Ash: The Lost History Part 51

6 September-7 September ad 1476.

'Fraxinus me fecit'

Chapter One.

She missed the weight of her hair.

Never having cut it, she had not been aware before that it had a weight: all the hundreds of fine, silver, yard-long strands.

The winds grew colder as they sailed south.

This isn't right. This isn't what Angelotti used to tell me about, when he was under the Eternal Twilight; not this cold. It should be getting hotter- Momentarily, she doesn't see this s.h.i.+p: sees instead Angelotti, sitting with his back up against the carriage of an organ-gun outside Pisa; hears him say Women in thin, transparent silk robes - not that I care! - and roof-gardens where the heat is reflected in by mirrors; the rich grow vines; one long endless night of wine; and always fireflies. Hotter than this! And she had breathed the sultry, sweating Italian air, watched the blue-green dots of fireflies swell and die, and dreamed of the hot south.

Freezing spray hit her face.

She had not realised, before, how the weight of her hair was with her every day, in every movement, or how it had kept her warm. Now she felt lightheaded, cold about the neck, and bereft. The soldiers of the King-Caliph had left her no more hair than would cover her ears. The whole silver carpet of it had strewn the dock at - where? Genoa? Ma.r.s.eilles? - cut, and trodden into the mud as she was carried aboard, semi-conscious.

Ash flexed her left knee, secretly. A stab of pain went through the joint. She nipped her lip between her teeth, not crying out, and continued the exercise.

The prow of the boat dipped, thudding into the cold waves of the Mediterranean Sea. Salt crusted her lips, stiffened her cropped hair. Ash gripped the stern-rail, rocking with the motion, and stared back, north, away from the lands of the Caliph. A diminis.h.i.+ng wake of silver marked their pa.s.sage on the sea: the reflection of a crescent moon, cleft by their pa.s.sing.

Two sailors pushed past her, going to the heads. Ash s.h.i.+fted her body. Her left leg would almost support her full weight now.

What happened?

Her nails dug into the wood of the s.h.i.+p's rail.

What's happened - to Robert, and Geraint, and Angelotti? What's happened to Florian, and G.o.dfrey in Dijon? Is Dijon even standing? f.u.c.k, f.u.c.k, f.u.c.k!

Frustrated, she slammed her hand down on the grained wood. Wind whucked the sails above her head. Nausea threatened to overcome her again. I am tired of feeling sick every d.a.m.n day!

Stomach empty, light-headed since the wound to her head had been freshly broken open, she still knew from experience that - despite in the past breaking her ribs, her s.h.i.+nbone, and almost all the fingers on her left hand at one time or another - the most dangerous injury she ever had received had been the n.a.z.ir's tap with a mace to her knee. The most dangerous because the most likely to disable. Knee joints don't move that way.

Better, now, than it had been some days ago?

Yes, she concluded tentatively. Yes . . .

Ash turned her head, gazing down the well of the s.h.i.+p, past the rowers. The n.a.z.ir who had given the blow, one Theudibert, grinned back at her. A sharp word from the commander of the prisoners' escort squad, 'Arif Alderic, recalled him to his duties; which as far as she could see only involved Theudibert in seeing that she did not throw herself overboard, or get herself raped and killed by the s.h.i.+p's crew - 'raped' is probably permissible, she thought, 'killed' will get Theudibert into trouble - and otherwise entertain himself until the s.h.i.+p made landfall.

As well, the Visigoth soldier kept her away from the other prisoners aboard. Ash had barely got a word with one or two of them - four women and sixteen men, most of whom were Auxonne merchants by their dress, except for a man who was obviously a soldier, and two old women who looked like swine-herds or chaff-gatherers; no one who could be worth the cost of bringing across the Mediterranean, even as slave labour.

Carthage. It has to be Carthage.1 I never heard any voice. I don't know what you mean. I never heard any voice!

She glimpsed something ahead, between the lateen sail and the prow, but could not make out enough in the darkness to know if it were land or clouds again. Above, constellations still indicated they sailed south-east.

Ten days? No, fourteen, fifteen, maybe more. Christ, Green Christ, de profundis, what's happened since they took me? Who won the field?

A tread on the deck alerted her. She looked up. 'Arif-commander Alderic and one of his men approached, the man carrying a bowl of something viscous, white and gruel-like.

"Eat," the bearded dark Visigoth 'arif ordered. He appeared to be forty or so: a large man.

It had been five days after the battle before her raw, ragged voice came back, and she was able to whisper. Now she could speak normally, apart from her chattering teeth in the cold.

"Not until you tell me where we're bound. And what's happened to my troops."

It was no great effort to decide on a hunger strike, Ash thought, when it was impossible to keep food down. But I shall have to eat, or I'll be too weak to escape.

