The quality of the light changed again.
We"re too late. He"s dying; the last breaths- Now, the wind blowing cold between the trees, all the high bare branches swayed, rubbing bark against bark, creaking and surging like the sea. The face of the chalk bluff glowed, as clouds do before a storm, when there is still some sunlight to gleam off their white ramparts.
"A moi!" she shouted.
Faintly, far off, a woman"s voice called, "Cy va!"
Hounds clamoured. Ash sat up and stared around, searching as far as she could see in any direction. No way to tell where the barking, yelping and belling came from. The gelding, reading her hesitation, lowered his teeth to a clump of gra.s.s at the foot of the bluff.
"Halloo!" Cords rasped in Ash"s throat. She swallowed, in pain, too scared to project her voice properly. "The Lion!"
"Here!"
The rip of the gelding tearing gra.s.s distracted her. She could not tell which direction the voice came from. Hesitant, she touched spurs to flank, and moved off down into the chine. The shifting perspective of tree-trunks as she rode hid any movement from her.
Above, a bird shrilled out a long call. Wings whirred. The gelding tossed his head.
"A Lion!"
Silence followed her shout.
The long slope ran down under beech trees to another stream. Briars overgrew the water. The gelding caught the scent. Ash let him drink, briefly. No hoof-marks dinted the banks, no footsteps, no muddied water from up-stream; nothing to show any man had ever pa.s.sed this way.
The air around Ash took on the quality that it has before rain: a luminous sepia darkness. By instinct, she crossed the streamlet and turned the gelding"s head uphill; riding towards the brightest light.
A silent whiteness floated between her and the turf-crowned bluff. The owl vanished almost as soon as she saw it. She leaned forward, urging the war-horse on up and around the rise.
Coming up on to the shoulder of the bluff, she could look behind her, and to the west, and ahead. A faint mist of grey-black twigs met her gaze, interrupted here and there by the solidity of holly and evergreens. Nothing but forest-top, nothing for leagues in every direction - and now, as she mounted the bluff, and could see over it to the east, nothing there either but trees: the ancient wildwood of Christendom.
No voices: no hounds.
Something white moved at the foot of the bluff, where it sloped down shallowly into the forest. Another owl? she thought. It was gone before she could be sure. Searching the line of trees, her eye caught a flash of another colour - straw-pale, gold - and she was spurring forward before she thought, reacting to what had to be a man"s or woman"s uncovered hair.
The air tingled.
Riding bareheaded, helmet gone, chilled in the cold east wind, and alone, she could have wept to see even Visigoth soldiers. The small open s.p.a.ce gave way to trees as she entered the wood again. She searched for the red-and-blue of Burgundian liveries, for the flash of light from a hunting horn; strained her ears to hear them blow the mote and rechase. Someone, somewhere, she thought, must be working the main pack. If they had a hart, they might have released the back relay of hounds, to bring it to bay.
The wind creaked in the branches.
"Haro!" she called.
Movement registered in the corner of her eye.
Liquid brown eyes looked into hers. The gelding snuffled. Ash froze.
Brown-gold animal eyes watched her, looking out of the lean face of a hart. Ivory-brown tines climbed the air above its brow - a hart of twelve, poised with one hoof raised, and its coat the colour of milk fresh from a cow"s teat.
Ash"s knuckles tightened. The gelding responded, rearing up, lifting both front hooves from the leaf-carpet. She swore, slapped his neck, and without her taking her eyes from the forest floor ahead of her, the white hart had gone.
"Haro!" she bawled, spurring forward. A spray of twigs lashed her, scratching pauldrons, breastplate, and her bare chin. A drop of blood stained her breastplate. Knowing only that the one hart in this whole forest must, if the hunters served the hounds right, bring the hunt down on it, Ash spurred hard through the trees - the ground open, the spoil-heaps of charcoal-burners scarring the earth - after the fleeing beast.
