ASHE
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Chapter Four
Which is all about decisions and falling.
The celebrations had almost finished for the night. Jura watched her lover walk toward Laure, the queen’s expression friendly but her eyes like ice. She wondered where Ashe had gone to. Had she been present to hear the news of Laure’s bloody new consort?
Leanna put a hand on Laure’s shoulder. Laure turned, and as their gazes met, Leanna thought: She’s stronger than I knew she was. And she thought, Jura was right: it might have been better for Laure if she’d had some time of hardship. And she felt her heart ache at the thought of Ashe. The other pain she felt was something else, something deep within her, and she understood that the balance of power within Lammor had just been changed for ever.
Laure’s expression when she looked at the queen was an oddity. A blend of embarrassment, fear and anticipation shone through Laure’s eyes. Leanna wondered if her daughter could have been bewitched, and then she dismissed the thought. She had always known what Laure was capable of… she’d just hoped that she wouldn’t be there to see that capability expressed. And there was Calypso, staying close to Laure, smiling that bright blank smile. It took every bit of Leanna’s strength to kiss Laure on both cheeks, and then reach out her hand to Calypso, who stepped forward, smiling, smiling… anticipating congratulations but not actually needing them. Why should she? Calypso had already won. The right of the princess to choose her consort was part of the mainframe of their society, and it had never been questioned. Leanna wondered whether it was her own sickness that prevented her from screaming – at Laure or Calypso or anyone – and then accepted that it was not. This is the law. No-one may overturn that law. If she stood up now and said that the rules about consorts might no longer stand, Jura would be taken outside and burned. Oh, Laure and Calypso had a good pair of brains between them, thought Leanna. And then came another thought, and she thought, but do either of them have even half a heart?
“You conducted yourself very well, Laure.” When there is nothing else left to say, stick to the obvious. Give the girl that gentle kiss and smile as though you agree with what she’s doing. “But where…”
She wanted to say, “Where is Ashe?”, and suddenly she could not. It was as if a hand had reached through her to her heart and having taken hold of it, was clutching it harder and harder. Leanna set her teeth. She felt the sweat break out on her forehead, she felt herself change colour. She felt weak tears in her eyes, tears that she wanted to blink away but could not because her power was going. She looked at Calypso and Calypso smiled back at her. Smiled steadily. Smiled as if she celebrated Leanna’s pain. The queen wanted to say, What have you done with my daughter? but she could not even mouth the words.
It was Alexis who stepped into the situation and changed it. “The queen is ill!” she cried. “Send for the wise woman. Send to the tower for Rhea.” Leanna had time to think: How did she know about Rhea? before Laure helped to lower her onto the ground.
“I think it’s nothing but a slight heart-attack, brought on by the stresses of the ceremony,” said Calypso, evenly, cheerfully. At least her smile had gone. Leanna thought she’d rather die than see that again. “Let’s get the queen up to her chambers.” Jura had been swept back by Alexis’s gestures, but she forced her way through to the queen and knelt beside her. Leanna’s expression was wild and the pain was making her limbs heavy and useless. Helpless, she was carried to her chamber, Jura by her side, holding her hand, trying to communicate with her in silence.
An hour or so later, when Leanna lay sleeping, propped on the white pillows, the firelight making the shadows dance around the room, Rhea and Jura stood and looked at one another. “I can’t believe that this has happened,” said Jura.
Rhea poured them both another cup of wine. Wary to the last, she’d spat out the first mouthful into the fire, tasting it for poison. When worlds fall apart, they often go off in a myriad of directions. Both drank. Jura said, “Do you know where Ashe is?”
Rhea shook her head. “I know where Ashe was,” she said. “And my powers have been too exhausted by this evening’s work for me to be able to summon up another image. “All that I can tell you now is that she’s safe, and she isn’t here any longer.”
Jura looked both worried and blank. “Not here?” she repeated. “Please don’t tell me that - ”
“No, she’s alive. It’s not like that. I think that Alexis let her go.” She looked at Jura. “Let us hope that she has enough of a start.”
“She’s really gone?”
“I read that much earlier. Midnight tonight was the obstacle. I told her that if she was still within the palace then, she’d never leave it alive. But that’s not all, is it? The queen’s sickness has suddenly become much worse. Lammor’s princess has just taken on half the country and she has Calypso to guide her.” Rhea sat down and ran her hands through her hair, over and over again, until she resembled nothing so much as a untidy hedgehog. “Jura, I’m a little stunned by all this. The Gods know, I’ve lived through some changes, but nothing like this.”
