by Mary Gentle
“Up!” Ash reached down, grabbing arms, hauling men up; her sheathed sword battering against her breastplate as she moved. The edges of her armour cuts the hands of men she helps, but they don’t notice, throw their lance-mates up within reach of the top of the aqueduct, tumbling over the walls, clutching weapons, down on – amazingly – green grass.
Men piled up the stairs from Carthage’s main gate, on to the aqueduct. Ash pounded in their wake.
“Go! Go! Go!”
All the noise is behind her, now.
“My lord Oxford! You take the van,” Ash said brusquely. “You know the way. Geraint, Angelotti, take the centre. I’ll bring up the rear.”
There is no time and no disposition for arguing: they like the confidence with which she tells them what to do. Angelotti goes forward with only a murmured wail under his breath: “My guns…”
“Too much weight! Euen, keep your guys back; help the wounded. Angelotti, I want two lines of missile weapons behind us, and two ahead of us; don’t shoot unless I give the word. Geraint, take forward position. Oxford, get ’em moving!”
Something resonant and obscene in East Anglian English echoed back; she spared two heartbeats to look forward along the aqueduct and see her men gathering around the Blue Boar banner of my lord Oxford.
Dim starlight lit broken ground. It is already night.
“’Ere they come!” Geraint yelled from further back along the aqueduct.
Ash, leaning over the brick coping, saw the foot of the street – coming up from the harbour – all one mass of armed men. Visigoth militia flags. Without hesitation, she bawled at Thomas Morgan and her banner went forward along the aqueduct, out into the darkness, fifty feet above the ground, the desert, the stone statues of the Caliph’s Bestiary.
The brick cover of the aqueduct is covered with sparse, lichen-like grass: a green neglect. It skids under her heels, leaves cold black trails behind her.
“Run!” she urged. “Run like fuck!”
Breath burns in her throat, and the borrowed armour rubs her under the armpits, in the soft flesh there under the mail: she will have cuts and bruises, tomorrow. If there is a tomorrow. And there is,; there will be: the darkness around them is unbroken, a long line of running men, two hundred or so men with weapons and bows, pelting along the hollow echoing cylinder of brick that brings water into Carthage, and takes them out – out over the desert, under the black sky where different stars are slowly dawning, away from the towering fires of Carthage harbour, and the rioting streets. Outdistancing pursuit.
We have left the Stone Golem.
Out into silence.
We have left Godfrey.
Out into silver veils of light, shimmering across the southern sky.
Scaling ladders led them down from the aqueduct, four miles beyond the city walls.
Ash’s feet hit the desert dirt. She is estimating, thinking, planning – doing anything except paying attention to the silvery light gilding the broken ground.
“They’re going to be behind us! Let’s move it!”
Nothing now but to urge them on, her voice hoarse, her visor up, her scarred face visible so that they can see their commander. There are sullen growls from some men: none that she hasn’t marked down before as men who will do this, in the sweat and strain of combat. The rest – some still amazed, her reappearance startling news – act with brutal professional efficiency: weapons gathered, lance-members counted.
Keep them moving or they’ll start to grumble about losing, Ash resolved as she pounded across broken ground, into the temporary fortified wagon-camp. Don’t give them time to think.
Her squire came running out with absurd joy on his face.
“Boss!” Rickard’s voice squeaked into boyish registers.
“Get the wagons harnessed and moving! Don’t slow down!”
Moving in towards the wagons, Richard Faversham came level with her. The big black-haired deacon had a man in full Italian armour slung bodily over his shoulders – and he was running. Not staggering, running.
Dickon de Vere, Ash recognised; yelled, “Keep going!” and fell back further to Floria and men with her, men carrying wounded and injured men on bill-shafts, and in makeshift arrangements of ropes, other men’s shirts, or just slung between them, gripping wrists and ankles.
Over the sound of screaming, Floria yelled, “I’m going to lose some of them. Slow down!”
It is an eternity in Ash’s mind since the tent outside Auxonne; now here is Floria – Floria! – dirty-faced and utterly familiar and bawling her out again.
“We can’t – leave them. Prisoners – be killed. Keep going! You can do it!”
“Ash—”
“You can do it, Floria!”
A swift flash of a grin, teeth in a dirty face, white eyeballs; and the surgeon said in the space of a heartbeat, “Cunt!” and, “We’re here, don’t worry, don’t leave us!”
“We don’t leave our own!”
That is partly for Floria, wavering on the edge of exhaustion as she runs; partly for the men with Floria. Mostly for Ash herself: the body of Mark Tydder is being carried with them, but not Godfrey’s body.
Unburied, and in a sewer.
