Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  “You’re hawking with owls,” Ash said, wonderingly. “You’re hawking, with owls, in a graveyard.”

  “It’s a Visigoth pastime.” Fernando shrugged.

  The group having halted, most of the guards were taking up stations in a rough circle between two of the immense sandstone pyramids. There was not room to gallop between them, Ash saw; even with a horse not twelve years old, overfed, and swaybacked into the bargain. She glanced back over her shoulder. Carthage was invisible, except for a white glow silhouetting a broken ridge, which she thought might be distant Greek Fire.

  Clearly, we are waiting.

  For someone? For something to happen?

  The back of her neck prickled.

  White, soundless death swooped past her head – so close that the pinions flicked her scarred cheek.

  An owl.

  In sheer, inane relief, she asked the banal question: “What do they hunt out here?”

  “Small game. Gully-rats. Poisonous snakes.”

  Hunting is always a good cover for a covert meeting.

  So easy. A crossbow bolt out of the dark. You wouldn’t even have to hit me. Just this horse. Where am I going, when I’m chained to it? She died in a riding accident, my lord.

  “Do you think I’m just going to sit here and wait?”

  Fernando shifted in his saddle. Something gave a coughing growl, far off among the pyramids. It sounded like a wild cat. Ash looked at Fernando’s German riders; two or three of them gazed nervously off into the darkness, the rest were watching her.

  Shit! I have got to do something!

  Fernando sat back in his saddle. “There’s news about the French peace treaty. His Spider-Majesty Louis signed. France is now at peace with the Visigoth Empire.”

  Fernando’s gelding mouthed at the mare’s tack, lipping her. The mare ignored this. She nuzzled the flagstones for spindly, frost-burned tufts of grass.

  “The war’s going to be over. There’s no one to fight now except Burgundy.”

  “And England, if they ever finish fighting their own civil wars. And the Sultan,” Ash said absently, staring into the darkness, “when Mehmet and the Turkish empire decides you’ve worn yourself out fighting in Europe, and you’re ripe to be picked.”

  “Woman, you’re obsessed with war!”

  “I—” She broke off.

  What she had been watching in the distance materialised.

  Not a troop of soldiers.

  Two squires with satiated owls on their wrists, walking out from behind a corner of the pyramid, a dozen or more dead snakes spitted on a stick between them.

  Her thumping heart slowed. She turned back in her saddle to face Fernando. Both she and the mare were chilling, stiffening up; and she nudged it into a walk, del Guiz riding beside her, gazing down at her with an expression of anxiety.

  I can’t just wait to be taken!

  She demanded, “Do you really think Amir Gelimer doesn’t want to kill me?”

  Fernando ignored the question.

  “Please,” she said. “Please let me go. Before something happens here, before I get taken back – please.”

  His hair took gold from the torch-light, that brought a glow of colour from his green livery and the gilded pommel of his riding sword. She thought he might be wearing a plackart over mail, under his livery jacket.

  “I’ve been wondering,” he said, “why men follow you. Why men follow a woman.”

  With a certain grim humour, that can stave off fear for whole seconds at a time. Ash said, “Often they don’t. Most places I’ve been, I’ve had to fight my own troops before I’ve fought the enemy!”

  In the torchlight, his expression changes. When he looks down at her, from the saddle of the Visigoth war-horse, it is with an unconscious awareness of the breadth of his shoulders, filling out into adulthood now, and the hard muscles of a man who trains daily for edged-weapon warfare.

  “You’re a woman!” Fernando protested. “If I’d hit you, I’d have broken your jaw, or your neck. You’re nothing like as strong as I am. How come you do what you do?”

  It is true, if irrelevant at this moment, that she neither hit him with her full strength, or with a weapon, or with the knowledge of where the human body breaks. She could have blinded him. Wondering now at her reluctance – Jesu Christus, he’s not going to let me go! – she listened to the night’s noises for a full minute before she spoke.

  “I don’t have to be as strong as you. I only have to be strong enough.”

  He looked blankly at her. “‘Strong enough’?”

  Ash looked up. “I don’t have to be stronger than you are. I only have to be strong enough to kill you.”

