It was the merest whisper, into the fur lining of her hood. The n.a.z.ir glared suspiciously at her, then turned aside to speak with one of his men. A low-voiced dispute broke out between them.
In her head, words sounded: "Carthage is upon the northern coast of the continent of Africa, forty leagues to the west of-"
"Where is Carthage from where I am!"
No voice sounded in her head.
The mare slowed, plodding through drifting snow. Ash peered out of her hood. Theudibert"s men rode, hunched, muttering. Their tracks were churning up a hand"s-deep fall of snow now, that clung in bobbles to the hairy hocks of the horses. One white mare whickered, tossing up her head.
"This isn"t the way we rode in, n.a.z.ir!"
"Well, it"s the way we"re riding out. Do I have to shut your f.u.c.king mouth for you, Barbas?"
Ash thought, What does it matter, now, if Leofric learns I"m asking the Stone Golem questions? If they get me back inside Carthage, I"m dead.
"Forty men and twenty men and fifteen men, all cavalry, possibly all three groups hostile to each other," she breathed, mist dampening the fur around her mouth and freezing immediately to ice. She found she was shivering, for all her wool gown and cloak. Her bare feet were numb blocks of flesh, and all sensation had gone from her hands. "One person, unarmed, mounted; escape and evasion, how?"
"You should provoke a fight between two forces and escape in the confusion."
"I"m chained! The third force isn"t mine! How?"
"No appropriate tactic known."
Ash bit at her cold, numb lower lip.
"You might as well pray, I suppose," a light tenor voice called. Fernando del Guiz rode in from her right, pressing the roan gelding between Alderic"s troopers without a thought. Perhaps for that reason, they admitted him. His green and gold banner whipped in the blizzard, momentarily blocking out torch-light. Ash looked up at his snow-plastered helmet and cloak.
"Is that necessary?" Fernando added, indicating the mare"s reins with one gloved hand.
"Sir." Theudibert"s tone was a gruff, less-urbane copy of his "arifs. He kept her reins knotted firmly in his right hand, riding knee to knee with Ash. "Yes, sir."
Trying to read Fernando"s expression, Ash could make out nothing. Over his shoulder, through driving snow, she saw the lord-amir Gelimer and his son Witiza riding back down the column towards them.
"When I pray, I want an answer." She spoke lightly, as if it were a joke. Snow melted, chill on her lips.
"I"m sorry!" Fernando leaned over, close enough that his breath was damp and warm on her cheek. The male smell of him jolted her heart. He hissed, "I"m caught between the two of them, I can"t help you!"
She held in her mind the expectation of a voice. "You"ve got, what, fifteen men with lances? Could you get me out of here?"
The familiar voice in her head said, "Two larger units will unite to defeat third: tactic unsuccessful," as Fernando del Guiz laughed, slapped the nearest Visigoth soldier on the back, and said, unconvincingly jovially, "What wouldn"t you give for a wife like that?"
The young soldier, Gaiseric, said something quickly in Gothic which Ash could see Fernando didn"t understand.
"I"m worth more than "one sick goat", trooper!" she remarked, in Carthaginian.
The trooper snuffled a laugh. Ash gave him a quick grin. It"s worth making them think of me as a commander, if it slows their reaction time by even a split-second- "Del Guiz!" The lord-amir Gelimer closed distance through the wind and snow.
"Del Guiz, I am riding back to the city. Ask me for no further help." His sharp, gauntleted gesture took in the blizzard, Alderic"s hors.e.m.e.n, the del Guiz squires shuddering with cold and riding with the hooded owls sheltered under their cloaks, his own son"s blue-white face. "I hold you implicated in this! I should have made a better judgement of you - a man who would marry this, this-!"
He pointed at Ash. She gripped a fold of her cloak and shook snow off herself; wiped the snow from her eyelashes. The brown mare whuffed, too tired to pull away from the n.a.z.ir"s grip on her reins. Ash sniffed back a runny nose, staring up at Gelimer; at this richly robed and armoured man, white snow lodging in the braiding of his beard.
"Well, f.u.c.k you too," she said, almost cheerful, if only because of the appalled expression on Fernando del Guiz"s face. "You"re not the first person to act like I"m an abomination, my Lord-Amir. If I were you, I"d be worrying about worse problems than me."
"You!" Gelimer waved a finger at her. "You and your master Leofric! Theodoric was misguided enough to listen to him. Yes, it is essential that Europe be eradicated, but not-" He stopped, wiping a blast of snow out of his face. "Not with a slave-general! Not with a useless war-machine. These things fail, and then where are we?"