A screen of dark holly blocked her way. By the time she found a way around it, the hart was gone. She sat still in the saddle, listening intently; and could hear nothing; might - she thought in a sudden panic - be the last living soul in Burgundy.
A greyhound bayed. Ash"s head jerked round, in time to see a dog sprinting down what must be a cart-track from the charcoal-burners" camp; its pads kicking up dirt from the deep ruts. In a split second, it vanished down the track. The deep thump of hooves on mud sounded, where it went: Ash had one glimpse of a rider - hooded head down, riding neck-or-nothing - and six or seven more hounds, strung out in a long line, and a huntsman in a dagged hood, his curved horn to his mouth; and all the small group were gone.
"G.o.d d.a.m.n it!" She jabbed the gelding"s flanks and shot off down the cart-track.
There were no tracks.
Several minutes of casting up and down gave her nothing. She reined in and dismounted, leading the pale gelding, but nothing met her searching gaze except the hoof-marks of her own mount.
"They crossed this f.u.c.king path!" She glared at the gelding. It flickered long pale lashes, in disinterest and weariness. "Christ and all His Saints help me!"
A few hundred yards down the cart-track, the ruts became overgrown with brown gra.s.s. She led her horse, the noise of its hooves and the noise of her armour as she walked breaking the silence. Another hundred yards, and the track itself trailed off into bushes, briar, and fallen beech-limbs.
"Son of a b.i.t.c.h!"
Ash stood still. She looked around, listened again. An older fear churned in her stomach: the knowledge that this was an abandoned track, that the wildwood covers league upon league upon league of land, and that once in it, men have died both of hunger and thirst. She put the thought out of her mind.
"This isn"t wildwood. We"d be trying to climb over fallen trees if it was, wouldn"t we? Come on, you." She firmly patted the gelding"s nose. He dipped his head in weariness, as if he had been ridden far and hard; and she could not tell, trying to spot the direction of the sun, what time of the day it might now be.
White and gold moved in the forest.
She saw the hart plainly, against a green-black glossy holly tree. His smooth flanks and rump gleamed white. The tines of his horns rose up, sharp and forked; and he swung his head around as she looked, his nostrils twitching.
Wind from me to him, she realised; and then, Sweet Green Christ!
A gold crown encircled the hart"s neck.
She saw it clear in every detail: the metal pressing into the hart"s forequarters with its own weight, dinting the smooth-haired white coat.
One end of a broken golden chain dangled down from the crown. The last link tapped at the white hart"s breast.
Chapter Three.As if the leaves did not bear old spines grown hard, the white hart turned and sprang into the holly. The green closed behind it without trace.
Ash strode forward, gripping the reins, letting the gelding find its own footing behind her. In the minutes that it took her to climb over rough ground to the evergreen trees, she thought nothing, only stared in front of her with dumb disbelief.
At the holly, she reached out first to touch the spines - no blood - and then bent and scrutinised the ground. No droppings. A slot, that might have been a hind"s track; but only one, and nothing to be read from it. So smudged, in fact, that it might have been anything, a boar"s mark, even; or an old track from days ago.
She tried to push the holly branches aside.
"s.h.i.t!" She s.n.a.t.c.hed her hand back. A leaf-spine, penetrating the linen glove under her gauntlet, had drawn blood: it welled red into her palm as she watched.
Beyond the sh.e.l.l of green leaves, the black-brown branches intertwined to fill the s.p.a.ce there so tightly, it seemed no beast could get through.
She considered tethering the gelding, covering her face with her protected hands, and letting the armour guard her as she walked through the holly. Reluctant to be left on foot, she rejected the idea; and began to lead her horse on and around the great thicket of holly trees, on in a direction that might be west, but she could not now be sure.
That all food, all water, was gone with her company units presumably now somewhere towards the ford of the western river, was only a minor irritation.
