Ash: The Lost History Part 139

Disturbed, she contented herself with another nod; which the Faris again ignored. The Visigoth woman, armoured and in black livery, had a dagger at her belt; Ash could not see a sword-hilt, in among the crush of bodies.

Why is Gelimer watching me? He should be watching the d.u.c.h.ess.

Is this some kind of diversion, so he can try to have Florian killed?

She inhaled, surrept.i.tiously, trying to catch the scent of slow-match on the air, to discover if there were arquebuses hidden in the ma.s.s of Gelimer's men. Movement caught her eye; brought her sword-hand across her body. She stopped.

Two Visigoth priests came pushing through the crowd in the Faris's wake. They held the elbows of a tall, thin bareheaded amir, a man with unruly white hair and the expression of a startled owl. Behind the amir stumbled a pudgy Italian physician - she recognised Annibale Valzacchi. And the amir is Leofric.

"Green Christ. . . !" Ash became aware that she had closed her hand around Floria's arm only when the woman winced.

"That's the lord-amir that had you prisoner? The one who owns the Stone Golem?"

"Yeah: you never saw Leofric in Carthage, did you? That's him." Ash did not take her eyes from Leofric's face, watching the elderly man across the s.p.a.ce of perhaps five yards. "That's him."

Not just my sister, but this.

A pain came deep in the pit of her stomach. Stairways, cells, blood; the intrusive painful stab of examination: all sharp-edged in her mind. She rode the ache out, not letting it show on her face.

Leofric wore the rich furred gown of a Visigoth lord, over mail. He appeared unaware of the priests' grip on his arms, and frowned at Ash with a puzzled expression.

"Greetings, my lord." Her mouth sounded dry even to her.

John de Vere whispered encouragingly in her ear, "Madam, yes, talk. It is all time gained."

Two slaves stood with the Lord-Amir Leofric behind the front row of Visigoth troops; one a child, and one a fat woman. Ash could see neither clearly. The child cradled something in the front of her stained linen robe, and shivered. The adult woman drooled.

In the fierce, flat white light, Leofric's eyes focused on Ash. His face crumpled. Into the silence, he wailed, "Devils! Great Devils! Great Devils will kill us all!"

Chapter Four.The Janissaries in front of Ash did not move, their alert surveillance intense. Florian looked taken aback; de Vere, although he did not show it, no less so. Ash shifted her gaze from Leofric to the King-Caliph. No surprise showed on the Visigoth ruler's face.

"The head of House Leofric is unwell," Gelimer said. "If he were himself, he would apologise for such a discourtesy."

"Ask her!" Leofric swung round imploringly towards Gelimer, the two priests gripping his arms even more firmly. "My lord Caliph, I am not mad! Ask her. Ash hears them too. She is another daughter of mine, Ash hears them as this one does-"

"No." The Faris's voice cut him off. "I cannot hear the machina rei militaris any longer. I am deaf to it."

Ash stared.

The Visigoth woman avoided her gaze.

With complete certainty, Ash thought She's lying!

"You said she wasn't talking to the Stone Golem ..." Floria whispered, her tone one of rueful admission.

"Not because she can't." Ash watched Gelimer wince and glance at the foreign envoys.

Frederick of Hapsburg was smiling a little, with the haughty and calculating smile she remembered from the summer at Neuss; and he caught her eye and lifted a brow slightly.

"To our business, lords." Gelimer fixed his gaze on Floria. "Witch-woman of Burgundy-"

The Lord-Amir Leofric interrupted obliviously. "Where did I go wrong?"

Floria, who looked as if she had been about to make some dignified ducal response, stopped before she started. The surgeon-d.u.c.h.ess put her fists on her hips with difficulty in the crowded s.p.a.ce, and stared at the Visigoth lord. "'Go wrong'?"

