"Shut your f.u.c.king mouth, Barbas!"
"Yes, n.a.z.ir."
"Ah, f.u.c.k it. f.u.c.k her." Theudibert swung around on his heel, shoving between his men to get to the cell door. "I don"t see none of you s.h.i.ts moving. Move! "
A thickly muscled soldier, the one she had seen get hard, protested sullenly, "But, n.a.z.ir-"
The n.a.z.ir thumped him in pa.s.sing, hard enough to double him over.
Their hard heavy bodies cluttered the cell door for seconds, longer seconds than she had known at any period of time that wasn"t on the field of battle: seconds that seemed to last for ever, them muttering discontentedly to each other, elaborately ignoring her, one spitting on the floor, someone harshly, cruelly laughing, a fragment of speech: "-break her anyway-"
The iron grating that formed a door clanged shut. Locked.
In that split second, the cell was empty.
Keys jangling, mail rustling. Their bodies moved away down the corridor. Distant booted footsteps loping up stairs. Fading voices.
"Oh, son of a b.i.t.c.h." Ash"s head fell forward. Her body expected the flop of long hair over her face, awaited the minute shifting of its weight. Nothing obscured her vision. Literally light-headed, she gazed up at narrow walls lit by the lantern beyond the iron grating. "Oh, Jesu. Oh Christus. Save me, Jesu."
A fit of shuddering took her. She felt her body was shaking like a hound coming out of cold water and, amazed, found nothing she could do would stop it. The lamp in the corridor showed only a few feet of clay-tiled floor and pink mosaic walls. The lock on the iron grating was larger than her two fists together. Ash scrabbled around with shaking hands and found her torn shirt. The fabric dripped wet in her hands. One of the n.a.z.ir"s men had p.i.s.sed on it.
Cold cut her skin. She wrapped the stinking cloth over as much of her body as she could reach, and curled up in the far corner of the cell. The absence of a door bothered her: she did not feel less imprisoned but more exposed by the steel grating, even if its mesh was not large enough to let her put a hand through.
In the corridor, a Greek Fire jet hissed into life. Intensely white squares of light fell through the iron grating, on to the cracked tiles. Her belly hurt.
The stench of male urine faded as her nose numbed it out. The wet cloth grew warmer with her body-heat. Her breath clouded the air in front of her face. Intense coldness bit at her toes, her hands; numbed the pain of her cut forehead and lip. Blood still trickled down, she tasted it. Her stomach twisted, in a grinding pain, and she wrapped her arms around her body, hugging herself.
All I did was catch them off their guard at the right moment. That won"t happen twice. That was just bad discipline: what happens when they get genuine orders to give me a beating, or a rape, or break my hands?
Ash curled herself tighter. She tried to quiet the yammering fear in her head, bury the word torture.
f.u.c.k Leofric, f.u.c.k him, how could he feed me and then do this to me; he can"t mean torture, not real torture, eyes burned out, bones broken, he can"t mean that, it must be something else, it must be a mistake- No. No mistake. No point in fooling myself.
Why do you think they"ve left you down here? Leofric knows who you are, what you are, she will have told him. By way of a profession I kill people. He knows what I"m thinking, right now. Just because I know what"s being done doesn"t mean it won"t work- Another grinding pain went up through her belly. Ash pushed both her fists into her abdomen, tensing her body. A low pain made her stomach cold. It subsided: almost immediately it grew again, cresting at a peak that made her gasp, swear, and sigh a great shuddering breath as it died down.
Her eyes opened.
Sweet Jesu.
She put her hand between her thighs and brought it out black in the lamp"s light.
"Oh, no."
Appalled, she lifted her hand to her face and sniffed. She could not smell blood, could smell nothing now, but the way that the liquid covering her hand began to contract and pull on her skin as it dried- "I"m bleeding!" Ash shrieked.
She pushed herself up on to her knees, left knee screaming at the impact; pulled herself to her feet, and limped two steps to the grating, her fingers locking into the square steel mesh.
"Guard! Help! Help!"
No voice answered. The air in the pa.s.sage outside shifted, coolly. No voices came from other possible cells. No sound of metal: weapons or keys. No guardroom.
Pain doubled her over. She gritted a high, keen sound out from between clenched teeth. Bent over, she saw the white skin of her inner thighs appeared black from pubic hair to knee, rivulets of blood running down from knee to ankle. She had not felt it: blood is undetectable, flowing over the skin at blood-heat.