Alderic frowned, more in puzzlement than anger. "I was particularly instructed on that point, not to tell you. Come: eat."

She visualised herself through his eyes - a thin lanky woman with the broad shoulders of a swimmer.2 Cropped silver-fair hair: scalp still clotted b.l.o.o.d.y where her head had bled ten or fifteen days ago. A woman, but a woman in nothing more than a linen s.h.i.+rt and braies; s.h.i.+vering, dirty, and stinking; and red with lice- and flea-bites. Bandaged at the knee and shoulder. Easy to underestimate?

"Did you serve with the Faris?" Ash asked.

The 'arif took the bowl that his foot-soldier held, motioning the man away with a jerk of one hand. He remained silent. He held it out, with an expression of determination.

Ash took the wooden bowl and scooped up crushed-barley gruel in her filthy fingers. She took a mouthful, swallowed, and waited. Her stomach lurched, but kept it. She licked her fingers, revolted by the bland lack of taste. "Well?"

"Yes, I served with our Faris." 'Arif Alderic watched her eat. An expression of amus.e.m.e.nt crossed his face at the speed of it, now she was able to eat without throwing up. "In your lands, and in Iberia, these past six years, where she fought in the Reconquista - taking Iberia back from the Bretons and Navarrese."3 "She good?"

"Yes." Alderic's amus.e.m.e.nt deepened. "Praise G.o.d, and praise her Stone Golem, she is very good indeed."

"She win, at Auxonne?"

Alderic began to speak. Got him! she thought. But within a fraction of a second the commander recalled himself and shook his head.

"My instructions are strict. You are to be told nothing. It was no inconvenience, while you were ill. Now you have recovered, somewhat, I feel it . . ." 'Arif Alderic appeared to be searching for a word. "Discourteous."

"They want me softened up, before they talk to me. I'd do exactly the same thing."

Ash watched him carefully not ask her who they might be.

"Okay." She sighed. "I give up. You're not going to tell me anything. I can wait. How long before we dock at Carthage?"

The man's brows rose up, with perfect timing. The 'arif Alderic inclined his head, politely, and said nothing.

Her stomach churned. Ash, with deliberation, leaned out over the leeward rail, and threw up what she had just eaten. It was not policy. Dread and pity mixed in her gut, fearful that she might hear of Dijon fallen, Charles dead - but who cares about a b.l.o.o.d.y Duke of Burgundy? - and worse, the Lion Azure in the front line, rolled up, broken, burned, crushed; all the faces she knows cold and white and dead on the earth in some southern corner of the Duchy. She gagged, threw up nothing but bile, and leaned back, holding on to the rail to keep herself upright.

"Is your general dead?" she asked suddenly.

Alderic started. "The Faris? No."

"Then the Burgundians lost the field. Didn't they?" Ash fixed her gaze on him, stating speculation as certainty: "She wouldn't be alive if we'd won. It's two weeks, what can it matter if you tell me? What happened to my people?"

"I'm sorry." Alderic gripped her arm and lowered her down on to the deck, out of the way of sailors' running feet. The deck heaved up under her: she swallowed. Alderic gazed back at the steersman and the stern, where the s.h.i.+p's captain stood. Ash heard something called, but could not distinguish what.

"I am sorry," Alderic repeated. "I've commanded loyal men, I know how badly you need to hear news of yours. I am forbidden from telling you, on pain of my own death-"

"Well, f.u.c.k King-Caliph Theodoric!" Ash muttered to herself.

"-and in any case, I do not know." The 'arif Alderic looked down at her. She saw him note, by a glance, where the n.a.z.ir Theudibert was, and if he was in earshot or not. Not. "I don't know your liveries, nor what part of the field you fought, and in any case I was with my own men, keeping the road to the north clear of the reinforcements from Bruges."

"Reinforcements!"

"A force of some four thousand. My amir's cousin, Lord Sisnandus, defeated them; I think in the early hours before you joined battle at Auxonne. Now: enough. Sit there, be silent. n.a.z.ir!" Alderic straightened. As Corporal Theudibert ran up, Alderic ordered, "Keep your men with you, and guard this woman. Never mind the other prisoners. Don't let her escape while we dock."

"No, 'Arif!" Theudibert touched his hand to his heart.

Ash, hardly listening, found herself sitting on the deck that throbbed to the rowers' change of beat, surrounded by the legs of armed men in mail s.h.i.+rts and white robes.

Reinforcements! What else didn't Charles tell us? h.e.l.l, we're not mercenaries, we're mushrooms - kept in the dark and fed on horse-s.h.i.+t. . .

It was the kind of remark she could have made to Robert Anselm. Tears p.r.i.c.ked at her eyes.

Above, the night sky darkened, familiar stars fading with moon-set. She prayed, by habit and almost without realising it: By the Lion - let me see dawn, let the sun come up!

