Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  The Faris stared at her. “Father told me it came to you with your first woman’s blood. With me – I have never not heard it. All my games as a child, with Father, were playing how to speak with the machina rei militaris. I could not have fought in Iberia without it.”

  Both her face and her voice remained calm. On her lap, almost concealed by the edge of the table, Ash saw that the Faris’s bare hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists.

  “We have a conversation to finish. When I came into your camp, two nights ago, you asked me about my priest,” Ash said harshly. “Godfrey Maximillian. You were hearing him then, weren’t you? He speaks to you as the machine.”

  “No! There is only one voice, the Stone Golem—”

  “No.”

  Ash’s impatient contradiction cracked out, loud enough to be heard across the open square of earth. One of the Visigoth qa’ids moved forward. The Faris signalled him back, without taking her eyes off Ash’s face.

  “God damn it, woman,” Ash said softly. “You know the other voices are real. Otherwise you wouldn’t have stopped talking to the Stone Golem. You’re afraid they’re listening to you! It’s their voices you’ve been following, for the last twenty years. You can’t ignore this.”

  The Visigoth woman unclenched her hands, rubbing them together. She reached for her goblet and drank.

  “I can,” she said briefly. “I could. Not now. Every time I fall asleep, I have nightmares. They speak to me on the borders of sleep – the Stone Golem, the Wild Machines – your Father Godfrey, he speaks to me, in the place where the machina should be. And how can that be?”

  Ash moved her shoulders, restrained by cuirass and pauldrons from a shrug. “He’s a priest. When he died, the machine was speaking through me. I can only suppose God’s grace saved him by a miracle and put his soul into the machine. Maybe not God – maybe the Devil. The hours don’t pass the same for him. It’s more like Hell than it is like Heaven!”

  “It’s strange. To hear a man speak, here.” The Faris touched her bare temple. “Another reason for doubt. How can I be sure anything the machina rei militaris tells me is trustworthy now, if it carries the soul of a man – and an enemy?”

  “Godfrey wasn’t anyone’s enemy. He died trying to rescue a physician who’d been treating your King-Caliph.”

  Somewhat to Ash’s surprise, the Visigoth woman nodded. “Messire Valzacchi. He is one of the men treating Father, under Cousin Sisnandus’s care.”

  The morning sun made Ash squint. A growing bitter cold froze the dank morning. The wind blew a flurry of white snow-powder across the earth, from the thin clouds massing in the north. Momentarily diverted, she said, “What did happen to Leofric?”

  She was not expecting an answer. The Faris, leaning forward, said earnestly, “He returned from the Citadel in time to take refuge in the room of the machina rei militaris.”

  “Ah. So he was down there while we were trying to blow the place.”

  As if Ash’s mild, sardonic amusement didn’t exist, the Visigoth woman went on:

  “He was there when the Stone Golem … spoke. When it repeated what the – other voices – said.” Her gaze flicked away from Ash’s face, but not before Ash filled in the missing phrase: ‘what the other voices said to you’.

  “I am not a fool,” the Faris said abruptly. “If Cousin Sisnandus believed that what my father heard was more than a product of his mental breakdown, he still would not tell the King-Caliph and rob House Leofric of what political influence we have left. I know that. But I know that Father is ill. They found him the next day, among the pyramids, under God’s Fire, surrounded by dead slaves. His clothes were torn. He had scratched away part of the side of a tomb, with nothing but his hands.”

  The thought of those hands, that have examined her body with steel instruments, being torn and bleeding; of the man’s mind shattered – Ash kept herself from showing her teeth. How sad.

  “Faris, if you’ve heard Godfrey,” she persisted, pressing her point, “then you’ve heard the Wild Machines.”

  “Yes.” The Visigoth woman looked away. “Finally, this past night, I could do nothing else but listen. I have heard.”

  Ash followed her gaze. Hundreds of surrounding faces stared back at the two of them: at the fate of Dijon being negotiated under truce, in the mud of a camp with winter coming on.

  “They follow you, Faris.”

  “Yes.”