The pain grew again, grinding down in the pit of her belly, in her womb, akin to monthly cramps but stronger, harder, deeper. A sweat broke out over her face and b.r.e.a.s.t.s and shoulders, slicked wet under her arms. Her fingers clenched.
"Jesu, for Jesu"s sake! Help me! Help! Help! Get a doctor! Somebody help me!"
She sank to her knees. Bent double, she pressed her forehead on the tiles, praying for the pain from her grazes to offset the pain and movement of her belly.
I must be still. Completely still. It might not happen.
Her muscles cramped again. A sharp, shearing pain cut off thought. She hugged her hands up between her thighs, into her v.a.g.i.n.a, as if she could hold back the blood.
The lamplight dimmed, gradually going down to a small intense jet. Blood clots blotted her palms. Blood smeared her skin as she held desperately on to herself, pushing up, pushing at the womb"s entrance; warm wet liquid running out between her fingers.
"Somebody help me! Somebody get a surgeon. That old woman. Anything. Somebody help me save it, help me, please, it"s my baby, help me-"
Her voice echoed down the corridors. Complete silence resumed, after the echoes died, a silence so intense she could hear the lamp hissing outside the cell. Pain died down for a moment, for a minute; she prayed, hands between her legs, and the swooping drag of it began again, a dull, intense, grinding, and finally fiery pain, searing up through her belly as her muscles contracted.
Blood smeared the tiles, made the floor under her sticky. Artificial light turned it black, not red.
She sobbed, sobbed with relief as pain ebbed; groaned as it started again. At the peak she could not keep from crying out. The lips of her v.a.g.i.n.a felt the pushing expellation of lumps - black stringy clots of blood, that slipped like leeches over her hands and away, spilling on the floor. Blood hot on her hands and legs; smearing her thighs, belly; plastering in warm hand-prints over her torso as she hugged herself and shook, biting at the inside of her mouth, finally screaming in pain; and then blood drying cold on her skin.
"Robert!" Her imploring scream died, dull against the ancient tiled cellar walls. "Oh, Robert! Florian! G.o.dfrey! Oh help me, help me, help meee-"
Her belly cramped, contracted. The pain came now, rose up like a sea swell, drowned her in agony. She wished she could pa.s.s out; but her body kept her present, working against it, swearing at the physical inevitability of the process, weeping, filled with a violent fury against - who? What? Herself?
I didn"t want it anyway.
Oh s.h.i.t no- Her ragged nails made half-moon indentations in her palms. The thick stink of blood flooded the cell. The pain shredded her. More than that, knowing what this pain meant broke her into pieces: weeping, quietly, as if afraid now that she would be heard.
Guilt shuddered through her: If I hadn"t asked Florian to get rid of it, this wouldn"t be happening.
Her reasonably accurate guesses of the north ("nearly Vespers", "an hour before Matins") gave way to complete disorientation: it must surely be still black day, not starry night, but she could not be certain of it. Not certain of anything now.
Her belly"s pain loosened and tightened every muscle in her body: thighs, arms, back, chest. The involuntary contractions of her womb died down, slowly. The immensity of the relief drowned her. Every muscle relaxed. Her eyes stared, fixed open wide.
Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s hurt.
She lay curled on her side in the lamp"s chequered illumination. Both her hands were full of clots and strings of black blood, drying to stickiness. A flaccid veined thing lay on her palm, half that size, drying. It trailed a twisted thread of flesh no thicker than a linen cord. Attached to the cord"s end was a red gelatinous ma.s.s about the size of an olive.
In the square of white light she could clearly distinguish its tadpole-head and curving body-tail, the limbs only buds, the head not human. A nine-week miscarriage.
"It was perfect." She screamed up at the invisible ceiling. "It was perfect!"
Ash began to cry. Great gasping sobs wrenched at her lungs. She curled up tight and wept, body sore, shuddering like a woman in a fit; screaming in grief, scalding tears pouring down her face in the darkness, howling, howling, howling.
Chapter Four.Footsteps tiptoed, voices whispered: she didn"t notice.
Gut-wrenching sobs faded to silent tears, running hot and wet over her hands. Grief ceased to be a refuge. Her limbs and body shook, with trauma and with the intense cold of the cells. Ash rolled into a tighter ball, cold palms clasped around her shins. Her lips were dry with thirst.
The world and her body came back. Chill clay walls bit into her bare flank.
She shivered, all her body-hair standing up like the bristles on a pig; expected soon to be sleepy, to cease to shiver, as men do in cold high mountain snow when they lie down never to rise again.
