Ash: The Lost History
Chapter 53 : A different, tenor voice protested, "Lord Caliph, it was I who brought this news t

A different, tenor voice protested, "Lord Caliph, it was I who brought this news to you, not Amir Leofric, though he must have known it long since!"

"True. True. You will then stay, so that we may hear your wisdom on this subject. Where is the woman?"

Ash's gaze fixated on the plain weave of the carpet. Its fibres felt soft against her palm. She risked turning her head, to see if there was any way to the door; saw nothing but the mailed legs of guards. No friends, no allies, no way to run. She wanted to s.h.i.+t.

"Here," Leofric admitted.

"Get her up," the King-Caliph wheezed.

Ash, dragged to her feet, found herself stared at by two expensively dressed and extremely powerful men.

"This is a boy!"

n.a.z.ir Theudibert stepped out from the guard and grabbed the front of her linen s.h.i.+rt between his two hands, ripping it from neck to hem. He stepped back. Ash sucked in her belly and stood erect.

"It is a woman," Leofric murmured, respectfully.

The King-Caliph Theodoric nodded, once. "I have come to encourage her. n.a.z.ir Saris!"

A scuffle at the door, among the King-Caliph's personal guard, made Ash turn her head. A sword slid from its wood-lined sheath. At that sound she jerked instantly back, even in Alderic's grip.

Two of the Caliph's soldiers dragged in the fat male prisoner.

"No! No, I can pay! I can pay!" The young man's eyes went wide. He yelled randomly in French, Italian and Schweizerdeutsch. "My Guild will pay a ransom! Please!"

One of the soldiers tripped him up, the other yanked up his stained blue robes.

Light flashed from the flat of the sword as the soldier lifted it, and chopped precisely down. Blood spurted.

"Oh, Christ! Ash exclaimed.

The room stank suddenly as the fat man's bowels relaxed. His white, bare legs streamed with blood. He lifted himself up on to his elbows, scrabbling forward, screeching and sobbing, face blubbered with tears. His legs dragged after him like two slabs of butcher's meat.

The twin slashes across the backs of his knees that hamstrung him, bled freely on the stone tiles.

An asthmatic voice said, "Talk to my councillor Leofric."

Ash forced herself to look away, to look at the man who had spoken - to look at the King-Caliph.

"Talk to my councillor Leofric," Theodoric repeated. In the lamplight, his stretched skin appeared yellow, his eye-sockets two black holes. "Tell him all your heart and all your mind. Now. I don't want you to be in any doubt of what we can and will do to you if you refuse even once."

The man on the floor bled and screamed and thrashed only his upper torso as the soldiers pulled him out of the room. The stone eyes of saints impa.s.sively watched him go.

"You did that just to show me-?"

Appalled and incredulous, Ash shouted at battlefield volume.

Dizziness sunk down through her body, her hands and feet felt hot; she knew she would faint, in a second, and bent over to grip her thighs and inhale deeply.

I've seen worse, done worse, but to just do it so casually, for no reason- It was the speed of it, and the absolute non-existence of any appeal, that appalled her the most. And the irrevocable damage. A flush coloured her scarred face. She yelled, in camp patois, "You just ruined that poor f.u.c.k's life to make a point?"

The King-Caliph did not look at her. His abbot was saying something quietly, into his ear, and he nodded, once. Slaves sluiced down the tiles and retired. The floral scent from the oil-burners did not conceal the copper smell of blood and the stink of faeces.

Alderic stepped away from her. Two of the Caliph's soldiers, the same two, took her wrists, locking her elbow and shoulder joints to hold her immobile.

"Kill her now," the amir Gelimer said. Ash saw Gelimer was a dark man, in his thirties; with a plain, small-eyed face and a braided dark beard. "If she is a danger to our crusade in the north, or even if she is only a very little danger, you should kill her, my lord Caliph."

The amir Leofric said hastily, "But no! How will we know what's happened? This must be examined!"

