by Mary Gentle
“Robert!” Her imploring scream died, dull against the ancient tiled cellar walls. “Oh, Robert! Florian! Godfrey! Oh help me, help me, help meee—”
Her belly cramped, contracted. The pain came now, rose up like a sea swell, drowned her in agony. She wished she could pass out; but her body kept her present, working against it, swearing at the physical inevitability of the process, weeping, filled with a violent fury against – who? What? Herself?
I didn’t want it anyway.
Oh shit no—
Her ragged nails made half-moon indentations in her palms. The thick stink of blood flooded the cell. The pain shredded her. More than that, knowing what this pain meant broke her into pieces: weeping, quietly, as if afraid now that she would be heard.
Guilt shuddered through her: If I hadn’t asked Florian to get rid of it, this wouldn’t be happening.
Her reasonably accurate guesses of the north (‘nearly Vespers’, ‘an hour before Matins’) gave way to complete disorientation: it must surely be still black day, not starry night, but she could not be certain of it. Not certain of anything now.
Her belly’s pain loosened and tightened every muscle in her body: thighs, arms, back, chest. The involuntary contractions of her womb died down, slowly. The immensity of the relief drowned her. Every muscle relaxed. Her eyes stared, fixed open wide.
Her breasts hurt.
She lay curled on her side in the lamp’s chequered illumination. Both her hands were full of clots and strings of black blood, drying to stickiness. A flaccid veined thing lay on her palm, half that size, drying. It trailed a twisted thread of flesh no thicker than a linen cord. Attached to the cord’s end was a red gelatinous mass about the size of an olive.
In the square of white light she could clearly distinguish its tadpole-head and curving body-tail, the limbs only buds, the head not human. A nine-week miscarriage.
“It was perfect.” She screamed up at the invisible ceiling. “It was perfect!”
Ash began to cry. Great gasping sobs wrenched at her lungs. She curled up tight and wept, body sore, shuddering like a woman in a fit; screaming in grief, scalding tears pouring down her face in the darkness, howling, howling, howling.
IV
Footsteps tiptoed, voices whispered: she didn’t notice.
Gut-wrenching sobs faded to silent tears, running hot and wet over her hands. Grief ceased to be a refuge. Her limbs and body shook, with trauma and with the intense cold of the cells. Ash rolled into a tighter ball, cold palms clasped around her shins. Her lips were dry with thirst.
The world and her body came back. Chill clay walls bit into her bare flank. She shivered, all her body-hair standing up like the bristles on a pig; expected soon to be sleepy, to cease to shiver, as men do in cold high mountain snow when they lie down never to rise again.
The cell’s steel grating slammed to one side. Slaves’ bare feet slapped on the tiled floor; someone shouted, above her head. Ash tried to move. Soreness stabbed her vagina. Quaking shudders wracked her body. The tiles felt frost-cold under her.
A rasping voice shouted, “God’s Tree, don’t you know enough to report to me!”
Ash got her head up off the floor, neck straining, swollen hot eyes blinking.
“Light a fire in the observatory!” a bulky, dark-bearded Visigoth man snapped, standing over her. The ’arif Alderic unbuttoned the voluminous indigo wool gown that hung from his shoulders, over his mail. He dropped it to the bloodstained floor, knelt, and rolled her into the material. Ash vomited weakly. Yellow bile stained the blue wool. Thick folds of cloth enveloped her, and she felt him thrust an arm under her knees, her shoulders, and lift. The mosaic walls whirled in the intense light of Greek Fire as he swung her up into his arms.
“Out of my way!”
Slaves ran. His footsteps jolted her.
Silk-lined wool slid over her icy, filthy skin. Warmth grew. She began to shudder with uncontrollable shivers. Alderic’s arms gripped her tightly.
Carried up steps, carried across the fountain courtyard with cold sleet slashing down on her bare face, trickling pale red water, Ash tried to go away in her head. To put it all wherever it is that she puts memories of bad things, of people who betrayed her, of stupid miscalculations that got people killed.
