"s.h.i.t!" Her voice came out a dry, high whimper.
No escape from the truth now. I do hear a voice. And I did hear her voice. The same voice. They don"t know it, but they"re right. This isn"t a mistake. I am the person they want.
And what happens to me, now that they"re going to find that out?
Chapter Two.All the way up the steep, narrow, ruler-straight streets from the dock, marching up steps between iron-shuttered buildings lit by steel-and-gla.s.s cages of Greek Fire,5 the Visigoth soldiers still kept her away from the other prisoners.
She had no time to look at the city. She stumbled, bare feet sc.r.a.ping on cobbles, aware of hands gripping her under the armpits. Guards" polearms clashed as they came up to a thick stone arch - a gateway, that pierced an encircling wall stretching away around the hill as far as lights could show her. The wall was too high for anything to be visible beyond it.
The other prisoners from the ship were herded on past, into the body of the city, away from the gate into the citadel.
"What?" Ash turned her head, stumbling. The "arif Alderic called something. Two of the soldiers dragged back an old woman, a young fat man, and an older man. Soldiers closed around them.
The arched gateway tunnelled through a defensive wall a good twenty yards thick. She lost her footing in the dark. Theudibert dragged her up with a satisfied obscenity. She flinched back from another wall - no lights, here. A freezing wind blew in her face. She realised she was no longer in the gateway, but in a narrower pa.s.sage.
None of the buildings to either side had any windows.
Four of Alderic"s men lit ordinary pierced-iron lanterns, carrying them high. Shadows now stalked and jerked in the narrow pa.s.sageway. A street? An alley? Ash squinted up. The last stars, fading into darkness, let her know this was still outdoors. A sharp fist in the back prodded her onwards.
They pa.s.sed a black door, barred with seven thick sections of iron. Thirty yards down the street, another door. None of the buildings were built of wood, or wattle and daub: all were windowless stone. Then they turned a corner, turned again, and again; winding through a maze of dark alleys, a pitiless black day dark above their heads.
Ash hugged her arms around her body as she hobbled on. Clad in thin linen, she would have shivered anyway, but this present cold bit at her hard-soled feet on the cobbles, whitened her fingers, and made her breath steam on the air.
The soldiers of the King-Caliph likewise shivered.
Four of the soldiers ran to unbar a door in a featureless wall. Big enough to be a sally-port, she thought. The n.a.z.ir thrust her through it, into darkness. She banged her injured knee, and screamed aloud. Iron lanterns danced in her dazzled sight, hands shifted her, shoulders and arms banged against her body, hustling her inside, along a long dark pa.s.sage.
A withered, tiny hand crept into hers.
Ash looked down, and saw that the old woman prisoner had taken her hand. The woman looked up at her. Shifting shadows, and lines and creases, disguised her expression. Her hand felt like cold chicken-bones. Ash tucked the woman"s hand under hers, pressing it to her linen-covered body for warmth.
The old woman"s hand slid down over her belly. The soft voice wailed in French, "I thought so, on the ship. You don"t show, but you"re with child, my heart. I could midwife you - Oh, what will they do to us? "
"Shut up!"
"What do they want us for?"
Ash felt and heard a mailed fist hit flesh. The woman"s hand went limp and slid out of hers. She made a grab; but the soldiers surrounded her, pushing her on, and she stumbled with them out into a great courtyard.
Back entrance, she surmised, and It"s a manor house! The courtyard was much longer than it was wide, surrounded on all sides by stone-barred windows and arched doorways. The building surrounding this interior courtyard on all four sides went up at least three storeys. Greek Fire lanterns dazzled: she could not see the sky.
The long courtyard was packed full with people. Some house-guards, by their swords. One or two better-dressed. Most of them were men and women of all adult ages, in plain tunics, with iron collars around their necks. Ash gaped at the running slaves, belly cold with familiarity.
Almost all, despite their different faces, had a family resemblance. Almost all had, in the fizzing white light, ash-pale hair.
She looked around for the old woman, missed her in the crowd, and tripped. She landed, hands and knees, on black and white tiles. She groaned, wrapping both hands around her knee. It felt swollen and hot again. Her eyes teared.
Through water, she saw Alderic step forward with the ship"s captain, the two of them speak to a group of house-guards and slaves; and she rolled over and got up. She and the male prisoners were pushed into a huddle. A fountain plashed into its bowl, a few yards away. In the heart of the falling jets, a mechanical phoenix sang.