Ash made great show of looking around her, at Theudibert hunched over his saddle, at the troopers pretending not to listen to the overwrought amir as they rode knee to knee in a tight little group, at Alderic ahead supervising Gelimer"s men.
She raised her head to the high, white, whirling air, and the snow-covered immense statues, and the blanket of snow smoothing out the desert in the sputtering light of the wet pitch-torches.
"Why is it winter here?" she demanded. "Look at this. My mare has her winter coat and it"s only September. Why is it so d.a.m.n cold, Gelimer? Why? Why is it cold?"
She felt as if she slammed, face-first, into a stone wall.
Her expectation of a voice in her head was flooded - no other word for it -with a stunning, fierce, complete silence.
The lord-amir shouted something in return.
Ash didn"t hear it.
"What?" she said, aloud, bewildered.
"I said, this curse began with Leofric"s slave-general going on crusade, it will probably stop when she dies. All the more reason to put a stop to his activities. Del Guiz!" Gelimer shifted his attention. "You could serve me yet. I can forgive!"
He spurred his mount. The gelding arched its back, took a kick in the flank, and cantered forward, iron shoes skidding on the snow-covered flagstones. The lord-amir called out. Gelimer"s men spurred forward, away from Alderic"s troop, on into the dark blizzard ahead. The "arif let them go.
Fernando groaned. "I thought he"d given up on me."
Ash paid him no attention. Her breath steamed around her face. Even her knees, where she clasped the mare"s flanks, were numb with the cold; and snow gathered in the folds of her cloak. The iron chain from her collar burned, where it touched her skin under her clothes.
Appalled, she whispered delicately, "Forty men and fifteen men, armed cavalry, escape and evasion, how?"
"What?" Fernando sat down in the saddle from peering after Gelimer.
"Forty men and fifteen men, armed cavalry, escape and evasion, how?"
No voice sounded in her mind. She let herself will the effort of active listening, making a way in through defences, demanding an answer from the silence within.
A cold slap of ice-flakes on her face snapped her attention outwards.
Am I not . . . hearing? That"s it. That"s it. It isn"t as if I"m stopped, blocked . . . There is no voice here. Only silence.
Beside her, on his palfrey, G.o.dfrey spoke cheeringly over what was plainly her indistinguishable mumble. "These amirs are crazy, child! You know that Gelimer was a rival with Leofric for the King-Caliph"s money, for the crusade? To raise troops? And now they"re both trying to get themselves elected king-"
"What is the secret breeding?" Snow burned Ash"s face. She muttered insistently: "What is the secret birth?"
No voice. No answer.
The potential there, but utterly, utterly silent.
"Where"s my f.u.c.king voice?"
"What do you mean?" Fernando pressed his gelding close in and reached out to pull back her hood. "Ash? What are you talking about?"
Theudibert reached across in front of her, over the mare"s saddle, to push the fair-haired European knight away. Ash lunged, almost automatically, reaching across the n.a.z.ir"s mailed back, grabbing for his knife where its scabbard hung on his right hip, with the intention of slashing through the mare"s reins.
A soldier shouted a warning.
Something fast and black came down between her and the n.a.z.ir. a lance-shaft. She jerked away.
"s.h.i.t!"
Ash grabbed for the saddle.
She knew she hadn"t made it, was falling off the mare. Something caught her arm a numbing blow. She cried out. Her heel jerked back. The furry mare jinked to the right. She grabbed for the saddle and her numb bare fingers slid across leather, fear flooding her gut as she slipped, falling, falling forwards and down towards snow-covered stone.
Her stomach swooped. Her head banged sharply against something that gave - the mare"s foreleg. Every muscle cringed, taut, against impact. Waiting for an iron-shod hoof to kick back into her face. Waiting to hit stone pavement.
The fall stopped.
Ash hung, upside-down.
A hoof clopped on stone, close by her ear. Something banged her jaw, very softly. She thrashed her head in the enveloping cloak and kirtle and shift falling down over her ears, and found herself staring at pale-tipped brown horse-hair.
The underside of the muzzle of the brown mare.
The horse stood, all four feet planted, knees locked, her head hanging exhaustedly down to the ground in front of Ash"s face.
Above her, there was a noise. A man laughing.
Dazed, Ash made out that she was hanging with both her hands and feet above her. Her cloak and skirts fell down over her head.
"s.h.i.t!"
