Ash: The Lost History Part 55

Leofric turned back to her. "What degree are you, little Frankish girl?"

Cold air flickered across the hot coals, they burned red and black in turn. Ash met the eyes of the girl-slave kneeling on the far side of the iron tripod. The child winced and looked away. Ash thought, Is he serious? A waft of heat over the coals made her shiver.

"Squire's, I suppose. I sit at table with men of the fifth degree by right." It suddenly struck her as irresistibly ridiculous. "I can eat at the same table as preachers, doctors of law, rich merchants, and gentlewomen!" Ash shifted her body closer to the edge of the oaken bed and the nearest dish of hot coals. "I guess I eat with the knight's rank, now I'm married to one. 'The substance of livelihood is not so dignifying as is n.o.ble blood.' Hereditary knight beats mercenary."

"And of what rank am I?"

She may safely be put to moderate torture within an hour or so.

Flesh is so easy to burn.

"Of the second degree, if an amir is second in rank after the King-Caliph; that is, a bishop, viscount or earl's equal." Her voice stayed calm. Her mind suddenly demanded, What is John de Vere doing, is the Earl of Oxford dead? She warily watched the Visigoth lord.

In his preoccupied tenor, he asked, "How should you address me, then?"

The answer he wants is Lord-Amir or my lord; he wants some show of respect.

Acidly, she suggested, " 'Father'?"

"Mmm? Mmm." Leofric turned and took a few steps away from her, and back; his lined and faded eyes fixing on her face. He snapped his fingers at the slave scribe. "Preliminary notes: of the mind and spirit."

Ash pushed herself up into a sitting position on the pallia.s.se, gritting her teeth against soreness and pain. Her eyes dripped. She bundled the warm wool around her naked body. She opened her mouth to interrupt. The little slave-girl's face screwed up in terror.

"She is a-" The white-haired man broke off. His gown moved, a bulge near his fine leather belt wriggling around. The grey nose and whiskers of a big buck rat poked out of Leofric's sleeve. He absently lowered his arm towards the oaken bed. The rat descended cautiously onto the pallia.s.se near Ash.

"This is a mind between eighteen and twenty years of age," the Visigoth amir dictated. "She has a great resilience towards pain, and towards mutilation and other forms of physical damage; recovering from the miscarriage of a foetus of approximately nine weeks' growth inside of two hours."

Ash's mouth dropped open. She thought recovered! and then startled as a fly brushed the back of her hand. The jolt as she froze, instead of batting it away, left her body shaking. She looked down.

The grey rat was niffing again at her hand.

"Such evidence as I have been able to gather speaks of her living among soldiers from an early age, adopting their modes of thought, and following both the military professions: wh.o.r.e and soldier."

Ash held out her brown-stained fingers. The rat began to lick her skin. It had a patched grey-and-white back and belly, one black eye and one red eye, and a plush velvet softness to its short coat. She cautiously shifted her hand to scratch it gently behind its warm, delicate ear. She attempted Leofric's chirrup. "Hey, Lickfinger. You're a witch's familiar if I ever saw one, aren't you?"

The rat looked up at her with bright mismatched eyes.

"She displays lack of concentration, lack of forward planning, a desire to live for momentary sensation." Leofric signalled the scribe to stop writing. "My dear child, do you imagine I have any use for a woman who has become a mercenary captain in the barbaric north, and who claims her military skills come from saints' voices? An ignorant peasant, with a mere physical skill?"

"No." Ash, cold in her belly, continued to finger the rat's velvet coat. "But that isn't what you believe I am."

"You were with my daughter long enough to counterfeit a working knowledge of the Stone Golem."

"So the King-Caliph says." Ash let the cynical, acid tone remain in her voice.

"He is, in this case, correct." Leofric's tall skinny bulk sat on the edge of the bed. The grey rat skittered over the pallia.s.se and climbed up his thigh, putting its front paws up on his chest. He added, "The Belly of G.o.d is right, you know; we Visigoths have no choice but to be soldiers-"

"'The Belly of G.o.d'?" Ash echoed, startled.

"Fist of G.o.d," Leofric corrected himself. In Carthaginian Gothic it was a single word, obviously a t.i.tle. "Abbot m.u.t.h.ari. I must stop calling him that."

Ash recalled a fat abbot in the King-Caliph's company. She would have smiled, but fear made her face stiff.

The amir Leofric continued: "Because you have every reason to attempt to convince me that you hear this machine, I can't believe anything you say about it." His faded blue eyes switched from her face to the rat. "I was not entirely lying to the King-Caliph, nor entirely attempting to save you from Gelimer's brutal, stupid wastefulness. I may have to inflict some pain on you, to be certain."

