Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  “I’ve been present while it happened. I’ve given the orders.” Ash swallowed. “I can probably frighten myself much better than you can, given what I’ve seen and what I know.”

  A slave-boy entered, coming to speak quietly to Leofric. The Visigoth’s shaggy brows went up.

  “ I suppose I should admit him.” He gestured the child away. A few moments later, two men in mail and helmets came in. Between his guards, an expensively dressed Visigoth amir with a braided dark beard entered the room.

  He was the one with the King-Caliph, Ash remembered, and looking at his dried-grape eyes gave her memory of his name: Gelimer. Lord-Amir Gelimer.

  “His Majesty insisted that I oversee this. Your pardon,” the younger amir said insincerely.

  “Amir Gelimer, I have never obstructed any order of the King-Caliph.”

  The two of them moved aside. Ash’s stomach chilled. Inside a few seconds, the amir Gelimer made a signal. Two well-built men entered the room, one with a small field-anvil; the second with steel hammers and a ring of iron.

  “The King-Caliph asked me to do this.” Amir Gelimer sounded both apologetic and smug. “It is not as if she were freeborn, is it?”

  Her body cramping, shuddering, bleeding; she let herself be pulled up from the bed, and stared fixedly at the mosaics on the wall – the Boar at the Green Man’s Tree, in intricate detail – while a curved iron ring was shoved under her chin and held closed. Her head rang to the brief and accurate bang of hammers fixing a red-hot rivet through the collar’s hasp. Cold water sluiced her. She could not move her head, cropped hair tight in one of the men’s grips, but she blew water and spat and shivered.

  The room smelled of soot. An unfamiliar cold weight of steel rested around her neck. Ash glared at Gelimer, hoping to have him think her outraged, but her mouth kept losing its shape.

  “Out of consideration for her illness, I think a collar will be sufficient,” the amir Leofric murmured.

  “Whatever.” The younger amir chuckled. “Our lord expects results.”

  “I will soon be in a position to better inform the Caliph. Consulting records, I find seven litters born about the time of her apparent age; of which all were culled but my daughter. It could be that this one escaped the culling.”

  Ash shivered. Her head throbbed from the hammers. She put her fingers through the slave collar and pulled at the unyielding metal.

  Gelimer for the first time looked her in the face. The amir spoke with the intonation one used to slaves and other inferiors. “Why so angry, woman? You have lost very little so far, after all.”

  What she sees, in her mind’s eye, is a Visigoth lance-head sliding into Godluc’s side: a thick knife on a stick ripping his iron-grey hair and black skin up his ribs, sinking in behind his forequarters. Six years’ care and companionship ended in a brutal second. She clenched her fists, under the woollen gown serving her as a blanket.

  It is easier to see Godluc than the dead faces of Henri Brant and Blanche and the other six score men and women who turn the baggage train alternately into hotel, brothel and hospital, running it with all the enthusiasm they can bring her; and Dickon Stour’s eternal efforts to improve his armoury from repair to manufacture. Easier than to think of the dead faces of her lance-leaders, and each of their followers, drunk or sober, reliable or useless: five hundred dirty, well-armed peasants who would not consent to dig their lord’s fields, or wild boys out for adventure, or criminals who would not stay for petty justice; but they will fight, for her. All this – the tents and their carefully sewn pennons, every war-horse or riding horse; each sword and the history of where she bought or stole or was given it; each man who has fought under her standard, in weather and ground always too hot – or too cold – or too wet—

  “No, what have I lost?” Ash said bitterly. “Nothing!”

  Gelimer said, “Nothing to what you may lose. Leofric, God give you a good day.”

  The half-cooled rivet on her collar stung her fingertips. Ash watched Gelimer’s leave-taking. The complexity of politics in this court – impossible to learn in months, never mind minutes – weighed down on her. Leofric might be trying to save my life. Why? Because he thinks I am another Faris? How important is that, now? Does it matter at all? My only chance is that it still matters—

  Her isolation cut her like a newly sharpened sword.

  No matter how clear one’s unimportance becomes, how easy it is to apprehend one’s own death, the self still protests, But it’s too soon, too unfair, why me?

