Ash: The Lost History Part 62

Her mind's eye holds the images of golems, wagons, fire-throwers. She will not think Roberto, Florian, Angelotti.

"And my decision to say that I take responsibility for them, while our contract lasts. I want to know what happened!"

She let herself look at him directly, and found herself looking into his tired, reddened eyes. His curling fair hair was longer, straggling around his face; he looked closer to thirty than to twenty, and it is only two months, she thought, since I stood with him in the cathedral at Cologne: sweet Christ!

She did not know what expression was on her own face, could not know that she looked simultaneously much younger, much more open and vulnerable, and at the same time herself looked aged. Worn, not by a life in camp, but by nights spent awake in Dijon, thinking about this, imagining what words she could speak, her body aching to lay full-length against him, wrap her legs around his hips, thrust him deep inside her.

And her mind despising her for that hunger for a weak man.

"I don't know," he mumbled.

"What have they got you doing now?" Ash said. "That's Gelimer's son. Lord-Amir Gelimer hates Lord-Amir Leofric. So, are you taking me to Gelimer? To be killed? Or what?"

His beautiful, ravaged face was momentarily blank.

"No!" Fernando's voice rose to a shout. He silenced himself; waving rea.s.suringly to Witiza and the squires. "No. You're my wife, I wouldn't take you to be murdered!"

Ash slid the reins up between finger and thumb, her eyes on the riders around her. She said, bitterly, "I think you'd do anything. The minute somebody threatened you! You hated me anyway, Fernando. From the minute we met in Genoa."

He coloured up. "I was a boy then! Fifteen! You can't blame me for some wild boy's prank!"

That touched a nerve, Ash realised, surprised.

Something whirred and clattered, out in the desolate land. A bird flew up from under one of the horses' hooves. Ash tensed, about to dig her heels in. The German troops closed in two-deep around her: she imperceptibly relaxed.

The sound of hooves on earth gave way to the clatter of iron shoes on stone: the ma.s.s of troops riding out of the desert and on to ancient flagstones. Her belly churned. She looked ahead, straining her eyes to see more cavalry: expecting now the amir Gelimer's men in ambush, or men hired by him. Gelimer, who might want her killed, or questioned: either being vile. Caught up in someone else's fight, she thought. Christ, I thought I had two days before Leofric did for me. I was safer inside Carthage!

Dark shapes blotted the sky.

Hills, she thought; before her eye took in their regularity. The noise of the horses' hooves echoed back from flat surfaces that sloped up and away; so that her second apprehension was that she rode in a steep valley, but the sides even in starlight were too regular. Flat planes, sharp-edged.

Pyramids.

Anyone could be hiding out here!

Stars fringed the edges of the stone. Their light leeched all colour from the sides of the pyramids: immense, shaped structures of carven stone, built up from a hundred thousand red silt bricks, faced with brilliantly painted plaster. Ash rode among armed men, among the pyramids of Carthage. She could say nothing; silenced; could only lift her head and look around her, regardless of the freezing wind that howled around the gargantuan stone burial monuments.

She saw that all the great frescoes were faded, damaged by centuries of weather and darkness. Plaster flaked off the tombs and lay in shards on the paving stones. Her mare trod on a painted gold-eyed fragment: a lioness with the moon between her brows. It crunched like frost.

Under their faded, flaking covering, the exact and mechanical regularity of the pyramids remained, stretching out as far in every direction as she could see - and she could see ten or a dozen of them, silhouetted against the stars. Her neck hurt from looking up, and her steel collar dug into her flesh.

"Christus!" she whispered.

An owl hooted.

She jumped. The mare startled, not very wildly; and she leaned forward to put a calming hand on the beast's neck.

A pair of wings stretched out from a squire's arm, ahead. Two flat yellow eyes gleamed at her through the starlit dark. The squire raised his arm. The great owl lifted, silently, and swooped into the night.

"You're hawking with owls," Ash said, wonderingly. "You're hawking, with owls, in a graveyard."

"It's a Visigoth pastime." Fernando shrugged.