A settled blackness lay across the world.

The wind bit cold, sieving through her old linen s.h.i.+rt as if she wore nothing. Her teeth began to chatter. But Angeli told me how hot it is, under the Eternal Twilight! Voices shouted, lanterns were lit - a hundred iron lanterns, strung from every rail and all up the mast. Decked out with yellow flames, the s.h.i.+p sailed on; sailed until Ash heard muttering among the soldiers and scrambled to her feet, knee paining sharply, and stood, soldiers' hands gripping her arms, and saw, for the first time that she remembered, the coast of North Africa.

The last moonlight marked out the lifting swell. A black blob, darker than the sea and sky, must be land. Low. Headlands? The deck jerked under her as they tacked and came around on a different course. Hours? Minutes? She grew cold as ice in their imprisoning hands, and the indistinct land drew closer. She smelled the liminal odour of dying weed, scavenged corpses of fish and bird excrement that is the smell of coasts. The lift and fall of the deck lessened: wood rang and rattled as the sails came down, and more oars dug into the water. Spray hit her numb skin.

A congerie of lanterns shone across the waves - the sea calmer now: she thought Are we sheltered? Is there an isthmus? - and became an approaching s.h.i.+p. No - s.h.i.+ps.

Something in the first vessel's movement took her eye: a snaking, irregular motion. She clenched her arms across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, against the cold, and stared tear-eyed into the wind. The foreign s.h.i.+p beat up towards them, indistinct; was suddenly twenty yards away, clear in its lanterns and their own - a sharp-prowed, long, thin, curving vessel; sides slabbed with wood and some bright substance.

Not metal, too heavy.

It glinted with the exact colour of sunlight on the roofs of Dijon, and she thought suddenly Slate! Thin-split slate, as armour. Christus!

A single great tiller-oar rose at the p.o.o.p, s.h.i.+fting left and right. The s.h.i.+p snaked a serpentine course, the whole body of it moving in articulated segments; knifing through the black water, a vision in lamplight: gone into the dark. No sails, no oars: what had stood at the tiller, wrenching it with immense power, had been a golem- "Messenger s.h.i.+p," Alderic said, behind her. "Fast news."

She made to answer. Her teeth chattered too much; she gave it up.

Behind the articulated wooden vessel, a much larger s.h.i.+p thunked through the waves. Ash had a second to recognise it as one of the troops.h.i.+ps she had seen from the hills of Genoa, before it pa.s.sed on into the wet darkness. She was too low to see its deck; could only guess at the number of soldiers in the shallow-draught hold - five hundred? More? She had a brief glimpse of the curved sides towering above them, s.h.i.+ning wet with spray; saw the great blades of the wheel at the stern canted, dipped down into the troughs of the waves; and she saw the clay bodies of golems inside the paddle-wheel, their weight and strength forcing it to turn, to bite into the cold, deep water. It thunked away north-east, into the Mediterranean.4 And how many s.h.i.+ps like that have gone north?

The thought numbed her as much as the cold. Tranced, in the icy dark, she thought nothing more until the s.h.i.+p's motion altered. An hour past moon-set: it would be dawn. But not in this Twilight - least of all, here.

Still held prisoned by Theudibert's men, she looked up.

The starboard rowers rested.

The s.h.i.+p opened the harbour of Carthage.

A very similar pa.s.sage appears in 'Pseudo-G.o.dfrey'; indeed it may have been copied into this. If the author of 'Pseudo-G.o.dfrey' was a monk, then he would have access to preserved Cla.s.sical texts, which he has here conflated with the mediaeval myth of the Sea-Serpent to depict a mythical segmented 'swimming s.h.i.+p', and a 'paddle-wheel' powered vessel. Mediaeval authors are p.r.o.ne to this. We can a.s.sume Ash actually saw a double- or a triple-oared galley, rowed by Carthaginian slaves.

Bare masts thicketed the darkness, outlined against the thousand lights of the port buildings.

A thousand s.h.i.+ps rocked, moored at rest in the harbour. Triremes and quinqueremes; golem-powered troops.h.i.+ps loading men and stores; and European galleys, caravels, cogs, carracks. Deep-hulled merchant s.h.i.+ps bringing in bullocks and calves and cows, pomegranates and pigs, goats and grapes and grain: all the things that do not grow or thrive, under the Eternal Twilight.

Oars splashed gently in the black water. Their s.h.i.+p glided on between two stark high promontories covered with buildings, each hair-pin street outlined by rows of Greek Fire lights, gaudy and blazing and brilliant. Ash craned her head back, staring up at people on the bastions of the harbour: slaves running, men and women walking in loose, heavy woollen robes; and she heard a bell banging out for ma.s.s from a distant church, and still the walls went up- Nothing was raw rock. All of it was dressed masonry.