  “Many of them men from your Iberian campaigns? And from fighting the Turk, over by Alexandria?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you’re right,” Ash said, and when the woman looked back at her, went on: “Your own men are in danger. The Wild Machines don’t care how they win this war. For one thing, they’re telling you to assault the city, take it in a hurry, kill the Duke by sheer force of numbers; and that’s bad tactics, you could lose half an army of men here for nothing. That’s lives wasted; lives of men you know.”

  “And secondly?” the Faris said sharply.

  “And, secondly – ‘We have bred the Faris to make a dark miracle, as Gundobad made one. We shall use her, our general, our Faris, our miracle-maker – to make Burgundy as if it has never been.’”

  Ash, speaking the words seared into her memory, watched the woman’s face start to seem grey, sunk-in, desperate.

  “Yes,” the Faris said. “Yes, I have heard those words. They say it is they who made the long darkness over Carthage. They say.”

  “They want the Duke dead and Burgundy gone so that they can make a miracle that makes the world into a desolation. Faris, will the Wild Machines care if the Visigoth army is still inside the borders of Burgundy when that happens? When there’s nothing but ice, darkness, and decay – the way it’s starting to be around Carthage. And do you think anyone’s going to survive it?”

  The Faris leaned back in her chair, her coat of plates creaking slightly. Aware of every movement – any signal that might be an attack, a hand that might be going for a stiletto – Ash found herself mirroring the Visigoth woman, sitting back and away from her.

  Another flurry of snow-particles dust-devilled across the earth, beyond the guy-ropes and tent-pegs of the awning.

  “Winter,” the Faris said, and looked straight at Ash. “‘Winter will not cover all the world’.”

  “You heard that too.” A tension that she had not been conscious of relaxed. It’s me telling Roberto and Angeli and Florian these things, it’s me staking the company, and Dijon, and a whole lot of lives on being right – and whether it’s true, or a lie, at least someone else has heard it.

  “If this is true,” the Faris said, “where do you suggest I take my men – or you take your men, if it comes to that – to be safe? If they want the whole world made into a desert, burned, sown with salt… Tell me, Frankish woman, where we may go to be safe!”

  Ash hit the wooden table with her gauntleted fist. “You’re Gundobad’s descendant! I can’t even miraculously light a bloody altar candle! You’re the one that’s going to make this miracle for them!”

  The Faris’s gaze slid away. Almost inaudibly, she said, “I do not know this to be true.”

  “Don’t you? Fucking don’t you? Well, I’ll tell you what’s true. When I was outside Carthage, the bloody machines just turned me round and walked me towards them, and there wasn’t a Christ-damned thing I could do about it! I didn’t have a choice! If Duke Charles dies, we’re all going to find out if you’ve got a choice, but by then it’s going to be far too late!”

  “And so the answer is that you kill me.”

  It stopped Ash as if she had walked into a wall: the Visigoth woman’s abrupt shifts from fear to concentration and back again. Now the Faris, without moving, added:

  “I can think for myself. You reason thus: if am I dead, the Wild Machines can do nothing. If you make a move, there are twelve of my sharpshooters who will put bodkin-head arrows through your armour before you get out of that chair.”

  An arrow-shaft as thick as a
finger; an arrow-head four inches long, four-sided, sharp: able to punch through metal. Ash pushed the image out of her mind’s eye.

  “Of course there are archers,” she said equably. “If nothing else, I overhear your communications with Carthage. You’d have shot me before now, except that Dijon will be even harder to take if you go around killing their current heroes. And you still think I might betray the city to you.”

  “You are my sister. I will not kill you unless it is necessary.”

  In the face of the woman’s intent seriousness, Ash felt nothing but a sudden impulse of pity. She’s young. She still thinks you can do that.

  “I’ll kill you without a second thought,” Ash said. “If I have to.”

  “Oh yes.” The woman’s gaze wandered to the child-slave, standing a few paces off with the wine jug; a boy with thistledown-white hair. Ash saw her glance around at other slaves; at Ash herself.

  The Faris said, “There is nothing they can make me do. Not a miracle, nothing. I will no longer speak to the machina rei militaris, I will not listen! Surely they can do nothing unless I speak with them, and I will not, I will not!”

