Ash: The Lost History Part 26

She blurted out, without any intention of doing so, "What do you mean, talk to the machine? What 'machine'? What do you mean?"

The Faris folded her fingers around her wooden cup.

"Don't tell me you haven't heard of the Stone Golem?" she inquired, in a sardonic tone that Ash not only recognised but suspected of being a deliberate parody. "When I've gone to so much trouble to spread the rumour? I want my enemies too terrified to fight me. I want everybody to know that we have a great war-machine19 at home - and that I speak with it whenever I please. Even in the middle of battle. Especially in the middle of battle."

That's it, Ash realised. This is why I'm here.

Not because I look like her.

Not because we're probably kin.

Because she hears voices and she wants to know if I do, too.

And what the h.e.l.l will she do if she knows the truth?

Even knowing it to be a long leap to a conclusion, knowing it might be unjustified, panic and uncertainty set her heart thumping, to the point where she was glad to be wearing a mail standard: a pulse would have been clearly visible at her throat.

By reflex, she did the thing she had been doing since she was eight: cutting the linkage between herself and her fears. Her voice came out casually dismissive. "Oh, I heard the rumours. But that's just rumours. You've got some kind of a Brazen Head in Carthage - is it a head?" she broke off to ask.

"You have seen our clay walkers? It is their great father and progenitor: the Stone Golem. But," the woman added, "our defeating the armies of the Italians and the Swiss is not mere 'rumour'."

"The Italians! I know why you razed Milan, that was just to cut off the armour trade. I know all about that: I was apprentice to a Milanese armourer once." This fact having failed to distract either the woman or herself, Ash went rapidly on: "I grant you the Swiss. But why shouldn't you be good? After all, I'm good!"

She stopped, and could have bitten her tongue hard enough to draw blood.

"Yes. You are good." The Faris said evenly, "I understand that you, also, hear 'voices'."

"Now that isn't a rumour. That's a downright lie." Ash managed to guffaw coa.r.s.ely. "Who do you think I am, the Pucelle?20 You'll be telling me next that I'm a virgin!"

"No voices? Merely a useful lie?" the Visigoth general suggested mildly.

"Well, I'm hardly likely to deny it, am I? The more - G.o.dly I sound, the better off I'm going to be." Ash managed, more convincingly, to sound both smug and ashamed of having been caught out telling fibs in public.

The woman touched her temple. "Nonetheless, I am in contact with our tactical computer. I hear it. Here."

Ash stared. She must look, she realised dimly, as if she didn't believe a word the woman was saying and thought she must be mad. In fact she was hardly aware of the woman at all.

The chill air moving into the sheltered garden swept over her sweating face. Somewhere outside a horse snorted, wuffing breath into the night sky. The sound of Visigoth soldiers talking was just audible. Ash clung to what she could see and hear as if to her own sanity. The thought formed itself in her mind with absolute inevitability. If I was bred like her, and she hears voices from a tactical machine, then that's where my voice comes from.

No!

Ash wiped at her wet upper lip, her breath misting the steel plate of her gauntlet. Numb, she felt first on the verge of vomiting, and then as if she were strangely detached from herself. She watched her wine-cup tip out of her fingers and bounce, spilling liquid across the trestle table, soaking all the papers neatly laid out.

The Faris swore, leaping to her feet, calling out, knocking over the table. Four or five boys - Visigoth pages or serfs - ran into the garden, rescuing the doc.u.ments, wiping the table, mopping wine from the general's mail hauberk. Ash sat and stared with oblivious eyes.

Serfs bred as soldiers. Is that what she's saying? And I'm just some brat that somehow wasn't killed? Oh, sweet Jesus, and I always thought slaves and bondsmen beneath contempt- And my voice isn't. . .

Isn't what?

Isn't the Lion? Isn't a saint?

Isn't a demon?

Christ, sweet saviour, sweet sweet saviour of me, this is worse than devils!

Ash gripped her left hand into a fist, under the table, digging steel plates into flesh. Then she could look up, focused by the pain, and mumble, "Sorry. Drinking on an empty stomach. Wine's gone to my head."

You don't know. You don't know that what she hears is what you hear. You don't know it's the same thing.

Ash looked down at her left hand. The gauntlet-glove across her palm showed red blots, soaking into the linen.