A sh gripped the hem of her shirt in her two hands, pulling it down over her thighs. Cold sweat ran down between her shoulder-blades. She found herself mouthing, Oh Christ, help me, help me keep my baby! and stopped, her face stark. But I don"t want it, don"t want to die in childbirth- When you think you have reached the end of fear, there is always somewhere to go. She knotted her hands into fists to prevent it being seen that they were shaking. Sentimental pictures of a son or daughter would not stay in her mind, confronted with this too-bright courtyard full of men talking in the Gothic dialect they called Carthaginian, far too fast for her to understand. Only the vulnerability of her hardly noticeable belly remained, and the absolute necessity - and impossibility - of secrecy.
"Poor girl, poor heart." The old peasant woman hung in a soldier"s grip, bleeding. The two male prisoners stood with her, their very different faces frozen in identical expectations of fear.
"Come with me." The "arif Alderic was at her side, pulling her onward.
Ash shivered, cold deep in her gut. From somewhere she dragged up a grin, showing all her teeth. "What"s the matter, you decided I"m the one you don"t want? Hey, I could have told you that at Dijon! Or maybe this is where you tell me you want a contract with my company? Consider me softened up, you"ll probably get a good deal!"
She could tell she stunk from the expressions of the guards near her, and the more distant glances of the one or two men who might be King-Caliph Theodoric"s freeborn subjects, but her own nose was insensible of it. She limped with Alderic on the cold tiles. Her mouth ran on: "I always thought it was warm enough, in the Eternal Twilight. This is f.u.c.king freezing! What"s the matter, the Penance getting too heavy for you? Maybe G.o.d"s p.i.s.sed off with waiting for the Empty Chair to be filled. Maybe it"s a portent."
"Be quiet."
Fear makes one voluble. Ash cut herself off.
Doors opened off the narrow pa.s.sage. Alderic opened one, bowed, said something, and pushed her through in front of him. Her eyes were dazzled by more light.
Ash heard the door slam to behind her.
A thick voice said, "Is it her?"
"Perhaps." Another, drier voice.
Ash blinked her vision clear of dazzles. The dado of the room was lined with pipes and gla.s.s-covered lamps, hissing with Greek Fire. Oil burners stood in the room"s corners, and their sweet scent both cleared her head and took her back with startling immediacy to being in a tent, in the field, some year in Italy, with Visigoth mercenaries.
No tent, this. The floor under her feet was tiled red and black, old enough that her bare feet felt every worn dip in it. Mosaic tiles winked back at her in the light of twenty lamps.
The walls glittered, covered in quarter-inch square colours from floor to vaulted ceiling. The images of saints and icons glared down: Catherine, with her wheel, Sebastian with his arrows, Mercurius with his surgeon"s knife and thief s cut purse, George and dragon. Gold robes and liquid dark eyes stared down at her.
Shadows lost themselves in the ribbed ceiling. Under the pungent controlled jets of Greek Fire she detected a smell of earth. The entire wall at the back of the room was one huge mosaic of the Bull and the Tree, Christ watching her from where He hung, Saint Herlaine at his leaf-pierced feet, Saint Tanitta6 observing.
It was oppressive enough that she missed what was next said, only managing to concentrate again as the echoes of voices died in the cold, cold room. She looked towards the room"s heavy, polished, square-cut settle and tables. Two men confronted her. A thin, white-robed man of about fifty, in the dress of an amir, watched her with lined eyes. Crouched by the foot of his chair, a man with the pasty fat face of an idiot watched her and dribbled.
"Go." The amir gently touched the r.e.t.a.r.ded man"s arm. "Go and eat. You may hear later what we say. Go, Ataulf. Go. Go . . ."
The idiot, who might have been anything between twenty and sixty, pa.s.sed her with a glance from slant bright eyes, under thick fair brows and thinning hair. His wide-lipped mouth dribbled wetly.
Ash took a step aside as he went out, using it as an excuse to look back. No windows opened into this room. There was only the one double door. The "arif Alderic stood in front of it.
"Have you eaten?" the amir asked.
Ash looked at the fair-bearded man. She could distinguish some slight physical resemblance to the r.e.t.a.r.d, but his intelligence shone out of his lined face.
Knowing where his kindness came from - that it was an effort to break her by contrast - she nonetheless answered meekly in her best Carthaginian Latin, "No, Lord-Amir."
""Arif, have food brought." He pointed to a second carved chair, lower, that stood beside his own; as Alderic leaned back out of the doors to give orders. "I am the amir Leofric. You are in my house."
That"s right. That"s the name. She mentioned you.
You"re her not-quite father.
"Sit down."
