spiral steps, into rooms below surface-level. Is the whole hill above Carthage harbour riddled with cellars? she wondered. And the obvious thought appeared in her mind: How many go in who never come out again?
Some. It only has to be ‘some’.
What does he mean, torture? He can’t mean torture. He can’t.
The nazir Theudibert spoke with a grin in his voice. “Yeah, why not? But you never saw it. Nothing happened to his prize bitch. You never saw nothing, right?”
Eight other excited voices mumbled agreement.
Their sweat stank on the air. Even as they bundled her out of the staircase, into lantern-lit corridors, she smelled their violent high spirits, their growing tension. Men in a group, egging each other on: nothing they would not do.
She thought, as their fists pushed her on: I can fight them, I can gouge out an eye, I can break a finger or an arm, rupture somebody’s testicles, and then what? Then they break my thumbs and shins and they rape me forward and backward, cunt and arse—
“Cow!” A fair-haired man grabbed her bare breast and squeezed his fingers closed with all his force. Ash’s breasts were already tender, had been every day on ship; she involuntarily screamed and lashed out, catching him in the throat. Six or seven pairs of hands manhandled her, a backhanded blow cracked across her face and spun her round and dashed her against the wall of a cell.
The crack to her head shattered her with pain. She felt baked clay tiles under her knees. A man coughed thickly; spat on her. A soft leather boot, with a man’s hard foot in it, kicked her violently three finger’s width below her navel.
Her lungs seized.
She gasped, scrabbling meaninglessly with her hands; found herself scraping a breath down her throat, felt cold clay tiles under left leg, hip, ribs and shoulder. Stinking linen tugged, caught around her neck, and ripped, as someone bending down tore her previously shredded shirt off over her head. Her braies were gone. Naked to their gaze.
Ash got half a spare breath, snarled, “Fuck you!” in a voice pitifully high.
Four or five male voices laughed above her. They kicked teasingly with their boots, laughed each time she shrank away from the pain.
“Go on, do her. Do her! Barbas, you first.”
“Not me, man. I ain’t touching her. Bitch got a disease. All them bitches from up north, they got disease.”
“Oh, fucking baby, wants his mamma’s tit, don’t want a woman! You want me to tie up the dangerous warrior-woman? You ’fraid to touch her?”
A scuffle, over her. Booted feet stamped down dangerously close to her head, on the cell’s tiled floor. She saw red clay, reddened by the single lamp’s light; dirty hems of robes, very finely riveted mail skirts, leather greaves tied on shins, and – as she rolled over on to her front and lifted her head – men’s faces in snapshot details: a wild brown eye, an unshaven cheek, a hairy wrist wiped across a mouth full of bright, regular teeth; a snake-scar trailing white down a thigh, a robe hitched up, the bulge under clothing of a cock growing hard.
“Fucking do her! Gaina! Fravitta! What you fucking standing there for, ain’t you seen a woman before?”
“Let Gaiseric go first!”
“Yeah, let the baby do it!”
“Get your cock out, boy. That it? She ain’t going to even feel that!”
Their deep voices resonated between small walls. She is ten years old again, sees men as infinitely heavier, stronger, muscled; but eight men are not just stronger than one woman, they are stronger than one man. They are stronger than one. Ash felt hot tears squeezing over her shut lids. She got to
her hands and knees, shouting at them:
“I’m going to take some of you with me, I am going to mark you, maim you, mark you for life—!”
Saliva dripped out of her mouth, damp-spotting the baked tiles. She saw every crack at the edges of the squares where the clay crumbled, every black spidering mark of ingrained dirt. Her head and stomach throbbed, half blinding her with pain. A hot flush ran over her bare body. “I’ll fucking kill you, I’ll fucking kill you.”
Theudibert bent down to scream into her face. His saliva sprayed her as he laughed. “Who’s a fucking warrior-woman now? Girl? You gonna fight us, are you?”
“Oh yeah, I’m going to try and take on eight men when I don’t even have a sword, never mind any mates.”
Ash was not aware, for a second, that she had spoken aloud. Or in such a tone of adult, composed contempt – as if it were completely obvious.