The group having halted, most of the guards were taking up stations in a rough circle between two of the immense sandstone pyramids. There was not room to gallop between them, Ash saw; even with a horse not twelve years old, overfed, and swaybacked into the bargain. She glanced back over her shoulder. Carthage was invisible, except for a white glow silhouetting a broken ridge, which she thought might be distant Greek Fire.

Clearly, we are waiting.

For someone? For something to happen?

The back of her neck p.r.i.c.kled.

White, soundless death swooped past her head - so close that the pinions flicked her scarred cheek.

An owl.

In sheer, inane relief, she asked the ba.n.a.l question: "What do they hunt out here?"

"Small game. Gully-rats. Poisonous snakes."

Hunting is always a good cover for a covert meeting.

So easy. A crossbow bolt out of the dark. You wouldn't even have to hit me. Just this horse. Where am I going, when I'm chained to it? She died in a riding accident, my lord.

"Do you think I'm just going to sit here and wait?"

Fernando s.h.i.+fted in his saddle. Something gave a coughing growl, far off among the pyramids. It sounded like a wild cat. Ash looked at Fernando's German riders; two or three of them gazed nervously off into the darkness, the rest were watching her.

s.h.i.+t! I have got to do something!

Fernando sat back in his saddle. "There's news about the French peace treaty. His Spider-Majesty Louis signed. France is now at peace with the Visigoth Empire."

Fernando's gelding mouthed at the mare's tack, lipping her. The mare ignored this. She nuzzled the flagstones for spindly, frost-burned tufts of gra.s.s.

"The war's going to be over. There's no one to fight now except Burgundy."

"And England, if they ever finish fighting their own civil wars. And the Sultan," Ash said absently, staring into the darkness, "when Mehmet and the Turkish empire decides you've worn yourself out fighting in Europe, and you're ripe to be picked."

"Woman, you're obsessed with war!"

"I-" She broke off.

What she had been watching in the distance materialised.

Not a troop of soldiers.

Two squires with satiated owls on their wrists, walking out from behind a corner of the pyramid, a dozen or more dead snakes spitted on a stick between them.

Her thumping heart slowed. She turned back in her saddle to face Fernando. Both she and the mare were chilling, stiffening up; and she nudged it into a walk, del Guiz riding beside her, gazing down at her with an expression of anxiety.

I can't just wait to be taken!

She demanded, "Do you really think Amir Gelimer doesn't want to kill me?"

Fernando ignored the question.

"Please," she said. "Please let me go. Before something happens here, before I get taken back - please."

His hair took gold from the torch-light, that brought a glow of colour from his green livery and the gilded pommel of his riding sword. She thought he might be wearing a plackart over mail, under his livery jacket.

"I've been wondering," he said, "why men follow you. Why men follow a woman."

With a certain grim humour, that can stave off fear for whole seconds at a time. Ash said, "Often they don't. Most places I've been, I've had to fight my own troops before I've fought the enemy!"

In the torchlight, his expression changes. When he looks down at her, from the saddle of the Visigoth war-horse, it is with an unconscious awareness of the breadth of his shoulders, filling out into adulthood now, and the hard muscles of a man who trains daily for edged-weapon warfare.

"You're a woman!" Fernando protested. "If I'd hit you, I'd have broken your jaw, or your neck. You're nothing like as strong as I am. How come you do what you do?"

It is true, if irrelevant at this moment, that she neither hit him with her full strength, or with a weapon, or with the knowledge of where the human body breaks. She could have blinded him. Wondering now at her reluctance - Jesu Christus, he's not going to let me go! - she listened to the night's noises for a full minute before she spoke.

"I don't have to be as strong as you. I only have to be strong enough."

He looked blankly at her. " 'Strong enough'?"

Ash looked up. "I don't have to be stronger than you are. I only have to be strong enough to kill you."

Fernando opened his mouth, and then shut it again.

"I'm strong enough to use a sword or an axe," she said, huddled into her cloak, listening. Nothing but the hunting calls of the owls. "That's just training, timing, balance. Not weight-lifting."