“And the theme running through all these changes, bar the queen’s illness is… Calypso.”
Rhea laughed, a little croakily. “Bar the queen’s illness, Jura?” she asked. “Bar it?”
“What a nice ceremony,” said Calypso. She was sitting, her armour thrown off and her booted feet up on a stool beside the fire. “Gods, it’s freezing! I always forget how cold the nights are here, even after spring begins.” She poured herself a cup of wine and said, “Did you enjoy yourself this evening?”
Laure was sitting on the edge of the bed she had until that morning shared with Ashe. Laure was as close to completely exhausted as she had ever been. She had gone from excitement to fear to shock and then to sorrow, and her head was spinning. She stared at Calypso. “Did I enjoy myself?” she echoed.
“Laure, you know what I mean. It’s a shame about the queen but she’ll be fine. And even if it takes her a little while to recover,… well, her capable daughter and her capable daughter’s equally capable consort can happily take care of things.” Calypso stared into the fire. She waited a moment then added, “Can’t they?”
Laure nodded. “Yes,” she said. The multitude of capables had made her feel dizzy and a little sick. Listening to Calypso was like being spun around, as Laure had been as a child. When she was young, she had loved the sensation; now it only filled her with a sense of helplessness.
Calypso watched her for a moment, then said, “Come sit with me.”
Laure stood up and crossed the room without even thinking about doing so. “Here,” said Calypso, nodding to the floor in front of her. Laure sat down, her eyes wide and her brain whirling. Within a day Ashe would be describing the same set of movements when she stumbled over a body in the snow.
“What about Ashe?” Laure hadn’t wanted to ask the question, but she had put it off long enough.
Calypso raised her eyebrows. “Ashe?” she repeated. She glanced around the room. “Who’s Ashe?”
For an awful moment Laure just stared. “Name doesn’t mean a thing to me,” said Calypso. Then she smiled broadly and smacked herself lightly on the forehead with the palm of her hand. “Oh, Ashe! Of course. Now I remember: Ashe.”
“So?” Laure waited too long for a continuation of the sentence and then pushed ahead. “Ashe. Where is she?”
“I have no idea,” said Calypso. “Why? Are you concerned about her?”
“What do you mean, you have no idea? It was your thuggish servant who carried Ashe out of my room. I - ” She had no opportunity to complete the sentence, because Calypso had reached down very quickly and taken Laure by the hair. She didn’t pull Laure’s hair; she just held her by it.
“I don’t have any… thuggish servants, Laure. I have good, true servants. And Alexis is invaluable to me. I’m not very happy about the fact that Ashe somehow got away from Alexis, giving her a rather nasty bump at the back of her head as a remembrance. If Ashe was still around, I’d have her hanged for what she did.” The words came quickly, easily, and the tone was almost without inflection. “But she is no longer around, so… I don’t see her being a problem.” She released Laure, rather sharply. “It’s hardly civil of you, Laure, to keep talking about servants on the night that you and I finally get to celebrate the new dimension to our relationship.”
Calypso stood up and stretched, vertebrae cracking. She sighed and then put out her hand to Laure. “You are very lovely. I had almost forgotten how beautiful your body was.”
“You saw it earlier today,” said Laure, quickly and stubbornly. “You saw it when - ” But Calypso had quickly covered Laure’s mouth with her hand.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t see it earlier, and I didn’t see Ashe earlier, and you and I are about to begin a new life together. The past is already dead, Laure. Our future together is only just beginning.”
*******
Leanna’s breathing had steadied. Jura stood over her. With a basin in one hand, she was gently wiping the queen’s forehead. Rhea was still sitting by the fire, but now she had taken from the little leather bag that usually hung around her neck the small bones used only for the most demanding readings. Rhea saw a darkness flying from sky to ground. She saw a woman gasping for breath. She saw Calypso’s smile. She heard the bones hit the ground and scatter as her hand shook and refused to hold them. When she looked up again, she saw that Jura was crying.
******
Calypso led Laure to the bed. She leaned casually against one of the bedposts and said, “You are lovely. Take off your clothes for me. I want to watch you. Take them off slowly.”
It would have been so different if… If the words had been spoken seductively, or kindly, or even with a hint of the shyness that had often coloured Ashe’s words, Laure could have obeyed without feeling so awkward. But responding to Calypso’s light and amused tones, she found herself to be clumsy and nervous. She fumbled with the fastenings of her cape, and dropped it to the ground. Beneath the ceremonial cape she wore a long robe, embroidered with every constellations known to the Lammorans. Suddenly hesitant, she stopped.