  Ash’s skin chilled.

  “What is going on?” she demanded.

  Leofric turned back from the room’s ornate, arched doorway. In French, again, he said, “If you want to live, I suggest you tell me.”

  It was blunt, a different tone completely from how he had spoken to Amir Gelimer.

  “What can I tell you?”

  “To begin with: how do you speak to the Stone Golem?” Leofric asked gently.

  She sat on an oak-carved bed it would take her five years to earn, wrapped in blood-soaked wool and linen. Her body felt sore. She said, “I just speak.”

  “Aloud?”

  “Of course, aloud! How else?”

  Leofric seemed to find something to smile at in her indignation. “You do not, for example, speak as you might do in silent reading, with an interior voice?”

  “I can’t do silent reading.”

  The scraggle-haired amir gave her a look which plainly intimated that he doubted she could do any kind of reading.

  “I recognise some of your machine’s tactics,” Ash said, “because I read them in Vegetius’s Epitomae Rei Militaris.”

  The skin around Leofric’s faded eyes became momentarily more lined. Ash realised his amusement. She remained on a cusp between fear and relief, held in tension.

  “I thought perhaps your clerk had read it to you,” Leofric said amiably.

  The release of tension brought too-easy tears to her eyes.

  If I’m not careful, I shall like you, Ash reflected. Is that what you’re trying to do, here? Oh, Jesu, what can I do?

  “Robert Anselm gave me his English copy11 of Vegetius. I keep – kept – it with me all the time.”

  “And you hear the Stone Golem – how?” Leofric asked.

  Ash opened her mouth to reply, and then shut it again.

  Now why have I never asked myself that question?

  Finally, Ash touched her temple. “I just hear it. Here.”

  Leofric nodded slowly. “My daughter is no better at explaining it. In some ways she is a disappointment. I had hoped, when one was at last bred who could speak at a distance to the Stone Golem, that the least I could expect was to be informed how this was done – but no. Nothing but ‘I hear it’, as if that explained anything!”

  Now who does he remind me of? Just forgets everything and goes off, rides his own hobby-horse…?

  Angelotti. And Dickon Stour. That’s who.

  “You’re a gunner!” Ash spluttered, almost hysterical, and clapped both hands over her mouth, watching his complete incomprehension with bright eyes.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Or an armourer! Are you sure you’ve never felt the urge to make a mail shirt, my lord Amir? All those thousands of teeny-tiny rings, every one with a rivet in it—”

  Leofric gave a bewildered, unwilling laugh; moved only by her evident mirth. Completely confused, the older man shook his head. “I neither forge guns nor construct mail. What are you saying to me?”

  Why did I never ask? she thought. Why did I never ask how I heard? How do I hear it?

  “Master Leofric, I’ve been taken before, I’ve been beaten before; none of this is new to me. I don’t expect to live until Christ’s Coming. Everybody dies.”

  “Some in more pain than others.”

  “If you think that’s a threat, you’ve never seen a stricken field. Do you know what I risk, every time I go out there? War,” Ash said, with very bright eyes, “is dangerous,
Master Leofric.”

  “But you are here,” the pale-coloured, elderly man said. “Not there.”

  Leofric’s complete calmness chilled her. She thought, gunners, also, care everything about shot, aim, elevation, firepower: and only later think about the consequences, where it hits. Armed knights will, after battles, sit and discuss, realistically, the evils of killing; but this will not stop any of them devising a better sword, a heavier lance, a more efficient design of helmet. He is a gunner; an armourer; a killer.

  And so am I.

  “Tell me what to do to stay alive,” she said. Hearing what she said, she suddenly thought, Is this how Fernando feels? She went on: “For however little time it turns out to be before you kill me. Just tell me.”

  Leofric shrugged.

  In the chill room, among bowls of red embers, lit by Greek Fire, Ash stared at the amir. She swathed the wool gown around her shoulders. It fell in bloodstained folds around her.

  I never asked because I never needed to.

  She felt it, now: a directing of her voice, somehow. A directing of her attention towards – something.

  “How long,” she asked aloud, “has there been a Stone Golem?”