Christ, I have to be there! They"ll go in, even if I don"t arrive. Thomas and Euen will see to that. But they won"t get far enough to kill the Faris. I know they won"t!
It was not pride but objective knowledge: her men would fight harder, and longer, if they had Ash there fighting with them; would take on trust her a.s.sessment of how necessary winning might be.
Undergrowth began to thin out. Blackened tree-stumps made her think that a fire might have blazed here, a generation ago: the forest became alders and ash trees, none of them much more than fifteen feet high. Areas of brown gra.s.s grew, clear of thorns.
The gelding plodded exhaustedly at her shoulder, picking his way with her over moss-encrusted rocks. A milky light shone down from the sky. Ash lifted her head, looking for any clue to direction. She blinked, furiously; looked away, and then up again, through the alders" gnarled bare twigs.
White dots scattered across the sky, close to the horizon. Too low to be seen properly, they tugged at Ash"s memory. She thought, Of course. Stars.
The constellations of autumn, pale against pallor, glimmered behind the noon sky.
Visible behind the weakening sun.
"Cristus vincit, Cristus regnit, Cristus imperad," she whispered.
The wood creaked around her.
The ground dropped away at her feet. She could see nothing down the slope, only the bare tops of trees: some darkly glossy and evergreen. The brown half-dead gra.s.s was slippery under her sabatons and boot-soles. She mounted up again, every muscle aching, and coaxed the gelding forward and down between the trees.
Red dots dappled the earth.
From the saddle, she could see that what covered the slope - what the gelding now trod under his hooves - were rose-briars. Pale green briars, soft and easily crushed. The scent of bruised vegetation filled her nostrils. And roses, red and pink petals coming loose in a shower of golden pollen, releasing their sweetness.
Some last, sheltered autumn blossoms, she thought, determinedly.
The ground flattened out as she rode towards tall rocks, jutting up between the trees. Moss covered the rocks, bright lime- and bottle-gla.s.s green. Very bright, as if the sun, faint everywhere else, shone on these rocks - but when she glanced up, she saw only the milky star-dotted sky. The gelding stopped abruptly.
A tiny stream ran away between gra.s.s-fringed banks. White and red flowers dotted the gra.s.s. The stream ran out from a dark still pool between the rocks. Its black surface rippled, as Ash watched, and she saw with no surprise that the white hart had its muzzle down, lapping at the water. The gold of its crown was so bright now that it hurt the eye.
A rough-coated greyhound trotted around the rocks from the far side.
The dog ignored the hart. Ash watched it sniff busily at the edge of the pool, in which the hart"s tines reflected perfectly. A second dog, its leash-mate, joined the greyhound. They cast about, with no great excitement, and then trotted back the way they had come.
Ash looked back from watching them vanish. She saw that the white hart no longer drank at the pool.
A cat with tufted ears watched her. Bigger than a lymer, as big as her mastiff b.i.t.c.h Brifault. Shiny pebble-black eyes stared into hers, un-beastlike; its black lips writhed back from sharp teeth, and it squalled.
"Chat-loup!"3 Left hand to scabbard, right to sword-grip; reins tucked under her thigh - and the cat turned and padded off across the flower-starred gra.s.s, vanishing behind the rocks.
She patted the gelding hard on his neck - unwilling to see any mount"s flanks ripped by claws, no matter how b.l.o.o.d.y-minded a ride - and dismounted. There were no deer slots, nor cat tracks, in the springy gra.s.s. The scent of wild roses filled her nostrils, dizzying her with the smell of long-gone summer.
"Deliver us, oh Lord-" she muttered aloud; managed not to say G.o.dfrey, help me, what do I do?
In the part of her that is shared, a growing tension is becoming triumph. Becoming distanced, interior, infinitesimal sound: "SOON! TO BE FREE OF YOU-"
"-DRAW DOWN THE SUN!-"
"-REACH HER: OUR CHOICE, OUR CHILD-"
"-DRAW ON OUR POWER . . ."