Calypso threw up her hands. “Come here, Laure,” she said. Her tone, though clearly indicative of exasperation, seemed to Laure to be a little kinder. But she used a short knife to free Laure of her clothes. Silk and linen and wool, sliced beyond hope of repair, began to gather on the floor beneath them.
Laure stood, naked, and Calypso grinned at her. In the lamplight, Laure’s skin seemed to glow. A mass of colours possessed her, pink and cream and even blue, where the veins showed in the pale skin. Ashe had worshipped Laure’s body unashamedly. The first time Laure had – more to shock than seduce – stripped off all her clothes before Ashe, Ashe had gone white, silent with awe. Calypso smiled appreciatively, but she said nothing. Ashe had bent down to kiss the undersides of Laure’s feet: Calypso merely smiled, and threw off her own short jacket and settled herself on the bed, unloosing her belt, pulling her linen shirt free. “I’d like that pretty mouth put here, Laure,” she said, pushing down her trousers until they were clear of the tops of her thighs.
Laure went pink, and stared at her. Calypso grinned, but there was less humour in her expression. “Come on, your highness.” Her tone was less friendly, too. “I’d like to see just how good this alliance is going to be. Come on… or should I ask Alexis to come and drag you over here… or perhaps show you what to do?”
Not simply the shock of Calypso’s associating, sexually, with Alexis, but the suggestion that Calypso really would have her dragged across the room, forced Laure into an angry response. “I know what to do,” she snapped. “I’m not naïve. I suppose I simply didn’t expect such a lack of either ceremony or respect from my new…” her voice faltered, “consort.”
“Respect?” Calypso sat up on the bed and stared at Laure. “You seem to forget, Laure, you chose this path with me for the sake of kudos and power. You don’t love me and I don’t love you. Not in the slightest. And think about it: you took a week to agree to the alliance; you took a day to come to my bed. I must admit, I did go a little… easily on you, then. I didn’t want to shock you away. But you wanted me, or you wouldn’t have agreed to all this. Think about it: I’ve had partners by the dozen, possibly you have, too. We have all of us been offered other things, according to time and place and need. I am as hungry for power as I am for other things: sex, food, wine. But power comes first. You are, as you know, a means to an end for me. And I rather suspect that I am almost exactly the same thing to you. You want power just as much as I do. So don’t play games with me. I know you like games – I could see that by the way you treated Ashe – but I don’t play games. Now, I simply want your warm red mouth on me. And either you come to me of your own accord or you can choose between my dragging you over or my calling in Alexis to do all the hard work. Take your pick. What do you say?”
As Laure bent her head over the dark hair, and smelled the pungent perfume of Calypso’s sex, she thought for one last time of Ashe – of Ashe who was gone for good – and Ashe’s gentle possession of her body. She thought of Ashe’s sudden, unexpected and rare smile as she began to touch Calypso with her tongue. She felt Calypso’s hand on the back of her neck, not caressing so much as controlling her. Calypso’s hand felt heavy and unwanted. Laure tried to summon up the wild eroticism that had run through her dreams since her first night with Calypso and could not find it. Laure thought, suddenly: Gods, what have I done?
*******
That she should never have tried fighting Calypso, was Ashe’s first thought when she woke into the cold morning air. She’d woken up with a jolt that knocked all the air out of her lungs. For a single insane moment she wondered where the walls had gone. Then everything came back to her in waves of cold reality. Laure. Calypso. Alexis…? Ashe sat up then stood up, and stretched to loosen up her spine. Evidently she had chosen the hardest patch of earth in the entire country to use as a bed.
She drank a little water, thought about drinking some of the brandy, too, and gave the thought a half-smile. Not a good time for that…
She thought, there is nothing quite so final as despair. The night before she had been full of a heightened sense of almost everything – nothing changes your perspective as wholly as being evicted from your home – and now in the early morning light she felt such a wash of despair that it threatened to overwhelm her. All she wanted to do was to quietly curl up under a sheltering tree or hedge (there were none within view).
Ashe set off along the mountain path again. It probably came with her race, she had long-since decided, these moods of utter darkness. Even Rhea had been hard-pressed to find anything in her range of medicines and spells that would help Ashe when her occasional demons woke up and howled. Besides, this latest bleakness had its roots in reality.