Her feet became warmer the instant she stepped on to the carpets that covered the brick-red tiles. An ash-blond man entered and moved past her, placing a shallow ceramic dish of hot food on a low table, and retreating out of the room without a word. He was about Ash"s own age, she judged; he had a metal collar around his throat, and neither Alderic nor the lord-amir Leofric took any more notice of him than they did of the lamps. A slave.
She hid the fear chilling her stomach by walking on across the carpet and sitting herself on the low oak chair. It was padded, with a back that came round under her elbows; she was at a loss, for some moments, as to how you sat in it. Amir Leofric appeared to be ignoring any likely infestations from this flea-bitten prisoner: he regarded her with a concerned, inquisitive expression.
The food - two or three objects that were yellow, soft and purse-shaped -steamed in the chill air. Ash scooped up one in her bare dirty fingers, bit into warm, brittle pastry, tasted potatoes, fish and saffron.
"s.h.i.t!" She s...o...b..red the better part of a raw egg out of the pastry purse, down her wrists and forearms. In one rapid movement she licked yolk and white off, licked her skin clean. "Now, sir-"
She looked up, intent on taking a verbal initiative, and broke off, springing to her feet, careless of the stained shirt barely covering her legs.
"Oh, Christ, it"s a rat!" She threw out an arm, pointing at the amir"s lap. "It"s a plague rat!"7 "My dear, nothing of the sort." The Visigoth amir had a surprisingly pleasant smile, much younger than his lined face; teeth gleaming white in his grey-blond beard. He bent his head and chirruped encouragingly.
A pointed furry face emerged from the folds of his white, gold-trimmed velvet robes, pink nose first. Tiny pupil-less black eyes fixed on Ash as the animal froze. Ash stared back, startled at the eye-contact. The animal"s fur shone pure white in the softening lamplight.
Encouraged by stillness it glided out on to Leofric"s thigh, picking its way carefully over his robe. High haunches were followed by a sleek bald tail. Its body alone was ten inches long. It had (she saw in frozen horror as it emerged) a bare scaly tail. And b.a.l.l.s the size of walnuts.
"That"s not a rat? Get out of here!"
At her voice the rodent froze, back curving into lordosis. Rats are black, are mice writ large. This, she saw with all the clarity of fear deferred, was broad at the rump, narrow in the fore-quarters. The muzzle seemed blunter than a mouse"s. It had small ears, for the size of its broad head.
"A different breed of rat. My family brought them back from a voyage to the Middle Kingdom."8 The amir Leofric murmured quietly. He put one weathered finger down and scratched the rodent behind its ear. The animal stood up on its hind legs, sniffing with a quivering spray of whiskers, and staring into the man"s face. "He is a rat, my dear, but a different kind."
"Rats are the Devil"s lap-dogs!" Ash moved back two steps on the carpet. "They eat half your stores, all if you don"t have a pack of terriers; Jesu, the trouble I"ve had-! Filthy, dirty- And they give you plague!"9 "Perhaps once." Again, the Visigoth amir chirruped. It was a surprisingly silly sound to come from an adult man, and Ash thought she heard the "arif Alderic snort quietly from the doorway. Leofric"s robe moved.
"Who"s my sweetheart, then. . . ?" he whispered.
Two more rats came out on to his shoulders. One was yellow, marked with a sepia brown at the haunches, toes, and muzzle; the other, Ash would have sworn if the light had been better, was a pale enough slate-grey to appear blue. Two more sets of bead-black eyes fixed on her.
"Perhaps once," Leofric repeated. "A thousand rat-generations ago. They breed much faster than we do. I have records going back through the decades to when these were plain brown - not half so pretty as you, my dear," he added to one of the beasts. "These have known no disease for a century or more. I have many varieties. Rats of every colour and size. You must see them."
Ash stared, frozen, as one of the rats reached its furry snake-head up and bit the Visigoth amir"s ear. A rat-bite will bring fever, sometimes death; even if not that, then pain like a needle stabbing flesh. She winced in sympathy. Leofric didn"t move.
The blue rat, delicate paws holding the unblemished lobe of the man"s ear, continued to lick it with a tiny pink tongue. She nuzzled a little in his beard, and then dropped down to all fours, and wriggled instantaneously out of sight in his robes.
"They"re your familiars!" Ash exclaimed, revolted.
"They are my hobby." The amir Leofric switched to talk in French, with a slight accent. "Do you understand me, my dear? I want to be sure than you understand what I say, and that I understand anything you may tell me."
"I don"t have anything to say."
They remained staring at each other for a moment, in the lamplit room. The same slave entered and tended to one lamp, pouring in a different oil. A flower scent gradually imposed itself on the room"s air. Ash glanced over her shoulder at Alderic"s bulk blocking the doorway.