  Fernando opened his mouth, and then shut it again.

  “I’m strong enough to use a sword or an axe,” she said, huddled into her cloak, listening. Nothing but the hunting calls of the owls. “That’s just training, timing, balance. Not weight-lifting.”

  He blew into his hands, as if for warmth, and without looking at her, said, “I know why men follow you. You’re only incidentally a woman. What you really are is a soldier.”

  Thrown back in her memory to the cell, to Gaiseric, Fravitta, Barbas, Theodoric; to violence that stops short of rape; to shed blood; she winces.

  “And it’s nothing to be proud of!”

  The chains chafe her wrists. “It’s what I need to be, to do what I do.”

  “Why do what you do?”

  Ash smothered a laugh: it would have come out weary, and on the wrong side of hysteria. “You’re not the person I’d expect to ask that! You’re the one who’s spent your whole life training to wear armour and use a sword. You’re the knight. Why do what you do?”

  “I’m not doing it any more.”

  What might have been adolescent in his tone was gone now. He made a quiet statement of fact. Distracted from listening for hoofbeats, she gazed at his Visigoth mail hauberk, the trained horse that he was riding, and the sword-belt at his side; and let him see her looking.

  Fernando stated, “I’m not killing anyone.”

  Ash’s mind made a mental note that any other knight’s sentence would have finished ‘anyone else’, at the same time that her mouth opened and she said, without volition, “In a fucking pig’s arse! That hauberk a present from Leofric?”

  “If I don’t wear armour or a sword, no one in House Leofric listens to a word I say.”

  “Yeah, and what does that tell you?”

  “That doesn’t make it right!”

  “Lots of things aren’t the way they should be,” Ash said grimly. “You ask my priest why men die of sickness, or famine, or act of God.”

  “We don’t have to kill,” Fernando said.

  A horse snorted, close at hand. Her pulse jolted, before she realised that it was one of the escort’s mounts.

  “You’re as crazy as she is! The Faris,” Fernando said. “I was one of the officers with her before Auxonne, walking the ground. She kept walking around saying ‘we can make that a killing-zone’ or ‘put the war-wagons there, I can guarantee you sixty per cent enemy casualties’. She’s a fucking head-case.”

  Ash raised her silver brows. “In what way?”

  She realised Fernando was staring at her.

  “Doesn’t it seem crazy to you to go around a perfectly good pasture and work out which bits of it you can use so that you can burn people’s faces off, and chop through their leg-bones, and shoot rocks through their chests?”

  “What do you want me to say, I lie awake nights worrying about it?”

  “That would be good,” he agreed. “But don’t tell me; I wouldn’t believe you.”

  Sudden anger sparked. “Yeah, well, I don’t notice you going up to the King-Caliph and saying, hey, invading Christendom is wrong, why don’t we all just be nice to each other? And I don’t guess you said to House Leofric, no, I won’t take the horse and the kit, thanks; I’m not going to be a warrior any more. Did you?”

  “No,” he muttered.
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  “Where’s the hair-shirt, Fernando? Where’s the monk’s robes, instead of the armour? Exactly when do you plan to swear poverty and obedience, and go around the King-Caliph’s nobles telling them to lay down their arms? Your ass would be hung up to dry!”

  He said, “I’m too afraid to try.”

  “Then how can you tell me—”

  He cut off her outraged protest: “Just because I can see what’s right, that doesn’t mean I can do it.”

  “Are you seriously telling me you don’t intend to stand up and protest against this war, but you expect me to stop what I do for a living? Jesu Christus, Fernando!”

  “I would think, from where you are, you’d know how I feel.”

  About to spit back some smart remark, Ash felt a chill in her belly that was not the bitter wind. She swallowed, dry-mouthed. At last, she said, “I’m on my own here. I don’t have my guys with me.”

  Fernando del Guiz did not make a sarcastic or destructive comment; he only nodded, acknowledging what she said.

  Ash said, “I’ll strike a bargain with you. You free me, here, let me ride off into the desert, before anyone else gets here. And I’ll tell you how you can legitimately have the marriage annulled. Then you’re nothing to do with me any more, and everybody will know that.”