“Go!—Wuff!” Ash ran into Thomas Morgan’s backplate as her banner-bearer came to a sudden halt.
And there is nothing around them now but their own camp, a square of wagons which men are rushing to lead out into column; two hundred and fifty men whose faces she knows. No sound of pursuit.
“Well—” Floria halted at her elbow, letting her impromptu helpers go ahead. She bent almost double, chest heaving. “You always tell me any fucking moron can attack—”
“—but it takes brains to get out again in one piece!” Ash turned and hugged the disguised woman enthusiastically. Floria winced as plate armour dug into her jack. “You can thank de Vere for this. We’re going to do it—” She crossed herself: “Deus vult.”
“Ash… What’s happening, here?”
Men pelt past her, running: Angelotti is walking up and down behind his lines of arquebusiers. Ash met Floria’s exhausted gaze.
“We’re trying to get to the shore, the galleys—”
“No. That.”
Closer now: they gleam, under starlight, pyramids, blackly glowing. A little further south, only a little; and cold sweat makes her wet under the armpits and between her breasts. Men are crossing themselves, someone is praying in a half-shout to the Green Christ and Saint Herlaine.
“I don’t know… I don’t know. We can’t stop to think about it now. Get the wounded on the carts.”
Wounded men, some who can walk, some who have to be carried – Ash estimated twenty-five men in all – are taken past her; and she turns her back on all Floria’s questions, leaves the woman to her ferociously active duties as surgeon; yells “Take the roll!” to Angelotti and Geraint as she waves them into camp, jogging to join the Earl of Oxford.
No sound of pursuit, and Euen Huw’s scouting men behind her have not ridden with news of any; but this is the heart of the Empire, they are close to the main caravan routes, and ten miles from the beach where Venetian ships may – or may not – be waiting.
Ash stared south across the intervening miles at blackly glowing edifices of stone.
Where the voice of the machina rei militaris had fallen silent in her head, among the pyramids and monuments ageless beyond the measure of man.
The visual memory in her mind is of riding past their flaking surfaces, seeing, under the painted plaster, the red bricks of which they are made: a million flat bricks fashioned from the red silt of Carthage.
It comes in the kind of intuition that is faster than words or thought: a knowledge, a certainty that she is right, before she ever goes back, plodding, to follow the line of reason that led her here:
The red silt of Carthage. As the Rabbi made the machina rei militaris, the Stone Golem, the machine-mind; the second one of which is not shaped like a man.
“Those.” Ash
spoke over the noise of men shouting orders, horses neighing, the sudden shots of distant arquebuses. “The pyramids. Those are the other voices. The voices that spoke from the earthquake. Those are the Wild Machines.”
“What? ” John de Vere demanded. “ Where, madam?”
Ash’s fists knotted in her mail gauntlets. She ignored the Earl, stared at the saw-toothed horizon; spoke without any intention of speaking words aloud: “Sweet Christ, did the Rabbi make you, too? ”
A ripple of vibration came, below hearing, so low that she felt it up through the soles of her boots, came grinding through earth and air.
Voices in her head deafened her, more surely than Angelotti’s guns:
‘IT IS SHE.’
‘IT IS THE ONE!’
‘THE ONE WHO LISTENS!’
“My lord, there is pursuit!”
“Captain Ash!”
‘IT – IS – SHE.’
Her soul shakes like a struck bell.
‘NO. NOT SHE! THIS IS THAT OTHER ONE, NEW ONE, NOT KNOWN, NOT OURS.’
‘NOT SHE WHO LISTENS TO THE MACHINA REI MILITARIS.’
‘NOT SHE WHOM WE HAVE BRED—’
‘BRED OUT OF SLAVES—’
‘—MADE OUT OF HUMAN BLOOD—’
‘—BRED FOR, FOR TWO HUNDRED YEARS—’
‘—OUR WARRIOR-GENERAL—’
‘NOT SHE WHO MOVES FOR US, FIGHTS FOR US, WARS FOR US; NOT OUR WARRIOR—’
“The Faris.” Through hot tears shaken out of her by voices that deafen, she looked at John de Vere, Earl of Oxford. “They’re saying – that – they – bred her, bred the Faris-General—”
The Earl in his armour is clasping her arms, staring into her face, frowning under his raised visor that is splashed red with some man’s blood.
“There is no time, madam Captain! They are on us!”
“The Wild Machines – they bred her – but how?”
De Vere thrust out a hand, stopping his aide; his gaze fixed on Ash. “Madam, what is this? You hear them now? These – other machines?”
“Yes!”
“I don’t understand. Madam, I am but a simple soldier.”