Hot tears pushed up between her eyelids. She felt water trickle down her face, mingling with the sleet. In a crowd of slaves and shouted orders, she was carried into another building, down corridors, down stairwells; grief wiping out everything but a dim impression of a warren of rooms going on for ever, rooted down into Carthage hill like a tooth into a jawbone.
The pressure of his arms under her relaxed. Something hard but slightly giving pressed into her back. She lay on a pallet on a blocky white oak daybed, in a spacious room lit by Greek Fire. Slaves ran in with ten or a dozen iron bowls, putting them on tripods and heaping them with red-hot charcoal.
Ash stared up. Metal cabinets lined the walls, below glass-and-fire lamps. Above the lights, the vaulted wooden roof shifted – shutting, like a clam-shell, as she watched: cutting off a view through thick, gnarled glass of a black day sky above.
Slaves ceased pulling ceiling-panels, tied off ropes.
A pale-haired girl of eight or so scowled at Ash, fingering her steel collar. The male slaves left. Two more child-slaves remained to tend the ember-burners that gradually leaked warmth into the cold air.
Alderic’s harsh commands brought more people. A freeborn, grave, bearded Visigoth in woollen robes stared down at Ash, together with a woman who wore a black veil pinned to the crown of her headdress. The two of them rattled a rapid conversation in medical Latin. She understood it well enough – why not? Florian uses it all the time – but the details slid out of her concentration. Her body shifted like meat on a slab as they pulled her legs apart, and first fingers and then some steel instrument were pushed into her vagina. She hardly winced at the pain.
“Well?” another voice demanded.
Her few minutes in the amir’s company had not given her a memory of his face, but now she recognised his dirty-white hair and beard, tufting up like a startled owl. The amir Leofric, glaring down with alert, bloodshot eyes.
The woman – who must be a physician, Ash realised – said, “She will not easily conceive again, Amir. Look. I am surprised that she could bear this one for so long. There is chronic damage: she will never carry to term. The gate of the womb10 is all but destroyed, and much scarred over with very old tissue.”
Leofric stamped across the room. He reached out his arms and a slave put a green and yellow woollen robe on him. “God’s Tree! This one is barren too!”
“Even so.”
“What is the use of these sterile females? I can’t even breed from this!”
“No, Amir.” The woman probing between Ash’s thighs lifted one bloodstained hand to put back her veil. She changed from Carthaginian Latin and spoke in French, as if she spoke to a child or an animal. The manner in which one speaks to a slave.
“I shall give you a drink. If there is more to pass, you will pass it. A flux, do you understand? A bloody flux. Then you shall be well.”
Ash shifted her hips. Hard metal obstructions slid from her vagina, bringing infinite relief from a pain she had not known she felt. She tried to sit, to move, striking out weakly. The second doctor closed his hand around her wrist.
Her eyes focused on the man’s cuff. In the room’s white light, she saw slanting big stitches fixing the olive lining to the bottle-green wool garment. Wild stitches fastened button to cuff. The loop for the button was a mere hoop of fraying thread. Someone, some slave, made this fast, sloppy, in a hurry. Underneath his voluminous woollen sleeve a light silk robe was visible: far more like what she would expect to see worn in Carthage.
Alderic’s wool gown cocooned her body, warming her core. Its workmanship was equally hurried.
They didn’t expect this cold either.
What she feels here is not the warm, star-lit, sweltering tw
ilight that Angelotti described; when he was both slave and gunner on this coast. The Eternal Twilight in which nothing grows, but within the bounds of which the nobles of Carthage walk, silk-clad, under indigo skies.
The very air crackles with frost.
The woman, practised, put a cup to her lips and tipped. Ash swallowed. A sweet herb tanged in the drink. Almost immediately her body cramped. The feeling of blood expelled from her body, soaking the wool, constricted her throat again and she clenched her jaw on a sob.
“Will she live?” Leofric demanded.
The elder doctor, very grave, very satisfied with his own opinion, observed to the amir Leofric, “The uterus is strong. The body is strong, and displays little shock. If she is subjected to more pain, she will hardly die of it, unless it be most severe. She may safely be put to moderate torture within an hour or so.”
The amir Leofric ceased pacing on the mosaic floor and flung open wooden window shutters. A blast of cold air entered the room, chilling the effect of the coals in iron dishes. He stared out into darkness at a sky of utter blackness: no moon, no star, no sun.