  She brought the mare around again, moving within the enclosing circle of troops. A wave of fear went through her. Who’s already on their way here? Gelimer? Someone else? Someone I don’t even know about? An owl shrieked, close by. Something rustled in the torch-lit darkness.

  She heard Fernando say, “Why could I annul the marriage? Because you’re a villein; slave-born?”

  “Because you’ll want an heir. I’m barren,” Ash said.

  She became aware that her bare hands locked shut on the pommel of her saddle, her shoulder-muscles rigid against – what? A punch, a blow from a whip? She looked up swiftly at Fernando del Guiz.

  “You are?” The lines of his face showed only shocked bewilderment. “How do you know?”

  “I was with child at Dijon.” Ash found she couldn’t release the grip of her hands. The leather reins, wrapped around the pommel, cut into her cold fingers. She kept her gaze on his face in the circle of torch-light. “I lost it, here; it doesn’t matter how. It isn’t possible for me to have another.”

  She expected anger, tensed against being hit.

  “My son?” he said wonderingly.

  “A son or a daughter. It was too soon to tell.” Ash felt her mouth twist into a painful smile. “You didn’t ask me if it was yours.”

  Fernando stared off, towards the dark pyramids, not seeing them. “My son or daughter.” His gaze came back to Ash. “Did they hurt you? Is that why you lost it?”

  “Of course they hurt me!”

  He bowed his head. Without looking at her, he said, “I never meant… Did it happen when we were riding to G—” He stopped.

  “To Genoa,” Ash completed. “Ironic, isn’t it? While we were on the river.”

  Momentarily, he cupped both hands over his face. Then he sat up in the saddle. His shoulders went back. The torchlight shone on his eyes, that gleamed wet; and Ash, frowning, found him stripping off his gauntlet and reaching a hand out to her. His expression held pain, sardonic humour, and a raw, undilute empathy that started to rip her open.

  “Sometimes I wonder, how did I get to be this person?” Fernando pressed his other hand’s knuckles to his mouth, and took them away to add, “I wouldn’t have had much to leave him. A keep in Bavaria and a blackened reputation.”

  His pain hit her, raw, under the breastbone. She pushed it away: this is not what I need to feel.

  He exclaimed, “You should have told me, at Dijon! I would have—”

  “Changed sides?” she completed, sardonically; but she reached across and gripped his hand, flesh warm in the cold night. “By the time I knew, you were gone.”

  His hand tightened on hers.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly, “you wouldn’t have had much of a husband in me.”

  A sharp answer came into her mind but she didn’t speak. For all his inanity, what shone out of his face as he reached down from his saddle to her was a genuine regret.

  “You deserve better,” he added.

  She let go of his hand, settling back on to the saddle’s chill leather. Above, thin clouds began to hide the stars.

  “I’m barren,” she said flatly. “So that’s the end of that. Don’t tell me you don’t want an annulment. You can always put a barren wife aside.”

  “I don’t know that we are married. Leofric’s lawyers are arguing over it.”

  He turned the gelding, riding back across the open ground.

  “You’re a bondswoman. Either you’re now my property, because I married you – or you didn’t have a right to consent to any contract, and the marriage is void. Take your pick. It doesn’t matter to me – whether the Church blessing holds or not, these people still think I’m the one who knows about you. I’m the one they ship down here because of that!”

  Chill, inner and outer, went through her, and she said, “Fernando. They are going to kill me. One or another of these lords. Please, please let me go.”

  “No,” he said, again, and the cold wind ruffled his hair. He looked across at Witiza and the squires, absorbed in the minutiae of hunting; and Ash could see him picturing a fair-haired boy of the same age.

  A barn-owl slid through the darkness as if the air were oil, gliding across the sloping face of a pyramid and vanishing into blackness.

  “How can you let this happen? I’m sorry I hit you,” Ash said in a rush. “I know you’re afraid. But please—”

  Fernando, his voice rough, his face growing redder, snapped, “I’m trying to keep my own head on while these heathens anoint another of their Goddamned Caliphs! You don’t know what it’s like for me!”