"She is a northern peasant," the King-Caliph wheezed dismissively. "Leofric, why waste your time with this? The best that can come out of it is another general, and I have one of those. Will she tell you why this cold? Why this h.e.l.lish, devilish cold here, since your slave-general went overseas? The further north we conquer in crusade, the harder it bites us here - I truly do wonder, now, what G.o.d would have us do! Was this war not His will, after all? Leofric, have you d.a.m.ned me?"

The Arian abbot said cheerfully, "Sire, the Penance is a northern heresy. G.o.d has always favoured us with this darkness that - while it keeps us from tilling soil or growing corn - nevertheless drives us out to conquer lands for Him. It makes us men of war, not farmers or herdsmen, thus it makes us n.o.ble. It is His whip, chastising us to do His will."

"It is cold, Abbot m.u.t.h.ari." The King-Caliph cut him off with a motion of his hand. The lantern light showed dark spots mottling his white fingers. Theodoric closed his fragile-lidded eyes.

"Sire," Gelimer murmured, "before you do anything else, Sire, take off her sword hand. A woman familiar with the Devil, as this one is, shouldn't be allowed to continue as a warrior, no matter how short a time you let her live after this."

The voice, and the apprehension of the image in her mind - two white circles of chopped bone in red spurting flesh - came instantaneously. Ash swallowed bile. Nausea and la.s.situde swept through her like the tide.

A small pointy furry face stared down at Ash from Amir Leofric's shoulder. Black eyes surveyed her. A spray of whiskers twitched. As Leofric bent down to speak to her, the rat s.h.i.+fted its pink-toed feet, and settled back to groom one pale blue flank - neither wet, nor dirty, nor infested with fleas.

"Give me something, As.h.!.+" the Visigoth amir Leofric pleaded in an undertone. "My daughter tells me you're a woman of great value, but I have only hope, not proof. Give me something I can use to keep you alive. Theodoric knows he's dying and he's become very careless of other people's lives these last few weeks."

"Like what?" Ash gulped, tried to see through tear-wet eyes. "The world's over-full of mercenaries, my lord. Even good, valuable ones."

"I cannot disobey the King-Caliph! Give me a reason why you shouldn't be executed! Hurry!"

Ash watched in fascination as the blue rat twitched its whiskers and washed behind its ears with delicate pink paws. She s.h.i.+fted her gaze six inches, to Leofric's imploring expression.

Either this will mean I'll be released. Or it'll mean I'll be killed, probably quickly. Quickly is better; sweet Christ I know it's better, I've seen everything you can do to the human body, this is just children playing rose-in-a-ring! I don't want them to start on what professionals do.

She heard her own voice, thin in the cold stone-walled room: "Okay, okay, I do hear a voice, when I'm fighting, I always have, it's the same as your - daughter - hears, it might be, I'm obviously blood-kin to her, I'm just a discard from your experiment, but I do hear it!"

Leofric thrust his fingers through his hair, spiking up his white curls. His intense eyes narrowed. She realised that the amir was regarding her with an expression of scepticism.

After all this, he doesn't believe me?

She whispered, hard and urgent, " You have to believe I'm telling you the truth!"

Sweating, shaking, she remained staring into his blue eyes for a long minute.

The amir Leofric turned away.

If a hand had not caught her around her body, she would have fallen: the n.a.z.ir Theudibert supported her across her bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s with a wiry, hard-muscled forearm. She felt him laugh.

Leofric said, "She hears the Stone Golem, sire."

The amir Gelimer snorted. "And so would you claim that, now, in her place!"

The King-Caliph's mouth had whitened, and his attention wandered from the conversation to the abbot at his side; Ash saw his eyes snap back to Leofric at Gelimer's comment.

"Of course she says it," the King-Caliph Theodoric remarked, scornfully, "Leofric, you are trying to save yourself with some fable of another slave-general!"