The last thing I want to do now is carry on talking to this woman. Oh, f.u.c.k.

I wonder what would happen if I just told her? That I do hear a voice? A voice that tells me what tactics I can use in a battle?

If I tell her, what happens next?

If I don't know the answer to that question, then I certainly shouldn't ask her!

She was struck, as often in the past, with how time itself slows when life is knocked out of its rut. A cup of wine, in a garden, on a night in August: it is the kind of occasion that pa.s.ses rapidly and automatically at the time, and falls out of memory instantly. Now she minutely registered everything, from the three-legged oaken stool's front leg sinking gradually into the daisy-thick gra.s.s under her weight, to the slide of plate over metal plate in her armour as she stretched her arm out to take the wine bottle, to the long, long intensity of the moment before the Visigoth general ceased being mopped down by her serfs and turned her bright head again towards Ash.

"It's true," the Faris said conversationally. "I do speak with the war-machine. My men call it the Stone Golem. It's neither stone, nor does it move like these-" A little shrug, as she indicated the stone-and-bra.s.s figures bearing the torches. "-But they like the name."

Caution rea.s.serting itself, Ash put the bottle down and thought, If I don't know what the result of telling her I hear a voice will be, then I shouldn't tell her until I do know.

And certainly not until I've had time to think it through, talk it through with G.o.dfrey and Florian and Roberto- s.h.i.t, no! They just think I might be a b.a.s.t.a.r.d; how can I tell them I was born a slave?

Her lips stiff with the deceit, Ash said, "What would be the use of a war-engine like that? I could take my copy of Vegetius21 on to the battlefield and read it there, but it wouldn't help me win."

"But if you had him there with you, alive, and you could ask the advice of Vegetius himself, then it might?" The Visigoth woman picked at the front of her fine mail with a fingertip, gazing down. "That's going to rust. This b.l.o.o.d.y wet country!"

The pitch-torches hissed and sputtered, burning down. Golems stood, cold statues. Trails of pine-smelling black smoke went up into the night sky. The recurved-bow crescent of the waning moon sank behind the hedges of the garden. Ash's muscles ached. Every bruise from her arrest smarted. The wine fizzed in her head, making her sway a little on the stool; and she thought, If I'm not careful the drink will work, I shall be telling the truth to her, and then where will I be?

"Sisters," she said, blurrily. The wooden stool lurched forward. She came to her feet, rather than fall sprawling, and halted with one armoured hand outstretched, catching the Visigoth woman's shoulder for support. "Christ, woman, we could be twins! How old are you?"

"Nineteen."

Ash laughed shakily. "Well, there you are. If I knew the year I was born, I could tell you. I must be eighteen or nineteen or twenty-ish by now. Maybe we are twins. What do you think?"

"My father interbreeds his slave stock. I think we probably all look alike." The Faris's dark brows frowned. She reached up with her bare fingers and touched Ash on the cheek. "I did see some others, as a child, but they went mad."

"'Went mad'!" A flush spread up over Ash's face. She felt the heat of it. Entirely unplanned, entirely genuine: her face grew red. "What am I supposed to tell people? Faris, what do I say? That some crazy lord-amir down in Carthage is breeding slaves like stock, like animals? And that I was one of them?"

The Visigoth woman said softly, "It still could be a coincidence. One shouldn't let a likeness-"

"Oh, f.u.c.king h.e.l.l, woman! We're twins!"

Ash looked into eyes exactly the same height above ground as her own, the same dark colour, searching her features for kinship: for the curve of lip, shape of nose, shape of chin; a pale-haired foreign woman with the sunburn and odd scars of military campaigns, and a voice that, while not quite her own, might (she supposed now) be her own voice as others heard it.

"I'd rather not have known," Ash said thickly. "If it's true, I'm not a person, I'm an animal. Bloodstock. Failed bloodstock. I can be bought and sold - by anybody - and I can't say a word about it. By law. You're a farm animal too. Don't you care?"

"It isn't news to me."

That brought her up short. Ash closed her hand over the woman's mailed shoulder, squeezed once, and let go. She stood swaying, but upright. The high hedges of the hortus conclusus shut out Basle, the company, the army, the world in darkness: and Ash shivered, despite armour and the padding under it.