Even the voices of the Wild Machines are stifled, in her soul, to a faint and immaterial chatter.
A horn.
"Over here!"
Ash stood, head c.o.c.ked sideways, eyes all but shut. A voice, female, coming from - down the slope, under the alder trees?
The gelding"s soft white muzzle thumped into her breastplate, compressing steel and padding. She muttered, "Oof!" and grinned at the horse. The gelding"s ears p.r.i.c.ked up, and he stared down the slope.
"Okay ... if you say so." She sprang heavily up into the saddle, using a blackened tree stump as a mounting block. The saddle received her, creaking.
She turned the gelding and rode carefully down the hill, ducking alder branches with fresh green curlicues of leaves budding from their twigs. "Haro! A Lion!"
"A Lion yourself!" Floria del Guiz, still astride the rangy grey gelding, and with four hounds and two huntsmen behind her, rode up out of the denser wood. The woman in man"s dress rode with complete carelessness, bouncing in the saddle; Ash marvelled that she stayed on at all. "Did you see it? We lost the scent again!"
"Did I see what? I"ve seen a lot of things in this past hour," Ash said grimly. "Florian, I don"t trust half of them - roses in winter, white harts, gold crowns-"
"Oh, it"s a white hart, all right." Floria urged her mount forward from the conferring hunters. "We saw it. It"s albino. Like that pup that Brifault whelped in Milan." Her amused smile took on a note of scepticism. "Crowns? And you tell me to lay off the local wine!"
"Look, I"m telling you-" Ash began stubbornly.
"Cobnuts!" Floria said cheerfully. "It"s just a hart. We shouldn"t be hunting it out of season - but there you go."
The scent of roses fading in her nostrils, Ash hesitated, made as if to speak, and realised she did not know what she had intended to say. This hunt is not important, there are men I should be leading, men you know; look at the sun!
One look at Floria"s intent, lost expression dried the words in her throat. She could not even say, I am starting to listen to the Wild Machines, I can"t stop myself- "The hunt"s scattered over five leagues!" Floria pushed her hood back from her straw-coloured hair. Shrewd, she glanced at Ash. "If Thomas and Euen can"t find their way back to the Visigoth camp, that"s good. If they do find it, they"re dead."
"If they don"t find it, we"re all dead. I should have managed to stay with them!"
Ash hits fist to thigh in frustration, gauntlet sc.r.a.ping on cuisse; a woman with slave-short silver hair, in armour, astride a muddy pale horse. The gelding whickered in complaint. Ash gazed up through the winter-bare branches of alders, but the sky is too milky - overcast with clouds, or something else - for her to see the invisible sun.
One of the hunters, red-faced and fever-thin, bends down at the foot of the rocks; his s.h.a.ggy-coated greyhounds with their muzzles down at his side. A very faint baying echoes between the trees. There is the rich smell of horse manure, cast from the two standing beasts.
"There"s no way we can take out the Stone Golem," Ash said, "so we have to kill her. Sister or not, Florian. If Euen and Thomas aren"t putting an a.s.sault in right now, killing her, I think we"re finished."
For the first time, the surgeon"s attention seemed to shift from the hunt. Her eyes narrowed against the milky light. "What happens?"
Ash suddenly smiled: sardonic. "I"ve never been on the receiving end of a miracle before! I don"t know. If anyone knows what it was like when Gundobad did his stuff, they"ve been dead far too long to tell us about it!"
Floria chuckled. "s.h.i.t. And we thought you knew!"
Ash reached out, gripped the woman"s hand; slapped her lightly on the shoulder. The two geldings stood flank by flank. Ash saw how Floria"s mud-spattered face was, under leaf-mould and a sc.r.a.pe or two - obviously at least one fall - remarkably happy.
"Whatever"s going to happen, it"s . . . happening. Starting," Ash urged. "I can - feel it, I guess."