  Ash talks to slaves. She knows that, up at the palace, the fretwork stone corridors resound to the screams of unsuccessful candidates for the Caliph’s throne.

  “Oh, I do.” Ash rested the brown mare’s reins under her cloaked knee, and blew on her white fingers. There was a laugh pressing up under her breastbone: or it might have been tears. “I remember something Angelotti once said to me. He told me, ‘The Visigoths are an elective monarchy – a method we may call succession by assassination’!”

  “Who’s Angelotti, for Our Lady’s sake?”

  “My master gunner. He trained here. You employed him, briefly. You,” Ash said, “wouldn’t remember.”

  Overhead, the stars had moved to midnight, or close to. She saw no moon. Dark phase, then. Three weeks after Auxonne field. The freezing wind began to drop, chill on her face; and she lifted her head, hearing the chink of bit and bridle – a split second before the German men-at-arms heard it, their lances lowering, visors going down.

  Fernando barked an order. Ash saw lances going back up to rest-position. Newcomers obviously expected. It’s now—

  Her stomach plummeted. She held on to her saddle with one hand, leaned out with the other and grabbed for her husband’s sword. His leather-gauntleted hand smacked down, crushing her fingers. He grabbed both her wrists.

  “You will not be killed!”

  “That’s what you say!”

  Horses came riding in between the towering sides of the pyramids, their torches sending shadows leaping across the ancient stone paving. Ash smelled horse-sweat. The brown mare’s flanks creamed whitely, as she backed up, pressing her rump against Fernando’s gelding. The newcomers wore mail, a dozen or more of them, and she opened her mouth to say, “Twelve cavalry, swords, lances;” to the machine, ready now – now it could not matter; in this extremity – ready to break silence, but she thought, And I’m unarmed, no armour, chained; what’s it going to tell me – ‘die’?

  The boy Witiza shoved his hunting owl at a squire and rode forward. A shrill horn split the silence.

  Not from the new party – from further back.

 
Ash heard it; and she stood up in the stirrups, as if the mare were a war-horse, and peered forward into the flickering light.

  “Exactly how much company were you expecting?” she inquired caustically.

  Fernando del Guiz groaned, “Shit…” and thumbed his sword loose in the mouth of its scabbard.

  Enough torches clustered together now between the two pyramids that Ash could see clearly. Crumbling plaster walls bore faded hieroglyphs in white and gold and blue, and the two-dimensional images of cow-headed women and jackal-headed men.

  Riding over broken paving stones, the lord-amir Gelimer was reining in a bright bay gelding with white coronels, and staring behind him, past his armed escort.

  Ash followed his gaze.

  Thirty or forty more horses rode up out of the darkness.

  These bore men in mail, riding with their lances at the rest-position. She saw a pennant with the device of a toothed wheel, and found herself looking at helmeted faces that she nevertheless knew: ’Arif Alderic, Nazir Theudibert, a young soldier – Barbas? Gaiseric? – and two more nazirs, and their squads, each man mounted.

  Alderic’s forty men, at their full strength.

  “God give you all a good night,” the ’arif Alderic said, his voice a deep rumble as he bowed in the saddle to Gelimer. “My Amir, riding so late can be dangerous. I beg you to accept my Amir Leofric’s hospitality, and our escort back to the city.”

  Ash put one hand thoughtfully over her mouth, and deliberately didn’t catch Alderic’s eye. The soldier barely dignified what he said with the tone of a request.

  She saw the lord-amir Gelimer glare at Alderic, glance around, see Witiza, and Gelimer’s small-eyed face shut up like a strongbox.

  “If I must,” he said ungraciously.

  “Wouldn’t do to leave you alone out here, sir.” Alderic rode on past him, bringing his rangy, flea-bitten grey mount up beside Ash’s mare. “Same goes for you too, Sir Fernando, I’m afraid.”

  Fernando del Guiz began to shout, one anxious eye on the Visigoth noble, Gelimer.

  Ash bit her lip. It was either that, or cheer, or burst out into hysterical laughter. The cold wind chilled the sweat under her arms and down her back.