Theudibert’s eyes narrowed. His grin faded. The nazir remained bending over, hands splayed on his mail-covered thighs. His frown indicated confusion. Ash froze.
“Like, I’m going to be stupid” she whispered scornfully, hardly daring to breathe in the moment of stillness. She stared up at faces: men in their twenties who would be Barbas, Gaina, Fravitta, Gaiseric, but she could not know which was which. Her stomach wrenched with pain. She sat back up on her heels, ignoring a hot trickle of urine down her inner thighs as she pissed herself.
“There aren’t any ‘warriors’ on a battlefield.” Her scornful voice ran on, trembling, in rough Carthaginian, and she let it: “There’s you and your buddy, and you and your mates, and you and your boss. A lance. The smallest unit on the field is eight or ten men. Nobody’s a hero on their own. One man alone out there is dead meat. I’m no fucking volunteer hero!”
It was the sort of thing she might have said every day, nothing especially perceptive.
She looked up in the yellow light at swinging shadows on the walls, and the rose-tinged faces staring down at her. Two men shifted back on their heels, a younger one – Gaiseric? – whispering to a mate.
But it’s the sort of thing they might say.
And no civilian would.
Not man versus woman. Military versus civilian. We’re on the same side. Come on, see it, you must see it, I’m not a woman, I’m one of you!
Ash had sense enough to rest her palms flat on her bare thighs and kneel there in complete silence. She appeared as unaware of her bare breasts and bruised belly as if she were back in the wooden baths with the baggage train.
Sweat poured unnoticed down her face. Salt blood from her cheek ran over her split lip. A rangy woman, with wide shoulders, and hair cropped boy-short, head-wound short, nun-short.
“Fuck,” Theudibert said. His thick voice sounded resentful. “Fucking cowardly bitch.”
A sardonic voice came from one of the eight men; a fair-haired man standing towards the back. “What’s she gonna do, nazir, take us all out?”
Ash felt a definable cooling to the emotional temperature in the cell. She shivered: all the fine hairs on her body standing upright. They’re on duty. They could have been drunk.
“Shut your fucking mouth, Barbas!”
“Yes, nazir.”
“Ah, fuck it. Fuck her.” Theudibert swung around on his heel, shoving between his men to get to the cell door. “I don’t see none of you shits moving. Move! ”
A thickly muscled soldier, the one she had seen get hard, protested sullenly, “But, nazir—”
The nazir thumped him in passing, hard enough to double him over.
Their hard heavy bodies cluttered the cell door for seconds, longer seconds than she had known at any period of time that wasn’t on the field of battle: seconds that seemed to last for ever, them muttering discontentedly to each other, elaborately ignoring her, one spitting on the floor, someone harshly, cruelly laughing, a fragment of speech: “—break her anyway—”
The iron grating that formed a door clanged shut. Locked.
In that split second, the cell was empty.
Keys jangling, mail rustling. Their bodies moved away down the corridor. Distant booted footsteps loping up stairs. Fading voices.
“Oh, son of a bitch.” Ash’s head fell forward. Her body expected the flop of long hair over her face, awaited the minute shifting of its weight. Nothing obscured her vision. Literally light-headed, she gazed up at narrow walls lit by the lantern beyond the iron grating. “Oh, Jesu. Oh Christus. Save me, Jesu.”
A fit of shuddering took her. She felt her body was shaking like a hound coming out of cold water and, amazed, found nothing she could do would stop it. The lamp in the corridor showed only a few feet of clay-tiled floor and pink mosaic walls. The lock on the iron grating was larger than her two fists together. Ash scrabbled around with shaking hands and found her torn shirt. The fabric dripped wet in her hands. One of the nazir’s men had pissed on it.
Cold cut her skin. She wrapped the stinking cloth over as much of her body as she could reach, and curled up in the far corner of the cell. The absence of a door bothered her: she did not feel less imprisoned but more exposed by the steel grating, even if its mesh was not large enough to let her put a hand through.
In the corridor, a Greek Fire jet hissed into life. Intensely white squares of light fell through the iron grating, on to the cracked tiles. Her belly hurt.