She had to get moving quickly enough to break herself of the almost insane cold. Her fingers were numb and her brain was foggy. She got as far as a still-flowing stream and bent to scoop up water. The water was fresh from the top of the mountains, and it was so cold that it took Ashe’s breath away for the second time. She coughed. The wind, too, came down from the mountains. Ashe looked around her. Yesterday morning she had been standing at a window, admiring the court, her only real problem being the marks Laure had bestowed upon her. How strange to look back on that moment as an experience of happiness. If not happiness, something quite close to it.
It began to snow.
For the next hours Ashe moved on through the snow, sliding in some patches, skidding in others, fighting against the slope that seemed to want so badly to pull her down. It was almost impossible to see ahead, so she kept her eyes fixed on the ground directly before her, and tried to maintain a steady pace. She was so fixed on the immediate that when she met a mound in the ground, she fell straight over it, and ended up in a snow-bank.
Shaking snow out of her hair, Ashe turned back, to see whatever it was she’d hit. There was something oddly familiar about the shape on the ground. Long-forgotten memories, like voices calling from a great distance, began to take shape in her mind. Ashe bent down, and using her cloak to shield her hands from the worst of the cold, began to dig through the snow.
Her eyes were watering so badly from the cold that when the shape became visible, she was almost blind. She blinked hard several times and looked down to see what she had discovered. Suddenly she understood what was familiar about the shape… it was a dead body. Ashe automatically muttered beneath her breath the prayers for the dead that Cora had taught her, the prayers she’d been too shocked to utter over Cora’s body.
The dead body was quite perfectly preserved. There were no marks of decay, or the signs of predator teeth and claws. And the body lay in an attitude like that of sleep, the head resting on one hand, once-soft hair swept back like a frozen black river.
Ashe stumbled to her feet and looked around her. Now that she knew – for whatever reason – what was going on, she knew what to look for. She began digging afresh.
Surrounding the girl’s body were the remains of five more. Ashe warily examined each one in turn. She was not frightened of death, but it was still unnerving to touch the silent, solid forms, and to think that they had once breathed, moved…
The other figures described a shape of some sort, the five of them surrounding the one… Some were a little way off, but Ashe suspected they had once been tightly wrapped around the body of the dead girl. Only this body had remained intact. There was little left of the others; they had been torn about by the wolves and the eagles. What had been different here?
She thought about the beauty of the girl’s face. Despite the horror of the situation itself, Ashe saw that the girl was still very lovely. She was wrapped in a cloak of wool, beneath which her clothes were all rich and exotic: wool, silk and velvet were providing a final shroud. She looked to be a little younger, perhaps, than Ashe, and she had died up here on the mountain, her… friends? guards? servants? working desperately to prevent her body alone from being spoiled, at least long enough for it to freeze so severely that nothing could mark her. As the snow stopped falling and the sun shone a little over the scene, Ashe sat before the dead figure, and put her head into her hands.
Ashe hardly ever cried. Because it happened so seldom, when the tears did come, they had to be forced out in a series of painful spasms. It was not for a single death that she cried, it was as much for the others, who must have accepted the idea of their death but who had not gone on, had not left the girl. And they’d gone on protecting her until they’d died, one by one of them falling face-down onto the iron ground.
With the last of her tears freezing on her cheeks, Ashe knelt down by the girl’s body and reverentially put out a hand to the firm ivory of the girl’s forehead. The backs of her fingers rested momentarily on the surface of the dead skin, and when it did, a host of images raced through Ashe’s head.
For a moment she could see nothing but internal images. She was aware of a rush of movement and a great wash of fear. She could see the girl lying in the centre of a protective circle, voices raised all about her. The companions had not deserted their charge: they would not leave her. They had carried her on until they could go no further, and then they had slowly… died. And now that spring was beginning, the weather would slowly improve and the ice would melt and the body would change and rot, as the season undid it.
Well, that wasn’t going to happen. Ashe knew that she was probably going out of her mind: Cora had told her stories of the strange things the snow could do, and now she was going to prove them all true. But Ashe no longer had to worry about someone else’s rules. It had hurt her deeply that Cora had had no kind of funeral save the most perfunctory and fleeting. Alright: Ashe couldn’t change that, but she could fix this. She took off her cloak and Alexis’s sword, and began looking for stones. The snow had stopped falling.