  “Maybe. It’s a hell of a chance to take.”

  “What would you have me do?” Her keen expression sharpened. “Kill myself, because voices in my head tell me I’m going to do a hellish miracle? I’m like you, jund Ash, I’m a soldier. I’ve never done miracles! I pray, I go to mass, I sacrifice where it’s proper, but I’m not a priest! I’m a woman. I’ll wait until we kill this Burgundian Duke, and see if I—”

  “It’s too late then!” Ash’s interruption silenced the Faris. “These are creatures who have the power to put out the sun. They did that. When they draw on the sun’s spirit again, when they force it on you, the same way God’s grace comes to a priest, do you think you can refuse it?”

  The woman licked her lips. When she spoke, it was without the rising note of hysteria.

  “But what would you have me do? Fall on my sword?”

  Ash said instantly, “Persuade Lord-Amir Leofric to destroy the Stone Golem.”

  The Visigoth woman stared, completely silenced, while a man might have counted a hundred. The sound of a war-horse, neighing from the lines, broke the silence. The eagles of the Visigoth legions glinted in the sunlight.

  I can’t get to her and kill her before they kill me.

  Maybe I won’t have to.

  “Do it,” Ash urged. “Then they can’t reach you. The Stone Golem is their only voice.”

  “My God.” The Faris shook her head in amazement.

  “They spoke once to your Prophet Gundobad, and once to Roger Bacon,” Ash said steadily, “and then with the machina rei militaris, to us. It’s their only voice. You’ve got an army here. Leofric’s your ‘father’, even if he’s sick. You’ve got the authority. No one can stop you going back to Carthage and breaking the Stone Golem into rubble!”

  The woman in Visigoth mail, with a quick apprehension that Ash read as long, if unconscious, consideration of the subject, said, “Cut these ‘Wild Machines’ off – at the cost of my never taking the field again.”

  “It’s you or the machine.” A ghost of humour pulled Ash’s mouth up at the corners. “So: you’re right, finally – here I am with the general of the Visigoth army, asking her to destroy the tactical engine that makes her win wars…”

  “I wish, truly, that this was a such a ruse of war.” The Faris linked her fingers, rested her elbows on the table, and her lips against her joined hands.

  There is no sound in Ash’s mind of the Faris’s voice speaking to the machina rei militaris, appealing to Leofric or Sisnandus. Nothing speaks.

  After a moment’s silence, the Faris lifted her head to say, “I could pray, now, for your Duke to stay alive.”

  “He’s—” not my Duke, Ash had been about to protest. She cut herself short. “He’s my current employer, so I’m supposed to want him to stay alive! Even if there wasn’t so much at stake.”

  The Faris chuckled briefly. She reached out for the goblet and drank again, the wine staining her upper lip purple. “Why Burgundy’s Duke?”

  “I don’t know. You don’t know either?”

  “No. I dare not ask.” The Faris squinted at the sky, and the gathering yellow-grey cloud cover. “My father – Leofric will never destroy the Stone Golem. Even now. He gave his life to it, and to breeding us. And he is sick, and I cannot talk with cousin Sisnandus unless I use the machina rei militaris to do it, and am … overheard. Or unless I travel back, over land and sea, to speak face to face.”

  “Then do that!”

  “It – would not be so easy?”

  Ash felt the lessening of tension, heard it in the Visigoth woman’s questioning voice. They sat, either side of the table, staring at each other: a woman in Milanese harness, a woman in a bright cloth-covered coat of plates; scarred and unscarred faces suddenly still.

  “Why not? Extend the truce.” Ash tapped a finger on the table, the gauntlet’s laminations sliding one over the other. “Your officers would rather hold siege and try to starve us out. They know they’re going to lose a lot of men with constant assaults. Extend the truce!”

  “And go south, to Carthage?”

  “Why not?”

  “I would be ordered back here. Ordered not to leave.”

  Ash heaved a great breath of air in, feeling a tension relax, feeling an excitement and expectation. “Shit, think about it! You’re the Faris, no one here has the authority to argue with you. You’d get to Carthage. This siege is good for months.”