"I hear tactics - I hear the Stone Golem," Ash said aloud, in Carthaginian Latin.

Gelimer protested. "You see? She had no knowledge of what it was called until you named it!"

The n.a.z.ir's arm pinned her. Ash opened her mouth to speak again, and Theudibert's free hand clamped over it, digging fingers hard into the hinges of her jaw so that she could not bite him.

The amir Leofric bowed very low, his rats scurrying for refuge into his robes, and raised himself up again to look at the dying King-Caliph.

"Sire. What the amir Gelimer says may be true. She may be saying this only for fear of pain or injury."

Leofric's pale faded eyes became bleak.

"There is a way to decide this. With your permission, now, Sire -I shall have her tortured, until it becomes clear whether or not she is speaking the truth."

Chapter Three.One of Theudibert's mates said something in Carthaginian which Ash heard as, "Let's have a bit of fun with her. You heard the old boy. It doesn't matter so long as she don't end up dead."

It might have been a blond one, or his comrade; Ash couldn't tell. Eight men - nine, with their n.a.z.ir - all very familiar, despite their light horse-mail and curved swords kit. They could have been any men in Charles's army, or Frederick's, or the Lion Azure if it came to it and where am I being taken? she asked herself, her bare feet bruising on stone steps, staggering, pushed down -down?

Down spiral steps, into rooms below surface-level. Is the whole hill above Carthage harbour riddled with cellars? she wondered. And the obvious thought appeared in her mind: How many go in who never come out again?

Some. It only has to be 'some'.

What does he mean, torture? He can't mean torture. He can't.

The n.a.z.ir Theudibert spoke with a grin in his voice. "Yeah, why not? But you never saw it. Nothing happened to his prize b.i.t.c.h. You never saw nothing, right?"

Eight other excited voices mumbled agreement.

Their sweat stank on the air. Even as they bundled her out of the staircase, into lantern-lit corridors, she smelled their violent high spirits, their growing tension. Men in a group, egging each other on: nothing they would not do.

She thought, as their fists pushed her on: I can fight them, I can gouge out an eye, I can break a finger or an arm, rupture somebody's t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, and then what? Then they break my thumbs and s.h.i.+ns and they rape me forward and backward, c.u.n.t and a.r.s.e- "Cow!" A fair-haired man grabbed her bare breast and squeezed his fingers closed with all his force. Ash's b.r.e.a.s.t.s were already tender, had been every day on s.h.i.+p; she involuntarily screamed and lashed out, catching him in the throat. Six or seven pairs of hands manhandled her, a backhanded blow cracked across her face and spun her round and dashed her against the wall of a cell.

The crack to her head shattered her with pain. She felt baked clay tiles under her knees. A man coughed thickly; spat on her. A soft leather boot, with a man's hard foot in it, kicked her violently three finger's width below her navel.

Her lungs seized.

She gasped, scrabbling meaninglessly with her hands; found herself sc.r.a.ping a breath down her throat, felt cold clay tiles under left leg, hip, ribs and shoulder. Stinking linen tugged, caught around her neck, and ripped, as someone bending down tore her previously shredded s.h.i.+rt off over her head. Her braies were gone. Naked to their gaze.

Ash got half a spare breath, snarled, "f.u.c.k you!" in a voice pitifully high.

Four or five male voices laughed above her. They kicked teasingly with their boots, laughed each time she shrank away from the pain.

"Go on, do her. Do her! Barbas, you first."

"Not me, man. I ain't touching her. b.i.t.c.h got a disease. All them b.i.t.c.hes from up north, they got disease."

"Oh, f.u.c.king baby, wants his mamma's t.i.t, don't want a woman! You want me to tie up the dangerous warrior-woman? You 'fraid to touch her?"