She hung upside-down, the chain between her ankles now taut across the mare"s saddle, and her whole body suspended under the mare"s belly. Some confusion of garments and chain and collar had both her hands pulled up tight into one stirrup and trapped.
Her cloak and gown fell back over her head and shoulders, baring her legs to the blizzard.
Ash giggled.
The mare placidly nosed back at her wool-shrouded head. Folds of wet cloth slid down, across her face, and uncovered her again, drooping to sweep the snow-covered stone.
"n.a.z.ir!" a voice she recognised as Alderic"s bawled hoa.r.s.ely, through the blizzard.
"Arif?"
"Get her back on that horse!"
"Yes, "Arif."
"Ah - wuff!" Ash choked, tried to m.u.f.fle it, and a wet laugh burst out from between her lips. She snuffled. In front of her, upside-down to her view, the legs of horses milled about, male voices shouting in confusion. Her chest began to ache as she laughed harder, not able to stop, her convulsing body driving out all her breath, tears streaming out of the corners of her eyes and down into her cropped hair.
She hung, completely unable to move, while mail-clad soldiers of the Visigoth Empire tugged thoughtfully at the chain across the mare"s back, and picked hopefully at the tangle of her wrists in the cloak and stirrup.
A face came into her view, a man bending down. The n.a.z.ir Theudibert shouted, "What have you got to laugh at, b.i.t.c.h?"
"Nothing." Ash shut her lips firmly together. His upside-down face, beard at the top and helmet underneath, and with an expression of complete bewilderment, sent her off again. A chest-heaving, belly-shaking laugh. "N-n-nothing - I could have been k-killed!"
She managed to wrestle her right hand and chain free. With that resting on the flagstones, wrist-deep in cold wet snow, she took some of her own weight. Hands manhandled her and the world swooped, sickeningly, and she was upright, the saddle between her thighs, feet scrabbling for stirrups.
A circle of dismounted men with swords surrounded her and the mare, wind driving snow into their faces. Beyond that were a ring of surrounding riders; and a clump of cavalry close around both G.o.dfrey"s palfrey, and Fernando"s riding horse. Even in the increasing wind and poor visibility, there was no way through the cordon.
"n.o.body made a mistake, then," Ash remarked cheerfully as her gut settled.
She freed her hands and wiped her nose on the linen lining of her cloak. The inner cloth was still dry. She started to speak, giggled, swallowed it back, and surveyed the cavalrymen around her with a warm, appreciative, and entirely embracing smile. "Whose dumb idea was this in the first place?"
One or two of them grinned in spite of the foul weather. She sat back in the saddle and picked up her reins, snuffling back chest-aching mirth.
Fernando del Guiz, from where he and his German troops sat surrounded on their horses, called, "Ash! Why are you laughing?"
Ash said, "Because it"s funny."
She caught sight of G.o.dfrey. Under his snow-whitened hood, he was smiling.
The "arif Alderic"s horse moved back into the circle of torch-light, Alderic riding with a solid, erect stance despite the driving snow.
"n.a.z.ir. Get that d.a.m.n horse moving. The scout"s come back. We"re no more than a furlong from the city gate."
Chapter Three."But they goin" to kill you!" the boy-faced soldier, Gaiseric, emphasised; his tone somewhere between confused malice, and awe. "You know that, b.i.t.c.h?"
"Of course I know it. Do I look stupid?"
The north-east quadrant steps of House Leofric jolted Ash as she plodded down their spiral again, Gaiseric and Barbas and the n.a.z.ir in front of her, the rest of the squad behind. Mail jingled; sword scabbards sc.r.a.ped the curved wall. Her soaking wet wool skirts dragged behind her on the steps.
"I don"t think," Ash said, "that you"ve understood."
As they walked out into a corridor, she hauled her cloak out from under her feet. The gla.s.ses of Greek Fire in the corridor showed her Gaiseric"s bewildered face, white with the cold.
"Don" get you," the boy said, as his n.a.z.ir went ahead down the mosaic-tiled corridor.
Ash only smiled at him. She surrept.i.tiously flexed her bruised and aching arms. The muscles of her inner thighs burned. She thought, It must be three weeks since I"ve ridden anything -not since the field of Auxonne.
"I"ve been taken prisoner before," she explained. "I think I"d forgotten that."
As to why I"d forgotten - she cut the thought off, putting the cell with the blood-soaked floor away in some part of her mind where she need not look at it. She is young, she heals quickly; there is a background discomfort from her head, her knee; it does not, now, affect this rising of her spirits.
A voice called, "Bring her!"