  Leofric spoke words she didn’t attend to.

  ‘Two hundred and twenty-three years and thirty-seven days.’

  Ash repeated aloud, “Two hundred and twenty-three years and thirty-seven days.”

  Leofric broke off whatever he was saying. He stared at her. “Yes? Yes, it must be. The seventh day of the ninth month… Yes!”

  She spoke again. “Where is the Stone Golem?”

  ‘The sixth floor of the north-east quadrant of the House of Leofric, in the city of Carthage, on the coast of North Africa.’

  Her attention rose to a peak. Her listening, too, felt now that she attended to it as if it were something she did: not entirely passive, as one listens to a man speak or a musician play; not a mere waiting for an answer. What am I doing? I’m doing something.

  “About five or six storeys below us,” Ash repeated, her eyes on Leofric. “That’s where it is. That’s where your tactical machine is…”

  The amir said dismissively, “This much you might have heard from slave gossip.”

  “I might have. But I didn’t.”

  He was watching her keenly now. “I cannot know that.”

  “But you can!” Ash sat up on the oak bed. “If you won’t tell me what to do to stay alive – I’ll tell you. Ask me questions, Master Leofric. You’ll know what the truth is. You’ll know whether I’m lying about my voice!”

  “Some answers are dangerous to know.”

  “It’s never wise to know too much about the affairs of the powerful.” Ash got off the bed and walked, slowly and with pain, towards the window shutter. Leofric did not stop her as she unbolted it and looked out. A centre iron bar bedded deep in the stone casement was thick enough to stop a woman throwing herself out.

  Bitter air froze the skin on her cheeks, reddening her nose. She had a brief sympathy for those under canvas, in the wet cold north; a fellow-feeling for their misery and discomfort that was, at the same time, an utter desire to be there with them.

  Below the stone sill, the great courtyard hissed and spluttered, Greek Fire lamps being hastily sheltered by an inappropriately gay striped awning. Ash looked down at mostly fair heads. The men and women who were slaves tugged the waxed linen into place with much swearing, complaints; thin arms holding up cloth or cord with impatient shouts. No one freeborn was in the courtyard except guards, and she could pick up their mutual enmity from here.

  The lights, once shrouded, let her see beyond, to the squat square surrounding buildings – a household of at least couple of thousand, she judged. It was impossible to see further in the dark, to see if this interior Carthage city contained other amirs’ establishments equally rich and well-fortified. And no way at all to see – she leaned up on her toes on the cold tiled floor – whether this building faced harbour or something else; how much of Carthage lay between her and the dock; where the great and famous market might be; where the desert lay.

  A hollow, moaning sound startled her. She lifted her head, alert, discerning that it echoed across rooftops and courtyard from a great distance.

  “Sunset,” Leofric’s voice came from beside her. When she looked at him, her eyes were on a level with his white-bearded chin.

  The metallic sound echoed again across the city. Ash strained to see the first stars, the moon, anything that would give her a compass bearing.

  The wooden shutter was gently closed in her face.

  She turned back into the room. The glowing warmth from the iron plates of coals made her feel how chill her face had grown, in those few minutes.

  “How do you speak to it?” she challenged.

  “As I speak to you, with my voice,” Leofric said dryly. “But I am in the same room with it, when I do it!”

  Ash couldn’t stop herself smiling.

  “How does it answer you?”

  “With a mechanical voice, heard by the ear. Again: I am in the same room when I hear it. My daughter does not have to be in the same room, the same household, the same continent – this crusade confirms me in my belief that she will never go a distance great enough for her not to hear it.”

  “Does it know anything except military answers?”

  “It does not know anything. It is a golem. It speaks only what I, and others, have taught it. It solves problems, in the field, that is all.”

  She swayed on her feet as a wave of lassitude went through her. The Visigoth amir gripped her arm above the elbow, through the bloodstained wool. “Come and lie down on the bed. Let us try what you suggest.”

  She let him guide her footsteps, all but falling back on to the palliasse. The room swayed around her. She closed her eyes, seeing nothing but darkness for long minutes until the dizziness faded; opening them to the stark white light of the wall lamps, and the soft scritching of the boy-slave on his wax tablet.