"What do you expect me to say, Lord-Amir?" she asked. "Yes, I"m some relation to your general. Obviously. She says you bred her from slaves. I can see that you did. Too many people here look like me . . . Does it matter? I"ve got five hundred men I can answer for, and despite what she did at Basle, I"m willing to negotiate another contract. What else can I say?"
Ash managed to end with a shrug, despite standing dressed in nothing but filthy shirt and braies, her hair cropped and stinking, itching with bites.
"Sweetheart," Leofric breathed. To the pale blue rat, Ash realised. The Visigoth lord bent his head and the rat now on his knee stood up on its hind feet, stretching up slimly. They were briefly nose-to-nose, then it dropped back to all fours. He cupped his hand and stroked the rodent"s arched back. It turned its head and licked his fingers with a clean pink tongue. "Touch her, gently. She won"t hurt you."
Anything to put off more questions, Ash thought grimly, and walked back across the carpet to Leofric"s chair, and reached out an extremely reluctant finger. She touched surprisingly soft, surprisingly dry, warm fur.
The beast moved.
She gasped. Tiny claws fixed into her forefinger - she froze, feeling how light the grip was.
The pale blue female rat sniffed delicately at Ash"s bitten, dirty nails. She began to lick Ash, sat back, sneezed twice - a tiny, absurd sound in the huge mosaic-walled chamber - and sat up on her haunches, rubbing paws over her muzzle and whiskers, for all the world as if she were cleaning away shipboard filth.
"She"s washing her face like a Christian!" Ash exclaimed. She left her hand outstretched, hopeful of the rat investigating it further; and with a sudden jolt of fear to her belly, realised that she was standing so close to the seated amir that she smelled his perfume and the underlying odour of male sweat.
Leofric stroked his rat. "My dear, it can take many years to breed a variety. Sometimes the right colour will come, and then faults come bound up with it: r.e.t.a.r.dation, aggressiveness, psychosis, miscarriages, deformed v.a.g.i.n.as, deformed guts so that they burst of their own waste products and die."
The blue rat lay down and curled up nose-to-tail on his lap. He looked back at Ash. "It can take many generations to breed true. To breed daughter back to sire, son to dam and sister. One culls out the unusable, breeding only from what is useful - for many, many years. And sometimes success never comes. Or if it does, it is sterile. Do you begin to understand why you may be important to me?"
"No." Ash"s tongue stuck to the dry roof of her mouth.
The amir Leofric smiled, as if he were simultaneously recognising her badly hidden fear, and thinking of something quite other. He added, "You will note, these are most tame, unlike other wild beasts. That is a by-product of the breeding, and one I did not expect- yes?"
"Sire!" Alderic"s deep voice boomed. She turned her head and witnessed a sudden entry through the double doorway into the room of collared slaves, Arian priests, armed foot soldiers, an Abbot, and a man carried waist-high above the ground in a chair.
"Lord Caliph!" Amir Leofric hurriedly stood up, bowing, rats scurrying back inside his clothes. "Sire?"
The back of the room was full of soldiers, Alderic"s men.
Between them walked a man in the green robes of an Arian abbot -something odd about the cross on his breast - and an amir richly dressed and (seen at close quarters) rather younger than Leofric.
"I welcome you to my house," Leofric said formally, in Carthaginian Latin, his voice achieving calmness.
A gesture, and the chair was set down.
"Yes, yes!" An old man sat in the chair, who had obviously once had red hair, but now it was turned dirty white, and who had had the warm freckled complexion that goes with it, which now shone mottled and dark in the lamplight.
Skin hung loose at his arms, and stretched tight over his nose, brows, and around his mouth. He wore robes of woven gold tissue. Ash inhaled once and tried to hold her breath: neither of the slaves attending with pomanders could hide the stench of s.h.i.t and his wasted flesh.
Theodoric, she realised, appalled, it"s the Caliph! and found herself pushed down on to the carpet - trying desperately to favour her left leg - and Alderic"s mail gauntlet forced her down on to hands and knees. She could see nothing but the hems of robes, and richly tooled leather sandals.
"Well?" the Visigoth ruler"s voice sounded weak.
Amir Leofric"s voice said, "My lord Caliph, why are these men with you? This abbot? And the amir Gelimer is no friend of my family."
"I must have a priest with me!" The King-Caliph, fretfully.
A full-blown abbot is "a priest"? Ash wondered.
"The amir Gelimer has no place here!"
"No? No, perhaps not. Gelimer, get out."