The stench of male urine faded as her nose numbed it out. The wet cloth grew warmer with her body-heat. Her breath clouded the air in front of her face. Intense coldness bit at her toes, her hands; numbed the pain of her cut forehead and lip. Blood still trickled down, she tasted it. Her stomach twisted, in a grinding pain, and she wrapped her arms around her body, hugging herself.
All I did was catch them off their guard at the right moment. That won’t happen twice. That was just bad discipline: what happens when they get genuine orders to give me a beating, or a rape, or break my hands?
Ash curled herself tighter. She tried to quiet the yammering fear in her head, bury the word torture.
Fuck Leofric, fuck him, how could he feed me and then do this to me; he can’t mean torture, not real torture, eyes burned out, bones broken, he can’t mean that, it must be something else, it must be a mistake—
No. No mistake. No point in fooling myself.
Why do you think they’ve left you down here? Leofric knows who you are, what you are, she will have told him. By way of a profession I kill people. He knows what I’m thinking, right now. Just because I know what’s being done doesn’t mean it won’t work—
Another grinding pain went up through her belly. Ash pushed both her fists into her abdomen, tensing her body. A low pain made her stomach cold. It subsided: almost immediately it grew again, cresting at a peak that made her gasp, swear, and sigh a great shuddering breath as it died down.
Her eyes opened.
Sweet Jesu.
She put her hand between her thighs and brought it out black in the lamp’s light.
“Oh, no.”
Appalled, she lifted her hand to her face and sniffed. She could not smell blood, could smell nothing now, but the way that the liquid covering her hand began to contract and pull on her skin as it dried—
“I’m bleeding!” Ash shrieked.
She pushed herself up on to her knees, left knee screaming at the impact; pulled herself to her feet, and limped two steps to the grating, her fingers locking into the square steel mesh.
“Guard! Help! Help!”
No voice answered. The air in the passage outside shifted, coolly. No voices came from other possible cells. No sound of metal: weapons or keys. No guardroom.
Pain doubled her over. She gritted a high, keen sound out from between clenched teeth. Bent over, she saw the white skin of her inner thighs appeared black from pubic hair to knee, rivulets of blood running down from knee to ankle. She had not felt it: blood is undetectable, flowing over the skin at blood-heat.
The pain grew again, grinding down in the pit of her belly, in her womb, akin to mon
thly cramps but stronger, harder, deeper. A sweat broke out over her face and breasts and shoulders, slicked wet under her arms. Her fingers clenched.
“Jesu, for Jesu’s sake! Help me! Help! Help! Get a doctor! Somebody help me!”
She sank to her knees. Bent double, she pressed her forehead on the tiles, praying for the pain from her grazes to offset the pain and movement of her belly.
I must be still. Completely still. It might not happen.
Her muscles cramped again. A sharp, shearing pain cut off thought. She hugged her hands up between her thighs, into her vagina, as if she could hold back the blood.
The lamplight dimmed, gradually going down to a small intense jet. Blood clots blotted her palms. Blood smeared her skin as she held desperately on to herself, pushing up, pushing at the womb’s entrance; warm wet liquid running out between her fingers.
“Somebody help me! Somebody get a surgeon. That old woman. Anything. Somebody help me save it, help me, please, it’s my baby, help me—”
Her voice echoed down the corridors. Complete silence resumed, after the echoes died, a silence so intense she could hear the lamp hissing outside the cell. Pain died down for a moment, for a minute; she prayed, hands between her legs, and the swooping drag of it began again, a dull, intense, grinding, and finally fiery pain, searing up through her belly as her muscles contracted.
Blood smeared the tiles, made the floor under her sticky. Artificial light turned it black, not red.
She sobbed, sobbed with relief as pain ebbed; groaned as it started again. At the peak she could not keep from crying out. The lips of her vagina felt the pushing expellation of lumps – black stringy clots of blood, that slipped like leeches over her hands and away, spilling on the floor. Blood hot on her hands and legs; smearing her thighs, belly; plastering in warm hand-prints over her torso as she hugged herself and shook, biting at the inside of her mouth, finally screaming in pain; and then blood drying cold on her skin.