Ash rubbed her hand across her face. The coals took the chill from the air, but her sweat was cold. "How will you know I'm telling the truth when you hurt me? I'd say anything, and you know it, anybody will! I've-"

After a moment, into the silence, the white-haired amir Leofric said gently, "'I've tortured men.' Is that what you were about to say?"

"I've been present while it happened. I've given the orders." Ash swallowed. "I can probably frighten myself much better than you can, given what I've seen and what I know."

A slave-boy entered, coming to speak quietly to Leofric. The Visigoth's s.h.a.ggy brows went up.

" I suppose I should admit him." He gestured the child away. A few moments later, two men in mail and helmets came in. Between his guards, an expensively dressed Visigoth amir with a braided dark beard entered the room.

He was the one with the King-Caliph, Ash remembered, and looking at his dried-grape eyes gave her memory of his name: Gelimer. "Lord-Amir Gelimer.

"His Majesty insisted that I oversee this. Your pardon," the younger amir said insincerely.

"Amir Gelimer, I have never obstructed any order of the King-Caliph."

The two of them moved aside. Ash's stomach chilled. Inside a few seconds, the amir Gelimer made a signal. Two well-built men entered the room, one with a small field-anvil; the second with steel hammers and a ring of iron.

"The King-Caliph asked me to do this." Amir Gelimer sounded both apologetic and smug. "It is not as if she were freeborn, is it?"

Her body cramping, shuddering, bleeding; she let herself be pulled up from the bed, and stared fixedly at the mosaics on the wall - the Boar at the Green Man's Tree, in intricate detail - while a curved iron ring was shoved under her chin and held closed. Her head rang to the brief and accurate bang of hammers fixing a red-hot rivet through the collar's hasp. Cold water sluiced her. She could not move her head, cropped hair tight in one of the men's grips, but she blew water and spat and shivered.

The room smelled of soot. An unfamiliar cold weight of steel rested around her neck. Ash glared at Gelimer, hoping to have him think her outraged, but her mouth kept losing its shape.

"Out of consideration for her illness, I think a collar will be sufficient," the amir Leofric murmured.

"Whatever." The younger amir chuckled. "Our lord expects results."

"I will soon be in a position to better inform the Caliph. Consulting records, I find seven litters born about the time of her apparent age; of which all were culled but my daughter. It could be that this one escaped the culling."

Ash shivered. Her head throbbed from the hammers. She put her fingers through the slave collar and pulled at the unyielding metal.

Gelimer for the first time looked her in the face. The amir spoke with the intonation one used to slaves and other inferiors. "Why so angry, woman? You have lost very little so far, after all."

What she sees, in her mind's eye, is a Visigoth lance-head sliding into G.o.dluc's side: a thick knife on a stick ripping his iron-grey hair and black skin up his ribs, sinking in behind his forequarters. Six years' care and companionship ended in a brutal second. She clenched her fists, under the woollen gown serving her as a blanket.

It is easier to see G.o.dluc than the dead faces of Henri Brant and Blanche and the other six score men and women who turn the baggage train alternately into hotel, brothel and hospital, running it with all the enthusiasm they can bring her; and d.i.c.kon Stour's eternal efforts to improve his armoury from repair to manufacture. Easier than to think of the dead faces of her lance-leaders, and each of their followers, drunk or sober, reliable or useless: five hundred dirty, well-armed peasants who would not consent to dig their lord's fields, or wild boys out for adventure, or criminals who would not stay for petty justice; but they will fight, for her. All this - the tents and their carefully sewn pennons, every war-horse or riding horse; each sword and the history of where she bought or stole or was given it; each man who has fought under her standard, in weather and ground always too hot - or too cold - or too wet- "No, what have I lost?" Ash said bitterly. "Nothing!"

Gelimer said, "Nothing to what you may lose. Leofric, G.o.d give you a good day."

The half-cooled rivet on her collar stung her fingertips. Ash watched Gelimer's leave-taking. The complexity of politics in this court - impossible to learn in months, never mind minutes - weighed down on her. Leofric might be trying to save my life. Why? Because he thinks I am another Faris? How important is that, now? Does it matter at all? My only chance is that it still matters- Her isolation cut her like a newly sharpened sword.

No matter how clear one's unimportance becomes, how easy it is to apprehend one's own death, the self still protests, But it's too soon, too unfair, why me?

Ash's skin chilled.

"What is going on?" she demanded.

Leofric turned back from the room's ornate, arched doorway. In French, again, he said, "If you want to live, I suggest you tell me."