A scuffle, over her. Booted feet stamped down dangerously close to her head, on the cell's tiled floor. She saw red clay, reddened by the single lamp's light; dirty hems of robes, very finely riveted mail skirts, leather greaves tied on s.h.i.+ns, and - as she rolled over on to her front and lifted her head - men's faces in snapshot details: a wild brown eye, an unshaven cheek, a hairy wrist wiped across a mouth full of bright, regular teeth; a snake-scar trailing white down a thigh, a robe hitched up, the bulge under clothing of a c.o.c.k growing hard.

"f.u.c.king do her! Gaina! Fravitta! What you f.u.c.king standing there for, ain't you seen a woman before?"

"Let Gaiseric go first!"

"Yeah, let the baby do it!"

"Get your c.o.c.k out, boy. That it? She ain't going to even feel that!"

Their deep voices resonated between small walls. She is ten years old again, sees men as infinitely heavier, stronger, muscled; but eight men are not just stronger than one woman, they are stronger than one man. They are stronger than one. Ash felt hot tears squeezing over her shut lids. She got to her hands and knees, shouting at them: "I'm going to take some of you with me, I am going to mark you, maim you, mark you for life-!"

Saliva dripped out of her mouth, damp-spotting the baked tiles. She saw every crack at the edges of the squares where the clay crumbled, every black spidering mark of ingrained dirt. Her head and stomach throbbed, half blinding her with pain. A hot flush ran over her bare body. "I'll f.u.c.king kill you, I'll f.u.c.king kill you."

Theudibert bent down to scream into her face. His saliva sprayed her as he laughed. "Who's a f.u.c.king warrior-woman now? Girl? You gonna fight us, are you?"

"Oh yeah, I'm going to try and take on eight men when I don't even have a sword, never mind any mates."

Ash was not aware, for a second, that she had spoken aloud. Or in such a tone of adult, composed contempt - as if it were completely obvious.

Theudibert's eyes narrowed. His grin faded. The n.a.z.ir remained bending over, hands splayed on his mail-covered thighs. His frown indicated confusion. Ash froze.

"Like, I'm going to be stupid" she whispered scornfully, hardly daring to breathe in the moment of stillness. She stared up at faces: men in their twenties who would be Barbas, Gaina, Fravitta, Gaiseric, but she could not know which was which. Her stomach wrenched with pain. She sat back up on her heels, ignoring a hot trickle of urine down her inner thighs as she p.i.s.sed herself.

"There aren't any 'warriors' on a battlefield." Her scornful voice ran on, trembling, in rough Carthaginian, and she let it: "There's you and your buddy, and you and your mates, and you and your boss. A lance. The smallest unit on the field is eight or ten men. n.o.body's a hero on their own. One man alone out there is dead meat. I'm no f.u.c.king volunteer hero!"

It was the sort of thing she might have said every day, nothing especially perceptive.

She looked up in the yellow light at swinging shadows on the walls, and the rose-tinged faces staring down at her. Two men s.h.i.+fted back on their heels, a younger one - Gaiseric? - whispering to a mate.

But it's the sort of thing they might say.

And no civilian would.

Not man versus woman. Military versus civilian. We're on the same side. Come on, see it, you must see it, I'm not a woman, I'm one of you!

Ash had sense enough to rest her palms flat on her bare thighs and kneel there in complete silence. She appeared as unaware of her bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s and bruised belly as if she were back in the wooden baths with the baggage train.

Sweat poured unnoticed down her face. Salt blood from her cheek ran over her split lip. A rangy woman, with wide shoulders, and hair cropped boy-short, head-wound short, nun-short.

"f.u.c.k," Theudibert said. His thick voice sounded resentful. "f.u.c.king cowardly b.i.t.c.h."

A sardonic voice came from one of the eight men; a fair-haired man standing towards the back. "What's she gonna do, n.a.z.ir, take us all out?"

Ash felt a definable cooling to the emotional temperature in the cell. She s.h.i.+vered: all the fine hairs on her body standing upright. They're on duty. They could have been drunk.