The cell"s steel grating slammed to one side. Slaves" bare feet slapped on the tiled floor; someone shouted, above her head. Ash tried to move. Soreness stabbed her v.a.g.i.n.a. Quaking shudders wracked her body. The tiles felt frost-cold under her.
A rasping voice shouted, "G.o.d"s Tree, don"t you know enough to report to me!"
Ash got her head up off the floor, neck straining, swollen hot eyes blinking.
"Light a fire in the observatory!" a bulky, dark-bearded Visigoth man snapped, standing over her. The "arif Alderic unb.u.t.toned the voluminous indigo wool gown that hung from his shoulders, over his mail. He dropped it to the bloodstained floor, knelt, and rolled her into the material. Ash vomited weakly. Yellow bile stained the blue wool. Thick folds of cloth enveloped her, and she felt him thrust an arm under her knees, her shoulders, and lift. The mosaic walls whirled in the intense light of Greek Fire as he swung her up into his arms.
"Out of my way!"
Slaves ran. His footsteps jolted her.
Silk-lined wool slid over her icy, filthy skin. Warmth grew. She began to shudder with uncontrollable shivers. Alderic"s arms gripped her tightly.
Carried up steps, carried across the fountain courtyard with cold sleet slashing down on her bare face, trickling pale red water, Ash tried to go away in her head. To put it all wherever it is that she puts memories of bad things, of people who betrayed her, of stupid miscalculations that got people killed.
Hot tears pushed up between her eyelids. She felt water trickle down her face, mingling with the sleet. In a crowd of slaves and shouted orders, she was carried into another building, down corridors, down stairwells; grief wiping out everything but a dim impression of a warren of rooms going on for ever, rooted down into Carthage hill like a tooth into a jawbone.
The pressure of his arms under her relaxed. Something hard but slightly giving pressed into her back. She lay on a pallet on a blocky white oak daybed, in a s.p.a.cious room lit by Greek Fire. Slaves ran in with ten or a dozen iron bowls, putting them on tripods and heaping them with red-hot charcoal.
Ash stared up. Metal cabinets lined the walls, below gla.s.s-and-fire lamps. Above the lights, the vaulted wooden roof shifted- shutting, like a clam-sh.e.l.l, as she watched: cutting off a view through thick, gnarled gla.s.s of a black day sky above.
Slaves ceased pulling ceiling-panels, tied off ropes.
A pale-haired girl of eight or so scowled at Ash, fingering her steel collar. The male slaves left. Two more child-slaves remained to tend the ember-burners that gradually leaked warmth into the cold air.
Alderic"s harsh commands brought more people. A freeborn, grave, bearded Visigoth in woollen robes stared down at Ash, together with a woman who wore a black veil pinned to the crown of her headdress. The two of them rattled a rapid conversation in medical Latin. She understood it well enough - why not? Florian uses it all the time - but the details slid out of her concentration. Her body shifted like meat on a slab as they pulled her legs apart, and first fingers and then some steel instrument were pushed into her v.a.g.i.n.a. She hardly winced at the pain.
"Well?" another voice demanded.
Her few minutes in the amir"s company had not given her a memory of his face, but now she recognised his dirty-white hair and beard, tufting up like a startled owl. The amir Leofric, glaring down with alert, bloodshot eyes.
The woman - who must be a physician, Ash realised - said, "She will not easily conceive again, Amir. Look. I am surprised that she could bear this one for so long. There is chronic damage: she will never carry to term. The gate of the womb10 is all but destroyed, and much scarred over with very old,tissue."
Leofric stamped across the room. He reached out his arms and a slave put a green and yellow woollen robe on him. "G.o.d"s Tree! This one is barren too!"
"Even so."
"What is the use of these sterile females? I can"t even breed from this!"
"No, Amir." The woman probing between Ash"s thighs lifted one bloodstained hand to put back her veil. She changed from Carthaginian Latin and spoke in French, as if she spoke to a child or an animal. The manner in which one speaks to a slave.
"I shall give you a drink. If there is more to pa.s.s, you will pa.s.s it. A flux, do you understand? A b.l.o.o.d.y flux. Then you shall be well."
Ash shifted her hips. Hard metal obstructions slid from her v.a.g.i.n.a, bringing infinite relief from a pain she had not known she felt. She tried to sit, to move, striking out weakly. The second doctor closed his hand around her wrist.
Her eyes focused on the man"s cuff. In the room"s white light, she saw slanting big st.i.tches fixing the olive lining to the bottle-green wool garment. Wild st.i.tches fastened b.u.t.ton to cuff. The loop for the b.u.t.ton was a mere hoop of fraying thread. Someone, some slave, made this fast, sloppy, in a hurry. Underneath his voluminous woollen sleeve a light silk robe was visible: far more like what she would expect to see worn in Carthage.