It was blunt, a different tone completely from how he had spoken to Amir Gelimer.

"What can I tell you?"

"To begin with: how do you speak to the Stone Golem?" Leofric asked gently.

She sat on an oak-carved bed it would take her five years to earn, wrapped in blood-soaked wool and linen. Her body felt sore. She said, "I just speak."

"Aloud?"

"Of course, aloud! How else?"

Leofric seemed to find something to smile at in her indignation. "You do not, for example, speak as you might do in silent reading, with an interior voice?"

"I can't do silent reading."

The scraggle-haired amir gave her a look which plainly intimated that he doubted she could do any kind of reading.

"I recognise some of your machine's tactics," Ash said, "because I read them in Vegetius's Epitomae Rei Militaris."

The skin around Leofric's faded eyes became momentarily more lined. Ash realised his amus.e.m.e.nt. She remained on a cusp between fear and relief, held in tension.

"I thought perhaps your clerk had read it to you," Leofric said amiably.

The release of tension brought too-easy tears to her eyes.

If I'm not careful, I shall like you, Ash reflected. Is that what you're trying to do, here? Oh, Jesu, what can I do?

"Robert Anselm gave me his English copy11 of Vegetius. I keep - kept - it with me all the time."

"And you hear the Stone Golem - how?" Leofric asked.

Ash opened her mouth to reply, and then shut it again.

Now why have I never asked myself that question?

Finally, Ash touched her temple. "I just hear it. Here."

Leofric nodded slowly. "My daughter is no better at explaining it. In some ways she is a disappointment. I had hoped, when one was at last bred who could speak at a distance to the Stone Golem, that the least I could expect was to be informed how this was done - but no. Nothing but 'I hear it', as if that explained anything!"

Now who does he remind me of? Just forgets everything and goes off, rides his own hobby-horse. . . ?

Angelotti. And d.i.c.kon Stour. That's who.

"You're a gunner!" Ash spluttered, almost hysterical, and clapped both hands over her mouth, watching his complete incomprehension with bright eyes.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Or an armourer! Are you sure you've never felt the urge to make a mail shirt, my lord Amir? All those thousands of teeny-tiny rings, every one with a rivet in it-"

Leofric gave a bewildered, unwilling laugh; moved only by her evident mirth. Completely confused, the older man shook his head. "I neither forge guns nor construct mail. What are you saying to me?"

Why did I never ask? she thought. Why did I never ask how I heard? How do I hear it?

"Master Leofric, I've been taken before, I've been beaten before; none of this is new to me. I don't expect to live until Christ's Coming. Everybody dies."

"Some in more pain than others."

"If you think that's a threat, you've never seen a stricken field. Do you know what I risk, every time I go out there? War," Ash said, with very bright eyes, "is dangerous, Master Leofric."

"But you are here," the pale-coloured, elderly man said. "Not there."

Leofric's complete calmness chilled her. She thought, gunners, also, care everything about shot, aim, elevation, firepower: and only later think about the consequences, where it hits. Armed knights will, after battles, sit and discuss, realistically, the evils of killing; but this will not stop any of them devising a better sword, a heavier lance, a more efficient design of helmet. He is a gunner; an armourer; a killer.

And so am I.

"Tell me what to do to stay alive," she said. Hearing what she said, she suddenly thought, Is this how Fernando feels? She went on: "For however little time it turns out to be before you kill me. Just tell me."

Leofric shrugged.

In the chill room, among bowls of red embers, lit by Greek Fire, Ash stared at the amir. She swathed the wool gown around her shoulders. It fell in bloodstained folds around her.

I never asked because I never needed to.

She felt it, now: a directing of her voice, somehow. A directing of her attention towards - something.

"How long," she asked aloud, "has there been a Stone Golem?"

Leofric spoke words she didn't attend to.

'Two hundred and twenty-three years and thirty-seven days.'

Ash repeated aloud, "Two hundred and twenty-three years and thirty-seven days."

Leofric broke off whatever he was saying. He stared at her. "Yes? Yes, it must be. The seventh day of the ninth month . . . Yes!"

She spoke again. "Where is the Stone Golem?"

'The sixth floor of the north-east quadrant of the House of Leofric, in the city of Carthage, on the coast of North Africa.'

Her attention rose to a peak. Her listening, too, felt now that she attended to it as if it were something she did: not entirely pa.s.sive, as one listens to a man speak or a musician play; not a mere waiting for an answer. What am I doing? I'm doing something.

"About five or six storeys below us," Ash repeated, her eyes on Leofric. "That's where it is. That's where your tactical machine is . . ."