  The unexpected feeling, Ash realised, was hope.

  “But, sister,” the other woman said.

  “Better go back to Carthage and have the Stone Golem destroyed, whether Leofric wants it to happen or not. Better that, than sit here knowing you’re the one person that has to be killed to stop this.” Ash jabbed her finger in the air. “This isn’t about war any more! It’s about being wiped out. Hell, take the Visigoth army home and take out House Leofric if you have to!”

  A smile curved the other woman’s lips. “That, I think, these men would not do. Even for me. The Empire takes certain precautions against that. But… Father might listen to me. Ash, if I leave, and if I fail, then perhaps we are still safe. Perhaps, if I am not in Burgundy, then nothing can happen.”

  “We don’t know that, either.”

  If you leave here, Ash thought suddenly, there’ll be no one with you who knows that you have to be killed. Shit: I should have realised that. But the chance, the chance that this could work and take out the Stone Golem—

  “They are great Devils,” the Faris said soberly. “Princes and Thrones and Dominions of Hell, set loose in the world and given power over us.”

  “Will you extend the truce?”

  The Faris looked up, as if her thoughts had been elsewhere. “For a day, at least. I must think, must carefully consider this.”

  To stop the assaults, the fucking bombardment, for a whole day; is it this easy?

  Such a phenomenal concession made Ash dry-mouthed with the fear that it might be retracted. She made herself sit with the confident expression of a mercenary who is used to negotiating the rules of engagement in war; tried to keep the strain and the sudden hope off her face.

  “But Duke Charles,” the Faris said. “There have been rumours that he is sick? That he was wounded mortally, at Auxonne?”

  Startled, Ash realised from the woman’s expression that she asked the question in all seriousness. She really thinks I’m going to tell her?

  “There’ll be rumours that he’s sick, wounded, and dead,” Ash said caustically. “You know what soldiers are like.”

  “Jund Ash, I am asking you – how much time do we have?”

  It was the first time that she truly heard the we.

  “Faris… I can’t tell you things about my employer.”

  “You said it yourself: this is not about war. Ash, how much time?”

  I wish I could talk to G
odfrey, Ash thought. He’d know whether I should trust her. He could tell me…

  But I can’t ask him. Not now.

  She kept the part of her that listens passive, silent, absorbed; offering no chink for a voice to come through. The fear of the ancient voices gnaws at the back of her mind, like a rat.

  No one can make this decision but me, on my own.

  “You call me your sister,” Ash said, “but we’re not, we’re nothing to each other, except by blood. I know nothing about whether I can trust your word. You’re sitting out here with an army – and I have men who will die if I make a bad decision.”

  The Faris said steadily, “And I am Gundobad’s child.”

  Now, as she sat back in her chair, the scarlet cloth covering riveted over the metal plates of her armour could be seen to be rubbed, worn, black with dirt under the cuffs. The Visigoth woman’s long hair shone silver-grey with grease. Ingrained mud pencilled fine lines in the skin at the corners of her eyes. She smelled of wood-smoke, of the camp; and Ash, feeling it hit home under her breastbone, leaving her without breath, was overcome with an utter familiar closeness nothing to do with blood kinship.

  The woman added, “We neither of us can say for certain what that means, but will you risk waiting to find out? Ash, how much time do we have? Is the Duke well and whole?”

  Ash remembers a dream of boar in the snow; Godfrey’s whisper of you are one of the beasts of the world with tusks, and it took me so long to gain your trust.

  The Faris got to her feet. Ash’s own face looks back at her from between wind-strewn tendrils of white hair; hair that falls in ripples over the rose-head rivets of a coat of plates, down past the waist and the sword-belt with its empty scabbards.

  Ash shut her eyes briefly, to blot such a strong resemblance out of her mind.

  “More than sisters,” she said, opening her eyes to cold wind and the surrounding ranks of troops; and armed men moving and talking quietly while discussion goes on out of their earshot: strategy, tactics, decisions. “Never mind what we are by birth. This. We both do this. We both understand it… Faris, don’t take long to consider your decision. The Duke is dying as we speak.”