Ash peered down the mine, between the shoulders of the Turkish Janissaries, the blue-white blaze of the Greek Fire making it paradoxically harder to focus on Leofric's face. Something about the shape of his mouth made her shudder: adult men in their right minds do not have such an expression. She remembered Carthage, was overwhelmed suddenly between contradictory revulsion, hate and pity.

He's not right. Something's happened to him, since I was there. He's not right at all...

She cut the emotions away from herself, concentrating only on the tunnel, the armed men, the sounds of voices, the shifting of feet and hands.

Leofric gazed down at the child-slave in front of him. He drew one arm from the priests' grip, reached down, and plucked a white-and-liver-coloured patched rat out of the child's arms. He held it up and stared into its ruby eyes. "I keep asking myself, where did I go wrong?"

The child - recognisably Violante; taller, thinner - lifted up her hands for the animal. Ash recognised the rat when it wriggled in mid-air, thrashed its tail from side to side, and dipped its furry head down to lick the girl's fingers.

She felt eyes on her: switched her glance to see Gelimer watching her again with avid, a.n.a.lytical care.

"Oh, f.u.c.k ..." Ash breathed.

Gelimer signalled. The two priests closed around Leofric again. Valzacchi pulled the amir's hand down, shrinking from the animal.

The white-haired man looked vague, and relinquished the rat absent-mindedly to his slave-girl. "Lord Caliph, the danger-"

"You put on this madness as an excuse for treachery!" the King-Caliph said, in a rapid Carthaginian Latin that Ash thought only she and de Vere, apart from Gelimer's Visigoth followers, understood. "If I have to kill you to silence you, I will."

"I am not mad," Leofric answered in the same language. Ash saw Frederick of Hapsburg look puzzled, and d'Amboise too; the other Frenchman, Commines, smiled quietly.

Ash glanced at de Vere. The English Earl nodded. She waited until she was sure he was watching the French and German delegations, and then reached up and unbuckled her helmet. Time to stir the pot. She took the sallet off and shook out her short hair, facing the Visigoths under the harsh light.

"My G.o.d, but they are twins!" Charles d'Amboise exclaimed. "A Burgun-dian mercenary and a Visigoth general? Their voices, their faces - what is this?"

"Sisters, I hear," de Commines put in sharply, staring at the Visigoth King-Caliph. "Lord Gelimer, his Grace the King of France will ask, also, why you have your generals fighting both sides of this war! If it is a war, and not some conspiracy against France!"

"The woman Ash is a renegade," Gelimer said dismissively.

"Is she?" Charles d'Amboise's shout made the young slave-girl in front of him flinch, and huddle the piebald rat to her chest. He bellowed at the King-Caliph: "Is she? What shall I tell my master Louis? That you and Burgundy conspire together, and this sham of a war is fought on both sides by you! That Burgundy is France's ancient enemy, and has you for an ally! And, worse than all this-" The French n.o.bleman flung out his hand, pointing at John de Vere, Earl of Oxford: "-the English are involved!"

Ash whooped. It was drowned out in the guffaws, cat-calls, and congratulatory comments to de Vere that echoed from Thomas Rochester's lance. Rochester himself wiped streaming eyes.

Gelimer's hand stroked his beaded beard.

When the applause, boos, and cries of "G.o.d rot the French w.a.n.ker!" died down, the King-Caliph said in a measured tone, "We do not bring our legions to raze the city of an ally, Master Amboise."

Plainly alerted by the sound of Gelimer's voice, the Lord-Amir Leofric suddenly bellowed out loud, his voice blaring in the low-roofed tunnel: "You must ask her! Ash! Ash!"

A dribble of earth fell down between planks, touching his face, and he winced and wrenched himself back with a cry. Panting, he fixed his gaze on Ash.

"Tell my lord the King-Caliph! Tell him. The stone of the desert has souls! Great voices speak, speak through my Stone Golem, and she has heard them, and you have heard them-" Leofric's voice lost depth. His face saddened. "How can you let this petty war keep you from speaking of such danger?"

"I-" Ash stopped. Floria's shoulder was pressing against hers, hard against her backplate; and de Vere had one thoughtful hand to his mace's grip.