“Bollocks,” Ash said, with a perfectly friendly grin at John de Vere, his mouth curving in reluctant humour; and in an instant, voices thundered again in her head:
‘SHE IS NOT OURS!’
‘WHO IS SHE?’
‘WHO, THEN?’
‘WHO?’
‘WHO!’
“Who are you?” Ash screams, not certain whether she asks or only echoes; deafened, shaken, falling down on her knees. Steel armour crunches against the broken paving of the desert. “What do you want? Who made you? Who are you?”
‘FERAE NATURA MACHINA:9 SO HE CALLED US, WHEN HE SPOKE WITH US—’
Ash shut her eyes. Footsteps ran either side of her, someone – the Earl? – shook her violently by the shoulders; she ignored it, and reached out, listening. Listening as she did within the palace of the King-Caliph, something in her mind which is at once a pull, an enclosing, a violent and sudden creation of a gap which must be filled—
“I will know!”
John de Vere’s voice shouted in her ear: “Get up, madam! Order your men!”
She is half up, on one knee, her eyes open to see his face with a trickle of blood running from mouth to chin – arrow-nick – and all but on her feet; then:
“I don’t care if the world falls in, I will know what I am sharing my soul with!”
A great masculine grunt of irritation. “Madam, not now!”
Two men pelt past her towards the moving wagons: Thomas Rochester and Simon Tydder, bandaged, with Carracci between them on a stretcher made of two bill-shafts and someone’s blood-soaked Lion Azure livery tabard. Ash finishes standing up, fists clenched, torn between the two urgencies.
“These are nobody’s machines. Who could own these—”
“Leofric, the King-Caliph, what does it matter!”
“No. They’re too – big.”
Ash calmly met John de Vere’s harassed gaze: a man intent on necessary orders, actions, emergency measures.
“They know about the Faris. The ‘one who listens’. If she’s theirs— But does she know about the Wild Machines? She’s never said a damn thing about ‘Wild Machines’!”
The Earl snapped, “Later. Madam, your men need you!”
Ash looks out across the earthquake-broken desert, back into darkness: the black city five miles away which has seen two deaths before this bloody shambles: Godfrey and her unborn child. She thinks herself bitter now; stronger; morally compromised, perhaps. Revenge is not so easy.
She is no longer free to be only a soldier. Perhaps she never has been.
“My lord – you brought ‘em in, you take ’em out!”
Ash clasped the Earl’s armoured hand and forearm, with a fierce grin. Bright-eyed behind her visor, she is all legs, cropped hair, broad shoulders, warrior-woman.
“Some choices don’t have a right answer. Get my guys out! I’ll follow.”
“Madam Ash—!”
“Carthage has done enough to me! It’s not going to do anything more. I will know, before I leave here—”
Across the black open countryside, under a sky of void, a dozen ancient pyramids burn silver, massive monuments of stone: and in her mind she does everything that she has done before, but harder: listens, reaches out, demands.
“—Now! ”
The stone paving rose up and smacked her in the face.
In that instant, before the channel of communication is shut down behind a violent, appalled wall of silence, what she gets is not voices, not narrative, but concepts slammed whole into her mind—
She felt the crunch of metal as visor and helmet took the impact, a dull stab of pain in her leg; and her mind wiped out everything, a woman’s voice saying abrasively, “It’s a holy fit; damn, what a time for—” and a man’s reply, “Bear her with us! Quickly, master surgeon!”
—the entirety of the Wild Machines—
Armoured feet run past her, black with dirt and blood.
—a gulf of time so vast—
“Billmen, retreat! Bows, cover them!”
—not voices, but as if all the voices of the world could be compressed and made small, like angels on a pinhead, Heaven in the compass of a rose’s heart; and with the thought Godfrey, Godfrey, if you were only here to help me! she falls into the perception of their communication—
“Pick her up, God rot you! God’s bollocks! Carry her!”
—and the rose flowers, the pinhead becomes Heaven, it is all there, in her mind, the Wild Machines whole and complete—
All voices become one voice, a quiet voice, no louder than the tactical computer that she has heard in her head for the better part of her life. A voice the nature of which would make Godfrey quote St Mark: My name is Legion: for we are many.10
Ash hears stone demons and devils speaking to her in one whisper:
‘FERAE NATURA MACHINA, SO HE CALLED US, HE WHO SPOKE WITH US … THE WILD MACHINES—’
A sick dizziness comes with that whisper. Ash is aware that hands grab her as she slumps, that running men catch her limp body between them; if she could shout, she would say, Put me down! Run! but in the insidious infection of the voice, she can get no words out.