"It doesn't matter to me who I fight for," she said. "I signed a contract with you, and I suppose this isn't enough to break it - a.s.suming all my people here are unharmed, and not just Thomas. You know I am good, even if I don't have your 'Stone Golem'."

The lie came with an ease that might have been role-playing, might have been numbness, but in any case, Ash felt, couldn't delude anybody. She pushed on doggedly: "I know you've razed half a dozen essential commercial cities in Italy, I know the Swiss cantons are wiped out as a fighting force, and that you've frightened Frederick and the Germanies into surrender. I also know the Sultan in Constantinople isn't currently expecting trouble, so your army is intended for Christendom - for the kingdoms north of here."

She let her gaze rest on the general's face, trying to detect any emotion. An impa.s.sive face looked back at her, chiaroscuro shadows shifting across it from the light of the golems' torches.

"Intended for Burgundy, Daniel de Quesada said, but I expect that means France as well. And then the rosbifs? You're going to be overextended, even with the numbers you've got. I know what I'm doing, I've been doing it for a long time, let me get on with it. Okay? And then some time in the future, when I'm not under contract to you, I'll let your Lord-Amir Leofric know exactly what I think of him breeding b.a.s.t.a.r.ds."

-And this would probably work with anyone else, Ash concluded in the privacy of her own mind. How like me is she? Is she going to spot when I'm lying? For all I know, this would sound like bluff to anyone, let alone a sister I didn't know I'd got.

f.u.c.k me. A sister.

The Visigoth general bent down and picked up the Brazen Head from where it dented the turf, shook it, shrugged, and placed it back on the trestle table beside Ash's sallet. "I should like to keep her as my sub-commander here."

Ash opened her mouth to reply, and registered the 'her'. 'Her', not 'you'. That, and the precise diction, and the woman's unfocused eyes, brought a sudden stab of realisation to her gut: She is not talking to me.

Fear flooded her body.

Ash took two steps back, skidded on the frosty gra.s.s, and stumbled backwards down the gra.s.sy bank, barely keeping her footing, falling, ramming her back hard into the marble surround of the fountain. She heard the metal of her backplate creak. A copper taste flooded her mouth. She blushed, blushed red as fire, as hot with shame as if she had been publicly discovered having s.e.x; feeling in the one second It was never real until now! and in the next, I never expected to see someone else doing this!

Golems stared down from the top of the bank. The nearest one to Ash now had a spider's web linking its arm to the hedge, a frost-rimed white strand running from trimmed privet leaves to the shining bra.s.s mechanism of its elbow. She stared at the featureless oval face, the hen's-egg shape of the head delineated by guttering torches.

The Faris's voice protested, "But I would prefer to use her and her company now, not later."

She is not talking to me. She is talking to her voices.

Ash blurted, "We're under contract! We're fighting for you here. That was the arrangement!"

The general folded her arms, now with her head raised, watching the southern constellations in the sky over Basle. "If you order me to, then I will."

"I don't believe you hear voices at all! You're a b.l.o.o.d.y heathen. This is all play-acting!" Ash made an attempt to climb back up the steep bank. The soles of her riding boots glided over the cold gra.s.s, and she slid down, pitching forward in a rattle of metal; catching herself on her hands, and gazing up from on all fours at the Visigoth woman. "You're putting me on! This isn't real!"

Her protests were verbal floodwater. She stuttered, jabbering, and in the most private part of her mind, thought I must not listen! Whatever I do, I mustn't speak to my voice, I mustn't listen, in case it is the same- -In case she'll know if I do.

Between keeping up a continuous protest and the clamped-shut determination in her mind, she neither heard nor felt anything as the Visigoth woman continued to speak aloud into empty air.

"Yes. I'll send her south on the next galley."

"You will not!" Ash got quickly and carefully to her feet.

The Visigoth general lowered her gaze from the night sky.

"My father Leofric wants to see you," she said. "You'll reach Carthage within a week. If he doesn't keep you long, I'll have you back here before the sun moves into Virgo.22 We shall be some way further north, but I can still use your company. I'll send your men here back to your camp."

"Baise mon cul!"23 Ash snapped.

It was pure reflex. In the same way that she had played camp's-little-mascot at nine, so she knew how to play bluff-mercenary-captain at nineteen. Her head swam.