"Tell him!" Leofric yelled. "My daughter betrays me, I am asking you -begging you-" He wrenched both arms free of the priests, stood for one second, then raised his head and stared straight at Ash. "The Empire is betrayed, we're all to die soon, every man of us, every woman, Visigoth or Burgundian - tell my lord Caliph what you hear."

Ash became aware again of Gelimer's intense stare. She looked away from Leofric; took in all the Visigoth group, the foreign envoys; stood for a moment in a complete state of indecision.

The faintest hiss came from the Greek Fire globes. Violante, cuddling her rat, looked up from under her chopped-off hair at Ash, her expression unreadable. The adult woman-slave began to pick at the girl's tunic, dribbling without wiping her wide lips, and whining like a hound.

"Okay." Ash rested her hands on her belt, a few inches from sword and dagger. With a sense of immense relief, she said, "He might be mad, but he isn't crazy. Listen to him. He's telling the truth."

Gelimer frowned.

"There are-" Ash hesitated, choosing words with care. "There are great pyramid-golems in the desert, south of Carthage. You saw them when we rode there, Lord Caliph."

Gelimer's lips twitched, red in the nest of his beard, and he stroked his hand across his mouth. "They are monuments to our holy dead. G.o.d blesses them now with a cold Fire."

"You saw them. They're made of the river-silt and stone. Stone. Like the Stone Golem."

He shook his head. "Nonsense."

"No, not nonsense. Your amir Leofric's right. I've heard them. It's their voices that have spoken to you through the Stone Golem. It's their advice that has brought you here. And believe me, they don't care about your Empire!" With a curious sense of release, she nodded towards the white-haired Visigoth lord. "Amir Leofric isn't crazy. There are devils out there - as far as we're concerned, they're devils. And they won't rest until the whole world is as cold and dead as the lands beyond Burgundy."

She had little hope of convincing him. She saw from his face that she probably had not. Nonetheless, she felt the release in herself: simply to be able to speak of it aloud. From behind the ranks of Janissaries, she watched Gelimer, and he could not look away from her.

"Which is the more likely?" he said. "That this talk of devils is true, when we so plainly have G.o.d's visible mark of favour? Or that House Leofric has some factional plot against the throne? Which his slave-general joined, at his command. And now you. Captain Ash, you should have died in my court, dissected for the knowledge you would bring us. That is how you will die, when I have taken Dijon."

"When," Ash remarked dryly.

Florian, at Ash's side, interjected, "Lord-Caliph, she's telling you the truth. There are golems in the desert. And you've been fooled by them."

"No. Not I. I have not been the fool."

Gelimer signalled again. The larger of the two priests holding Leofric let go of him, and pushed his way through the press of men to the woman-slave standing beside Violante. The woman flinched away from him and began to cry in great unrestrained sobs and gawks and chokes. The priest hauled her forward by the iron collar around her wattle-skinned neck.

"My lords of France and the Holy Roman Empire," the King-Caliph said. "You have seen that my lord Leofric is ill. You see his slave daughter, our General, is also not in health. And now you hear from this mercenary Captain-General of Burgundy the ramblings of a lunatic. This is why, gentlemen. This woman. I brought her for you to see, and judge. This is Adelize. She is the mother of both these young women."

The priest punched the slave-woman. She stopped roaring. A complete silence fell. Ash heard only a hissing sound in her ears. Thomas Rochester, beside her, gripped her shoulder.

"If this is the dam," Gelimer said, "what wonder if the pups are mad?"

Ash stared at the idiot woman. Under the rolls of fat, the outline of her face could be similar to that of the Faris, standing impa.s.sively beside her; it had a gut-wrenching familiarity that Ash did not let herself feel. An old woman, fifty or sixty. The woman's pale hair was by now grey, no trace of colour left.

Ash opened her mouth to speak; and could say nothing, her voice lost.