Ash lay in the pomegranate-carved oak bed, watching him. She thought: I really could die, now.
It was not a sudden realisation. It came to her quite ordinarily, as it always did, usually just before battle; but it tightened the focus of her mind, snapped her into a complete consciousness of Leofric, his doctors, ’arif Alderic and his guard, the bitter air, the bustle and business of the household. The hundred thousand men and women outside on the white-lit streets of Carthage, living out quotidian experience.
About three-quarters of which will know there’s a war on, half of whom will care, and none at all will bother about just one more prisoner dying in a lord-amir’s house.
What came to her was the absolute apprehension of her own unimportance, as if a membrane had broken: all the things that one thinks could not happen ‘because I am me’ become in an instant possible. Other people die of injuries, of accidents, of poisoned blood, of childbed fever, of an ordinary order of execution of the King-Caliph’s justice, and therefore I—
She was used to thinking herself the hero of her own life: what lost sense for her now was the idea of it being a coherent story requiring a resolved ending (some day, in the future, the far future). She thought, But it doesn’t matter, quite calmly. Other people can win battles, with or without ‘voices’. Someone else can take my place. It is all accident, all chance.
Rota fortuna, Fortune’s Wheel. Fortuna imperatrix mundi.
Without turning around, the Visigoth amir said, “I was reading a report from my daughter when the slaves summoned me. She reports you are a violent woman, a killer by profession, a warrior by desire rather than by training, as she is.”
Ash laughed.
It was a tiny snuffle, a choke of a laugh, hardly a breath; but it surged through her so that her eyes ran, and she wiped the back of her hand across her chill, wet face. “Yeah, and I had so many professions to choose from!”
Leofric turned. At his back, a blank black sky whirled, flakes of snow plastering the edges of the wooden shutters. The same girl-slave pattered over the tiles and heaved the window shutters to. Leofric ignored her.
“You are not what I expected.” He sounded both fussy, and frank. He bundled up his striped gown of green and yellow velvet and paced across the floor towards her. “Foolishly, I expected you to be as she is.”
That begs the question of what you think she is, Ash reflected.
“Take this down,” Leofric said, to the smaller of the boy-slaves. Ash saw the child held a wax tablet, ready to impress it with his stylus. “Preliminary notes: physical. I see an habitually dirty young woman, evidence of parasitic skin inflammation common, scalp infested with ringworm. Muscle development unusual in a woman, especially in the trapezoid, and biceps. Peasant stock. General muscle tone good – extremely good. Some evidence of early malnutrition. Two teeth missing, upper jaw, left-hand side. No evidence of caries. Scarring to face, old trauma to third, fourth and fifth ribs on the left side, to all fingers of the left hand, and evidence of what I suppose to have been a hairline fracture of the left shin-bone. Rendered infertile by trauma, probably before puberty. Read that back to me.”
Leofric listened to the young boy reading in a sing-song. Ash blinked back too-easy tears, huddling the wool gown around herself. Her sore body ached. Waves of sensation still throbbed through her belly, through her whole body: every tissue aching.
It took her breath: too stark to think about. Some arrogant part of herself rose up in revolt. “What is this, my pedigree? I’m not some God-rotted horse-coper’s mare! Don’t you know of what degree I am?”
Leofric turned back to her. “What degree are you, little Frankish girl?”
Cold air flickered across the hot coals, they burned red and black in turn. Ash met the eyes of the girl-slave kneeling on the far side of the iron tripod. The child winced and looked away. Ash thought, Is he serious? A waft of heat over the coals made her shiver.
“Squire’s, I suppose. I sit at table with men of the fifth degree by right.” It suddenly struck her as irresistibly ridiculous. “I can eat at the same table as preachers, doctors of law, rich merchants, and gentlewomen!” Ash shifted her body closer to the edge of the oaken bed and the nearest dish of hot coals. “I guess I eat with the knight’s rank, now I’m married to one. ‘The substance of livelihood is not so dignifying as is noble blood.’ Hereditary knight beats mercenary.”
“And of what rank am I?”