"This wasn't in the contract! If I have to take my people out of the field now, it'll cost you - I've still got to feed them. And if you want me to go all the way to f.u.c.king North Africa in the middle of your war ..." Ash made an attempt at a shrug. "That wasn't in the contract either."

And the second you take your eye off me, I'm out of here.

The Visigoth woman picked up Ash's sallet from the table, stroking her bare palm over the curve of metal from visor to crest to tail. Ash automatically winced, antic.i.p.ating rust on the mirror-finished steel. The woman knocked her knuckles against the metal thoughtfully, and pushed the visor down until it clicked.

"I'm giving some of these to my men." A brief glitter of laughter, her eyes meeting Ash's. "I didn't order Milano razed until I'd cleared it out first."

"You can't get better than Milanese plate. Except for Augsburg - and I don't suppose you've left much of the south German foundries, either." Ash reached up and took her helmet from the woman's hands. "You send word to me out at the camp when you want me to board ship."

For a whole second, she was convinced that she had done it. That she would be allowed now to walk out of the garden, ride out of the city, put herself squarely in the middle of eight hundred armed men wearing her own livery, and tell the Visigoths to go straight to whatever might be the Arian version of eternal d.a.m.nation.

The Visigoth general asked, aloud, "What do I do with someone my father wants to investigate, and I don't trust not to escape if I let her leave here?"

Ash said nothing aloud. In that part of herself where voice was potential, she acted. It was no decision, it was gut-level reflex, taken in despite of any risk of discovery. Pa.s.sive, Ash listened.

A whisper - the merest whisper of a whisper - sounded in her head. The quietest, most familiar voice imaginable- 'Strip her of armour and weapons. Keep her under continuous close guard. Escort her immediately to the nearest ship.'

Chapter Five.

A n.a.z.ir24 and his guards kept a literal grip on her, walking from the castle garden down through the streets, to a long tall row of four-storey houses that Ash recognised from her scouts' reports as the main Visigoth headquarters in Basle. Mail-covered hands held her arms.

Above the lime-washed plaster and oak beams of the gables, the stars were being swallowed up in darkness. Dawn coming.

Ash made no effort to break their hold on her. Most of this n.a.z.ir's unit were young, boys no older than her, with tan-creased faces, tight bodies, and long legs with calves thin-muscled from being so much on horseback. She gazed around at their faces as they hustled her into the nearest building, through an oaken door. If not for the Visigoth robes and mail, they could have been any men-at-arms from her company.

"Okay, okay!" She stopped dead in the entrance, on the flagstones, and shaped her mouth into a smile for the n.a.z.ir. "I have about four marks in my purse, which will buy you guys drinks, and then you can come and tell me how my men are doing."

The two soldiers released her arms. She felt for her purse and realised that her hands were still shaking. The n.a.z.ir - about her age, half a head taller, and male, of course - said, "Motherf.u.c.king mercenary b.i.t.c.h," in a fairly businesslike tone.

Ash mentally shrugged. Well, it was either that or she's our boss's double! and I get treated like the local demon . . .

"f.u.c.king Frankish c.u.n.t," he added.25 House guards and servants came out into the hall, carrying candles. Ash felt a hand jerk at her belt as she was shoved forward, knew her purse would be missing when she looked for it; and then in a clatter of boots and shouted orders in Carthaginian, she found herself bustled towards the back of the house, through rooms full of armed men, down stone-floored pa.s.sages, into a tiny room with an iron-barred door made of two-inch-thick oak, and a window about a foot square.

Two solemn-faced pages in Visigoth tunics indicated they were to help her off with her armour. Ash made no protest. She let herself be stripped down to her arming doublet and hose, with its sewn-in mail at armpits and crutch; her request for a demi-gown brought nothing.

The oak door closed. A sound of iron grating down into sockets told her that bars had been secured in place.

One candle guttered, its holder placed on the floor.

By its light she examined the room, padding around it in bare feet. The oak floorboards felt chill. The room was bare, containing neither chair nor table nor bed; and the window-slot had thumb-thick iron bars set into its walls. "f.u.c.kers!" Kicking the door would hurt: she hit it with the heel of her hand. "Let me see my men!"

Her voice bounced back flat from the walls.