She is caught in one single moment of apprehension, as if they are paralysed in this desert near the sea; surgeon, lord, military commander; while her mind gulps down knowledge that she has summoned to her; knowledge falling like a storm, a rain, an avalanche, in one elongated second of voices too swift for the human soul to know. A moment in the mind of God, she thinks, and—
‘—AND “WILD MACHINES” WE ARE. WE DO NOT KNOW OUR OWN ORIGIN, IT IS LOST IN OUR PRIMITIVE MEMORIES. WE SUSPECT IT WAS HUMANS, BUILDING RELIGIOUS STRUCTURES TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO, WHO … PUT ROCKS IN ORDER. CONSTRUCTED ORDERED, SHAPED EDIFICES OF SILT-BRICKS AND STONE. LARGE ENOUGH STRUCTURES TO ABSORB, FROM THE SUN, THE SPIRIT-FORCE OF LIFE ITS
ELF—’
A memory of Godfrey’s voice says in her mind heresy! Ash would weep for him, but she is caught in this one moment of knowing all. Her question is implicit, part of the avalanche: being asked, already asked. “What are you!”
‘FROM THAT INITIAL STRUCTURE, AND ORDER, CAME SPONTANEOUS MIND: THE FIRST PRIMITIVE SPARKS OF FORCE BEGINNING TO ORGANISE, TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO. FIVE THOUSAND YEARS AGO, THOSE PRIMITIVE MINDS BECAME CONSCIOUS, BECAME US, OURSELVES – WILD MACHINES. WE BEGAN TO EVOLVE OURSELVES DELIBERATELY. WE KNEW THAT HUMANITY AND ANIMALS EXISTED, WE REGISTERED THEIR WEAK LITTLE SOULS. BUT WE COULD DO NOTHING. WE HAD NO VOICE, NO WAY TO COMMUNICATE, UNTIL THE FIRST OF YOU—’
“Who called you ferae natura machinae,” Ash completed, between numb lips. “Friar Bacon!”
‘NOT THE FRIAR,’ the voice whispered, ‘LONG BEFORE HIM, A STRONGER SOUL WAS BORN. THE FIRST SOUL TO WHICH WE COULD EVER SPEAK, BREAKING THE DUMBNESS OF TEN THOUSAND YEARS – WE SPOKE TO HIM, TO GUNDOBAD, WHO CALLED HIMSELF “PROPHET”. HE WOULD HAVE NONE OF US, CALLED US DEVILS, DEMONS, VILE SPIRITS OF THE EARTH. WOULD NOT SPEAK! AND, SO STRONG WAS HIS SOUL, THAT HE MADE A MIRACLE: WARPED THE FABRIC OF THE WORLD ITSELF, PUTTING A DESERT ABOUT US HERE, WHERE THERE HAD BEEN A GREAT RIVER AND SILT-FIELDS; FREEING HIMSELF FROM US, GOING AWAY TO WHERE WE COULD NOT REACH HIM.’
“To Rome … the Prophet Gundobad went to Rome and died—”
‘FOUR HUNDRED TURNS OF THE SUN ABOUT THE EARTH PASSED, A LITTLE, LITTLE SOUL CAME CLOSE TO US, MAKING HIS MACHINES FROM BRASS. WEAK, BUT STILL ANOTHER SOUL THAT COULD WORK WONDERS, ABOVE THE NATURAL LOT OF MAN. WE SPOKE TO HIM, THROUGH HIS BRAZEN HEAD, OUR VOICES TO HIS SENSES.’
“He burned it…” Black sky and black masonry are frozen in her vision. “The Friar – broke the Brazen Head – burned his books.”
‘AND NOT UNTIL THE ANCESTORS OF LEOFRIC BROUGHT A RABBI TO THEM, COULD WE SPEAK AGAIN. A WONDER-WORKER, THIS SOUL, WE PERCEIVED IT WHEN HE CAME CLOSE TO US. AND HE BROUGHT TO OUR COMPREHENSION ILDICO, DAUGHTER DESCENDED FIFTEEN GENERATIONS FROM GUNDOBAD. STRONG SOULS, STRONG WONDER-WORKING SOULS … THE RABBI BUILT HIS GOLEM. OUR NEW CHANNEL BY WHICH WE COULD COMMUNICATE WITH HUMANITY. WISER, NOW, WE HID BEHIND THE VOICE OF THE FIRST GOLEM, EASING OUR SUGGESTIONS INTO ITS VOICE. AND THE RABBI, A WONDERWORKER, AS THE FIRST MAN WAS, MADE THE SECOND STONE GOLEM FROM THE BODY OF ILDICO AND GUNDOBAD…’