She may safely be put to moderate torture within an hour or so.
Flesh is so easy to burn.
“Of the second degree, if an amir is second in rank after the King-Caliph; that is, a bishop, viscount or earl’s equal.” Her voice stayed calm. Her mind suddenly demanded, What is John de Vere doing, is the Earl of Oxford dead? She warily watched the Visigoth lord.
In his preoccupied tenor, he asked, “How should you address me, then?”
The answer he wants is Lord-Amir or my lord; he wants some show of respect.
Acidly, she suggested, “‘Father’?”
“Mmm? Mmm.” Leofric turned and took a few steps away from her, and back; his lined and faded eyes fixing on her face. He snapped his fingers at the slave scribe. “Preliminary notes: of the mind and spirit.”
Ash pushed herself up into a sitting position on the palliasse, gritting her teeth against soreness and pain. Her eyes dripped. She bundled the warm wool around her naked body. She opened her mouth to interrupt. The little slave-girl’s face screwed up in terror.
“She is a—” The white-haired man broke off. His gown moved, a bulge near his fine leather belt wriggling around. The grey nose and whiskers of a big buck rat poked out of Leofric’s sleeve. He absently lowered his arm towards the oaken bed. The rat descended cautiously onto the palliasse near Ash.
“This is a mind between eighteen and twenty years of age,” the Visigoth amir dictated. “She has a great resilience towards pain, and towards mutilation and other forms of physical damage; recovering from the miscarriage of a foetus of approximately nine weeks’ growth inside of two hours.”
Ash’s mouth dropped open. She thought recovered! and then startled as a fly brushed the back of her hand. The jolt as she froze, instead of batting it away, left her body shaking. She looked down.
The grey rat was niffing again at her hand.
“Such evidence as I have been able to gather speaks of her living among soldiers from an early age, adopting their modes of thought, and following both the military professions: whore and soldier.”
Ash held out her brown-stained fingers. The rat began to lick her skin. It had a patched grey-and-white back and belly, one black eye and one red eye, and a plush velvet softness to its short coat. She cautiously shifted her hand to scratch it gently behind its warm, delicate ear. She attempted Leofric’s chirrup. “Hey, Lickfinger. You’re a witch’s familiar if I ever saw one, aren’t you?”
; The rat looked up at her with bright mismatched eyes.
“She displays lack of concentration, lack of forward planning, a desire to live for momentary sensation.” Leofric signalled the scribe to stop writing. “My dear child, do you imagine I have any use for a woman who has become a mercenary captain in the barbaric north, and who claims her military skills come from saints’ voices? An ignorant peasant, with a mere physical skill?”
“No.” Ash, cold in her belly, continued to finger the rat’s velvet coat. “But that isn’t what you believe I am.”
“You were with my daughter long enough to counterfeit a working knowledge of the Stone Golem.”
“So the King-Caliph says.” Ash let the cynical, acid tone remain in her voice.
“He is, in this case, correct.” Leofric’s tall skinny bulk sat on the edge of the bed. The grey rat skittered over the palliasse and climbed up his thigh, putting its front paws up on his chest. He added, “The Belly of God is right, you know; we Visigoths have no choice but to be soldiers—”
“‘The Belly of God’?” Ash echoed, startled.
“Fist of God,” Leofric corrected himself. In Carthaginian Gothic it was a single word, obviously a title. “Abbot Muthari. I must stop calling him that.”
Ash recalled a fat abbot in the King-Caliph’s company. She would have smiled, but fear made her face stiff.
The amir Leofric continued: “Because you have every reason to attempt to convince me that you hear this machine, I can’t believe anything you say about it.” His faded blue eyes switched from her face to the rat. “I was not entirely lying to the King-Caliph, nor entirely attempting to save you from Gelimer’s brutal, stupid wastefulness. I may have to inflict some pain on you, to be certain.”
Ash rubbed her hand across her face. The coals took the chill from the air, but her sweat was cold. “How will you know I’m telling the truth when you hurt me? I’d say anything, and you know it, anybody will! I’ve—”
After a moment, into the silence, the white-haired amir Leofric said gently, “‘I’ve tortured men.’ Is that what you were about to say?”