Alderic"s wool gown coc.o.o.ned her body, warming her core. Its workmanship was equally hurried.
They didn"t expect this cold either.
What she feels here is not the warm, star-lit, sweltering twilight that Angelotti described; when he was both slave and gunner on this coast. The Eternal Twilight in which nothing grows, but within the bounds of which the n.o.bles of Carthage walk, silk-clad, under indigo skies.
The very air crackles with frost.
The woman, practised, put a cup to her lips and tipped. Ash swallowed. A sweet herb tanged in the drink. Almost immediately her body cramped. The feeling of blood expelled from her body, soaking the wool, constricted her throat again and she clenched her jaw on a sob.
"Will she live?" Leofric demanded.
The elder doctor, very grave, very satisfied with his own opinion, observed to the amir Leofric, "The uterus is strong. The body is strong, and displays little shock. If she is subjected to more pain, she will hardly die of it, unless it be most severe. She may safely be put to moderate torture within an hour or so."
The amir Leofric ceased pacing on the mosaic floor and flung open wooden window shutters. A blast of cold air entered the room, chilling the effect of the coals in iron dishes. He stared out into darkness at a sky of utter blackness: no moon, no star, no sun.
Ash lay in the pomegranate-carved oak bed, watching him. She thought: I really could die, now.
It was not a sudden realisation. It came to her quite ordinarily, as it always did, usually just before battle; but it tightened the focus of her mind, snapped her into a complete consciousness of Leofric, his doctors, "arif Alderic and his guard, the bitter air, the bustle and business of the household. The hundred thousand men and women outside on the white-lit streets of Carthage, living out quotidian experience.
About three-quarters of which will know there"s a war on, half of whom will care, and none at all will bother about just one more prisoner dying in a lord-amir"s home.
What came to her was the absolute apprehension of her own unimportance, as if a membrane had broken: all the things that one thinks could not happen "because I am me" become in an instant possible. Other people die of injuries, of accidents, of poisoned blood, of childbed fever, of an ordinary order of execution of the King-Caliph"s justice, and therefore I- She was used to thinking herself the hero of her own life: what lost sense for her now was the idea of it being a coherent story requiring a resolved ending (some day, in the future, the far future). She thought, But it doesn"t matter, quite calmly. Other people can win battles, with or without "voices". Someone else can take my place. It is all accident, all chance.
Rota fortuna, Fortune"s Wheel. Fortuna imperatrix mundi.
Without turning around, the Visigoth amir said, "I was reading a report from my daughter when the slaves summoned me. She reports you are a violent woman, a killer by profession, a warrior by desire rather than by training, as she is."
Ash laughed.
It was a tiny snuffle, a choke of a laugh, hardly a breath; but it surged through her so that her eyes ran, and she wiped the back of her hand across her chill, wet face. "Yeah, and I had so many professions to choose from!"
Leofric turned. At his back, a blank black sky whirled, flakes of snow plastering the edges of the wooden shutters. The same girl-slave pattered over the tiles and heaved the window shutters to. Leofric ignored her.
"You are not what I expected." He sounded both fussy, and frank. He bundled up his striped gown of green and yellow velvet and paced across the floor towards her. "Foolishly, I expected you to be as she is."
That begs the question of what you think she is, Ash reflected.
"Take this down," Leofric said, to the smaller of the boy-slaves. Ash saw the child held a wax tablet, ready to impress it with his stylus. "Preliminary notes: physical. I see an habitually dirty young woman, evidence of parasitic skin inflammation common, scalp infested with ringworm. Muscle development unusual in a woman, especially in the trapezoid, and biceps. Peasant stock. General muscle tone good - extremely good. Some evidence of early malnutrition. Two teeth missing, upper jaw, left-hand side. No evidence of caries. Scarring to face, old trauma to third, fourth and fifth ribs on the left side, to all fingers of the left hand, and evidence of what I suppose to have been a hairline fracture of the left shin-bone. Rendered infertile by trauma, probably before p.u.b.erty. Read that back to me."
Leofric listened to the young boy reading in a sing-song. Ash blinked back too-easy tears, huddling the wool gown around herself. Her sore body ached. Waves of sensation still throbbed through her belly, through her whole body: every tissue aching.
It took her breath: too stark to think about. Some arrogant part of herself rose up in revolt. "What is this, my pedigree? I"m not some G.o.d-rotted horse-coper"s mare! Don"t you know of what degree I am?"