  Leofric made a gesture, and the child stopped writing.

  His voice, beside her, asked quietly, “Who was it first built the Golem?”

  Question and answer. She spoke it aloud: had to ask twice, the answering name was unfamiliar to her. She said uncertainly, “The… ‘Rabbi’? Of Prague.”

  “And he built it for whom?”

  Another question, another response. Ash shut her eyes against the harsh light, straining to hear the inner voice. “‘Radonic’, I think. Yes, Radonic.”

  “Who first built the Stone Golem, and why?”

  ‘The Rabbi of Prague, under direction of your ancestor Radonic, two hundred years ago, built the first Stone Golem to play him at shah.’ “—At chess,” Ash corrected herself.

  “Who first built machines in Carthage, and why?”

  ‘Friar Roger Bacon.’

  “One of ours,” Ash said. She let her voice repeat the sound of the voice in her head: ‘It is said that Friar Bacon made, in his lodgings at the port Carthage, a Brazen Head, from such metal as might be found in the vicinity. Howbeit, when he had heard what it had to say to him, he burned his devices, his plans, and his lodgings, and fled north to Europe, never to return. Afterwards the new presence of many demons in Carthage were blamed upon this scholar. Geraldus writ this.’

  Leofric’s voice said soothingly, “Many have read much into the Stone Golem’s ears in two hundred years. Try again, dear daughter. Who made the first Stone Golem, and why?”

  ‘The amir Radonic, beaten in shah by this speechless device, grew weary of it, and was much displeased with the Rabbi.’ “That’s lords for you,” Ash added. She became aware that she was on the edge of hysteria. Dehydration made her head ache, blood-loss made her weak; all of this was enough to account for it. The voice in her head continued: ‘Radonic, growing weary, caused the stone man to be set aside. Like a good Christian, he doubted the small powers of the Jews to be from the Green Christ, and began to think he may have countenanced demonic works
in his household.’

  “More.”

  ‘The Rabbi had made this Golem a man in every part, using his semen, and the red mud of Carthage, and shaping it very handsomely. A slave in the household, one Ildico, grew greatly in love with the Golem, for that with its stone limbs and metal jointures it looked most like a man, and bore it a child. This she said was caused by the Wonder-Worker’s intercession, the great Prophet Gundobad appearing to her in a dream and bidding her carry about her person his sacred relic, which was passed down in this slave’s family since Gundobad lived.’

  Ash felt a soft touch. She opened her eyes. Leofric’s fingers stroked her brow, the tips touching skin, dried blood and dirt with complete indifference. She flinched away.

  “Gundobad’s your prophet, isn’t he? He cursed the Pope and caused the Empty Chair.”

  “Your Pope should not have executed him,” Leofric said gravely, removing his hand, “but I won’t dispute with you, child. Six centuries of history have passed over us, and who can tell what the Wonder-Worker was, now? Ildico believed in him, certainly.”

  “A woman who had a baby by a stone statue.” Ash couldn’t keep contempt out of her tone. “Master Leofric, if I were going to read history for a machine to listen to, I wouldn’t tell it this rubbish!”

  “And the Green Christ born of a Virgin, and suckled by a Boar; this is ‘rubbish’?”

  “For all I know, it is!” She shrugged, as well as was possible lying down on the bed. Her feet were cold. She became aware as Leofric frowned that she had slid into a French-Swiss dialect of her youth, and tried it again in Carthaginian Latin: “Look, I’ve seen as many tiny miracles as the next woman, but all of them could be chance, fortuna imperatrix, that’s all…”

  With slight emphasis, the Visigoth man said, “What made the second Stone Golem and why?”

  Ash repeated his words. The voice that moved in the secret places of her mind was no different from the voice that answered when she gave it terrain, troop type, weather conditions, and asked for an ideal solution: the same voice.

  ‘Some have written that Ildico, slave, not only preserved a powerful relic of the Prophet Gundobad, but was in direct line of descent from his body, through the generations from the eight hundred and sixteenth year after Our Lord was given to the Tree, to that year of twelve hundred and fifty-three.’