He blew into his hands, as if for warmth, and without looking at her, said, "I know why men follow you. You're only incidentally a woman. What you really are is a soldier."

Thrown back in her memory to the cell, to Gaiseric, Fravitta, Barbas, Theodoric; to violence that stops short of rape; to shed blood; she winces.

"And it's nothing to be proud of!"

The chains chafe her wrists. "It's what I need to be, to do what I do."

"Why do what you do?"

Ash smothered a laugh: it would have come out weary, and on the wrong side of hysteria. "You're not the person I'd expect to ask that! You're the one who's spent your whole life training to wear armour and use a sword. You're the knight. Why do what you do?"

"I'm not doing it any more."

What might have been adolescent in his tone was gone now. He made a quiet statement of fact. Distracted from listening for hoofbeats, she gazed at his Visigoth mail hauberk, the trained horse that he was riding, and the sword-belt at his side; and let him see her looking.

Fernando stated, "I'm not killing anyone."

Ash's mind made a mental note that any other knight's sentence would have finished 'anyone else', at the same time that her mouth opened and she said, without volition, "In a f.u.c.king pig's a.r.s.e! That hauberk a present from Leofric?"

"If I don't wear armour or a sword, no one in House Leofric listens to a word I say."

"Yeah, and what does that tell you?"

"That doesn't make it right!"

"Lots of things aren't the way they should be," Ash said grimly. "You ask my priest why men die of sickness, or famine, or act of G.o.d."

"We don't have to kill," Fernando said.

A horse snorted, close at hand. Her pulse jolted, before she realised that it was one of the escort's mounts.

"You're as crazy as she is! The Faris," Fernando said. "I was one of the officers with her before Auxonne, walking the ground. She kept walking around saying 'we can make that a killing-zone' or 'put the war-wagons there, I can guarantee you sixty per cent enemy casualties'. She's a f.u.c.king head-case."

Ash raised her silver brows. "In what way?"

She realised Fernando was staring at her.

"Doesn't it seem crazy to you to go around a perfectly good pasture and work out which bits of it you can use so that you can burn people's faces off, and chop through their leg-bones, and shoot rocks through their chests?"

"What do you want me to say, I lie awake nights worrying about it?"

"That would be good," he agreed. "But don't tell me; I wouldn't believe you."

Sudden anger sparked. "Yeah, well, I don't notice you going up to the King-Caliph and saying, hey, invading Christendom is wrong, why don't we all just be nice to each other? And I don't guess you said to House Leofric, no, I won't take the horse and the kit, thanks; I'm not going to be a warrior any more. Did you?"

"No," he muttered.

"Where's the hair-s.h.i.+rt, Fernando? Where's the monk's robes, instead of the armour? Exactly when do you plan to swear poverty and obedience, and go around the King-Caliph's n.o.bles telling them to lay down their arms? Your a.s.s would be hung up to dry!"

He said, "I'm too afraid to try."

"Then how can you tell me-"

He cut off her outraged protest: "Just because I can see what's right, that doesn't mean I can do it."

"Are you seriously telling me you don't intend to stand up and protest against this war, but you expect me to stop what I do for a living? Jesu Christus, Fernando!"

"I would think, from where you are, you'd know how I feel."

About to spit back some smart remark, Ash felt a chill in her belly that was not the bitter wind. She swallowed, dry-mouthed. At last, she said, "I'm on my own here. I don't have my guys with me."

Fernando del Guiz did not make a sarcastic or destructive comment; he only nodded, acknowledging what she said.

Ash said, "I'll strike a bargain with you. You free me, here, let me ride off into the desert, before anyone else gets here. And I'll tell you how you can legitimately have the marriage annulled. Then you're nothing to do with me any more, and everybody will know that."

She brought the mare around again, moving within the enclosing circle of troops. A wave of fear went through her. Who's already on their way here? Gelimer? Someone else? Someone I don't even know about? An owl shrieked, close by. Something rustled in the torch-lit darkness.

She heard Fernando say, "Why could I annul the marriage? Because you're a villein; slave-born?"