"With such a dam, what can you expect of the cubs?" Gelimer repeated rhetorically. "Nonsense such as this talk of great devils."

"Your Faris, your commander in the field, she also suffers this lunacy?" de Commines said sharply.

"The crusades of our Empire have never been dependent on one commander." The King-Caliph sounded serene.

John de Vere stirred, fair brows dipping; obviously doubting that serenity. "Madam, he thinks it worth discrediting the commander who has won him Europe, to discredit Leofric and you."

Ash said nothing. She stared at Adelize, at the woman who wept now without sound, wet tears blubbering her cheeks. Two hundred years of incest. Sweet Christ and all the Saints. Is this what I- The Faris reached out and rested her hand on the woman's hair. Her hand moved softly, stroking. Her face remained impa.s.sive.

"With that disposed of," King-Caliph Gelimer said briskly, "we turn to our business with Burgundy."

Ash missed what Floria said. She turned her head aside, choked up the searing hot vomit in her throat, spat it into her hand, and let it fall to the floor. Her eyes ran: she blinked back the water in case anyone should think she wept.

"-an envoy," the King-Caliph was saying.

"Envoy?"

"He says he wants to send one in to us," Floria whispered. Her face, intent, promised compa.s.sion and a.n.a.lysis later; in this second, she was all alertness, all d.u.c.h.ess. "I'm going to let him. The man's probably a spy, but it's all delay." She spoke up., "If he's acceptable, we'll take him."

Gelimer's hand stroked his beaded beard again, the gold flashing. He said mildly, "You will find him acceptable, d.u.c.h.ess of Burgundy. He is your brother."

Ash did not take it in. There was a stir in the group of armed men in front of her, someone pushing their way through. Her gaze went past the man. She looked back, suddenly thinking I know that face!; wondering which of Gelimer's Franks he might be - a mercenary she'd met in Italy, maybe; or some Iberian merchant? And in a split second, the light fell full on his face, and she saw that it was Fernando del Guiz with his hair cropped, and that he wore a priest's high-collared robe.

A priest?

How can he be a priest: he's my husband!

Last seen, he had been a young man with blond hair falling s.h.a.ggy to his shoulders, dressed in the mail and furred robes of a Visigoth knight. Now, unarmed - not even a dagger! - he wore a dark priestly robe b.u.t.toned from chin to floor-length hem, and tightly belted at the waist. It only showed off the breadth of his shoulders and chest the more. Something about his scrubbed cleanliness and shining yellow hair made her long to walk over to him and bury her face in his neck; smell the male scent of him.

The shifting light of the Greek Fire globes cast shadows enough to hide her expression. Amazed, she felt her cheeks heating up.

"Fernando," she said aloud.

Abruptly conscious of her hacked-off short hair and general siege-induced grubbiness, she shifted her gaze away as he looked at her. There was no pectoral cross on the chain around his neck, but a pendant of a man's face carved with leaves tendrilling from his open mouth. Arian priest, then. Christus Viridia.n.u.s! What on earth-?

Angry with herself, she raised her eyes again. Someone had expertly shaved his hair back above his ears in a novice's tonsure. He looked faintly amused.

"Abbot m.u.t.h.ari must be hard up," Ash remarked, in a voice with more gravel in it than she liked. "But I might have known you'd get into skirts as soon as you could."

There was an appreciative rumble from the soldiers. Ash overheard Robert Anselm translating her remark for Bajezet's men; their laughter came in a few seconds late.

There I go: motor-mouth, she thought, still staring at Fernando. Knowing that whatever she said, automatically, was nothing more than a time-filler while she stared up at him thinking, Has he really taken vows as a priest? and, Are the Arian priests celibate?

A warmth ran down her skin, loosening the muscles of her thighs, and she knew that the pupils of her eyes must be wide.

"This is my amba.s.sador," the King-Caliph said.

Fernando del Guiz bowed.

Ash stared.

"s.h.i.t," she said. "Well. s.h.i.t. Merry f.u.c.king Christmas."