She saw the nearer stone dimly in the light from the s.h.i.+p's lanterns as they steered between half a dozen merchant s.h.i.+ps, the drum-beat of their rowers echoing across the water and off the heights. Dressed stone: rising up sheer to battlements, bastions, ravelins, the highest walls pockmarked with row upon row of dark holes: arrow-slits, and crenellations, and stations for gunners to fire their cannon.

Her neck ached. She swallowed, lowered her gaze from the sheer immensity. She smelled the salt sea, overlaid by the stench of the harbour: all kinds of rubbish bobbed on the black waters, between skittering tiny craft. Sellers of fruit, sweetmeats, wine and woollen blankets sculled to keep up with their hull. She noted dozens of cargo s.h.i.+ps, grain s.h.i.+ps, riding high in the water: holds empty. And the black figures of men on the docks stood out against burning bonfires, and braziers full of hot coals. Chill wind blew into her eyes, making them water. The tears froze on her cheeks.

The sweaty fingers on her arm gripped tight. She glanced rapidly at whoever held her, and met the n.a.z.ir Theudibert's bright-eyed, gloating expression. Theudibert slid his other hand up between her thighs. His rough nails snagged her skin and his fingers nipped shut, pinching tender internal flesh.

Ash winced, looked for Alderic, then felt her face burn red with the humiliation of making that appeal. She wanted to reach quickly behind her, grab Theudibert's wrist, bring his elbow cracking down backward over her knee - too many hands dug into the muscles of her arms, holding her: she could not move. His fingers stabbed up between painfully dry skin. She writhed.

He can't know - my belly's not thick. If anything, I'm thinner; I can't eat for being sick. Maybe if he rapes me that'll shake it loose, and I'll end up grateful to this mother-f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.d- "This ain't the harbour," Theudibert grated, "that's the harbour."

Ash stared ahead. It was all she could do. The rowers were taking them between a mult.i.tude of small boats and medium-size cogs and carracks. Now, ahead, four great lanes of black water opened up before them, crowded with s.h.i.+pping.

Stark masonry separated these junctions of the harbour. Surmounting them, up in the darkness - she moved her head, dazed - in turn a barracks, a fort, a windowless black building . . . and moored along the quay, great triremes and galleys and black-pennanted wars.h.i.+ps.

Thousands of people swarmed, everywhere she looked: raising sail on s.h.i.+ps, bringing donkey-carts steeply down to the quay ahead of them in the first opening, lighting more lanterns along the heights, calling, shouting, loading crates on to carracks. A dozen face-m.u.f.fled women stared down from pleasure grounds a hundred and fifty feet away up a sheer cliff.

If I scream for help, who'll come?

No one.

The scent of spices, dung, and something odd came to her; something that didn't fit- Ash wrenched her body. The armed men, taller and stronger, held her tightly; their warm, hard, armoured bodies jostling hers. She flinched, her bare feet among their boots. A pang of fear went through her, rising up from her belly to her throat. The muscles of her thighs and knees loosened. She swallowed, dry-mouthed.

It's real, now. All the while we were just on a s.h.i.+p, anything could happen, we could have been going somewhere else, I could have escaped, it wasn't real . . .

I would give anything now to have a weapon, and even a dozen men . . .

The sweating soldier who held her, his fingers wet with her body's wetness, wore mail and carried a sword strapped at his belt; more importantly, had eight mates with him, and a commander whose shout would bring a hundred troops from the docks and warehouses.

"Mouthy b.i.t.c.h not so mouthy now?" his voice whispered in her ear. His breath was sweet with rice gruel: her gorge rose.

The knowledge that rape and mutilation are not inconceivable, are possible and even likely, thumped in the pit of her pregnant belly. A cold, cold sensation ran through her. Her hands p.r.i.c.kled. She stared at the inexorably approaching dock.

Terror dried her mouth, tautened her body, strung her out to the highest pitch. Almost absently, she identified the odour that jarred her - the wind smelled almost peppery-cold. It stung her nostrils. In the Swiss mountains she would have thought it the scent of approaching snow.

A sudden eddy of wind across the harbour brought dampness.

Cold dots of sleet kissed her scarred face, and her bare legs under her s.h.i.+rt.

Oars backed and withdrawn, the sailors leaped to prow and stern and slung ropes, and quayside workers hauled them in. Wood grated against stone. The galley docked in a crackle of the ice forming at the foot of the stone quay, and strained hemp cables to a creaking halt.

The n.a.z.ir's fist hit her in the kidneys, pus.h.i.+ng her forward into the gaggle of the s.h.i.+p's other prisoners. Ash stumbled. She pitched forward and fell, unprepared, on the gangway, catching herself and grazing her hands on the stone steps that led up to the quay. The first flakes of true snow melted under her palms. A boot caught her in the ribs. She smelled her own vomit.