*******
It took all of that day and the morning of the next for Ashe to build the cairn. Most of the time she had to slide down the mountainside some distance to find rocks and stones, and many of them were agony to lift or push back up. Her hands became scratched and bloody and her whole body ached. But something possessed Ashe: she worked as she had never done before, blind, single-minded labour that lasted until dark, when she more or less passed out.
As Ashe worked, she thought through her own history, of everything she could remember from the remains of her childhood to the leaving of Lascar. And she talked it through out-loud, and it became a kind of confession. Ashe told her story to the unmoving figure lying motionless in the snow. Once the story had been completed, Ashe felt oddly free of it. It was like shedding a skin.
She had dragged the girl’s body up and onto a shelf of stone that jutted out from the side of the mountain. Then she did the same for the other bodies – no mean feat: despite her own resolve, her stomach twisted and turned when she looked down into those ruined faces – and arranged them around the first. Then she built up the cairn around them, using building skills she had not known she possessed. As each layer of stone went up, the sense of having seen such a thing before became more and more vivid in Ashe’s memory.
In some ways the building work was pure insanity on Ashe’s part - the more protective aspects of her brain did try suggesting that such work, and in such a place was nigh-on madness – but she never thought to stop, once she’d started, and once she’d started, she knew she’d go on until the cairn was completed, or she’d dropped dead in the snow. She didn’t really mind which.
She had put the final stone in place, stood back, hands pressed hard into the small of her back, which ached fiercely, when someone said, “And just what in the name of all the Gods made you do that?”
Ashe turned slowly round. The speaker’s accents were foreign to her, and she noticed that the speaker and her companions were all armed. She wondered how she could have missed their arrival. But she’d been working in a blind stupor - she probably would have missed a passing avalanche unless it had taken her with it.
“It is your work, isn’t it? Don’t bother replying: I can smell the blood on your hands. This must have taken you long enough. It’s good work. It’s a shame that we have to kill you. You might have proved a useful artisan.
“You know, after they got away from us, I said, let’s come back in the spring. We were passing by this way, so I thought we’d look now. I said, perhaps now we can divide up the bones, and cast them into the river. Then they’d never have found peace, any of them. And then you do this thing… which according to our law means that we can’t touch them any more. You just made it possible for them to reach their gods. They’re probably already there.”
Ashe stood like a statue in the snow, watching the speaker. Her sword lay too far away for her to reach. Besides, these strange figures could read minds, or so it seemed, for the first said, “Oh, I don’t think you’ll be wanting those again,” clicking her fingers, commanding one of her following to collect up Ashe’s possessions. “In fact, I suggest you summon up your recollection of your gods. You’re about to meet them.” As the last sentence broke through the cold air, the speaker flung herself at Ashe, her teeth showing, jagged and stained.
Ashe ducked down, her first instinct and a useful one: the speaker went flying over Ashe’s head. She kicked out at the next one, as they ran at her, and she felt the toe of her boot connect satisfyingly with a knee-cap, but the next one had thrown her down and onto her back. Ashe looked up into strange red eyes, tawny skin, and those… teeth. Oh, Gods, to be bitten with those! Suddenly realising that the women were cannibals, Ashe gathered up her reserves. With a desperate surge of energy she threw off the woman and staggered to her feet. Then they were all after her.
Ashe ran through the snow, sliding, nearly falling, and then really falling. She had reached a break in the mountain, where a ravine opened out, three hundred feet below, and went tumbling over the edge. Sliding over the lip she struck out wildly and caught her left wrist in a root of some sort. The sudden jolt was so fierce that she cried out, but she hung on, and maintained the grip as she heard her pursuers shouting after her.
This time the voice was full of an ugly humour. “Don’t forget these!” And her cloak and Alexis’s sword were flung down at her. The cloak flapped against her face and nearly undid Ashe, but the sword simply flipped through the air, landing what seemed like much later, in a distant clatter.
There was a short, angry discussion high above Ashe, and then the women began rolling stones toward Ashe. The first were such a surprise that she nearly lost her grip, and then another struck her, cutting her cheek, almost breaking the hold that was already tenuous.
Ashe had a moment of clarity, almost an epiphany. For a single moment she felt such detachment from the moment that her head spun. She looked up at the hate-filled faces and knew that they’d keep going until they knocked her free. Perhaps it would be better to do something on her own terms. She was tired of being pushed around.
Ashe called out, “See you in the next life!” and let go her hold.
In falling she saw for an instant their shocked, disappointed faces, then that image was sucked away by the force of gravity. Cold air whistled past her. It was three hundred feet to the base of the ravine.