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Ashe: Book Three
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Chapter 2
I
Night fell, and a storm that ripped up trees and tore down walls raged across the land. It blasted sand across the beaches until the air was fit to blind. At Caer Arianrhod it tore shutters free of walls and sent them tumbling. It ran down corridors and out across the courtyard, startling the guards and making the guard dogs howl.
The storm reached the Red Temple, where the guards swore and muttered and moved closer to the vague protection offered by the half ruined buildings. Everyone there feared the ghosts of the civil and uncivil dead: everyone knew someone who had seen at least a single phantom. Murah, miles and miles from the Red Temple, lay in a deep and comfortable sleep in a Mercian bed, but her dreams were nightmares, and it was only the huge amount of wine she’d drunk that evening that enabled her to sleep at all.
Above the cliffs the storm spasmed in toward the cave in which Ashe sat sleepless, watching over her charges. She had always liked lightning, and now she was seeing blazing strikes of it along the length of the valley bed and toward the distant mountains.
In Berrach’s room, with its frescoed walls and air of solemnity, Mercia’s leader slept while her lover remained watchful.
The wind snatched at the cloak that Ashe wore but could not pry it free. Eventually she stood up, a little stiffly, and went back into the cave to check on her charges. She touched the back of her hand to Sanna’s forehead and felt the fever burning. Ashe shook her head: she was worried. This would be Sanna’s last night on earth if the fever did not break, and if her wounds broke open again. Earlier Ashe had been forced to hold Sanna down as the fever racked her, and there had been wounds that required re-stitching. Now such wounds had to be left: there was nothing else that Ashe could do.
Ashe’s second patient confused her. Wiped as free of blood and mud as she could manage, this still unconscious girl stuck in her mind and set her wondering. She did not remember seeing this one in the run-up to the battle, but she had clearly been there, if only to collect a single, felling blow and then drop.
Ashe did not know what had happened to the battlefield in her absence because she intended never to go back. It didn’t matter that she could - perhaps - collect more clothes and weapons, she just wasn’t going back. As she had turned her back on the bodies and the birds of carrion, the rain had begun in earnest, and soon Ashe could hardly see. She stumbled more than once on that walk, and finally fell. It was not surprising that she’d slipped: she had had almost no sleep, very little food and her defences were being slowly eroded away when she thought of the Red Temple and the fact that it still stood.
Once fallen she stayed for a moment where she was. There had come upon her a desire to stay where she lay until the grass and flowers grew over her, too. Waving grasses could take root in her befuddled brain and her skull could act as a water dish for foxes. Ashe found something mildly amusing in the prospect, got up, and stayed up. You’re just very tired, she told herself. That was all. That and depressed almost to a point of paralysis.
But the grim mood passed enough to let her move, and do, and there were benefits to this. The rain, falling on blood, first refreshed that metallic stink but at length erased it. Then as the air had cleared, the rain become intermittent. Ashe moved on.
As she cut a path across the battlefield she imagined the site in the years to come. Her memory of the battle would by far outlast the evidence of that assault. The rocks would remain scattered, but they had looked from the first perfectly fitting. As to the bodies, well, flesh and clothing rotted quickly enough, and bones would fall away. Animals and insects, weather and time, would all do their part. In a year or so there might be flowers blazing where the dead presently lay.
The short turf, once mended, would lend itself to pink thrift and purple and yellow heartsease. Self-heal would send up purple flower-heads. Sweet-smelling sage would sprout beneath the alders. Windflowers would bloom against the rocks in the sheltered spaces, and dame’s violets would loosen their soft perfume onto the summer air.
What Ashe did not see, because she never again looked back at the battlefield, was that the changes her thoughts had anticipated had already begun. By the time she had regained the cave there was a new pattern to the sprawling valley floor. Pink thrift did indeed nod and bob beneath the wind, and the scent of sage rose up, delicate and earthy, from its place beneath the trees. A very occasional whiteness suggested anemones or lilies, but that was nothing but an occasional bone that still broke the cover of the soil. Turf and heather smoothed the rougher outlines of the ground, and covered the land like a benediction.
II
I have sat watching her for almost an hour. For hours before I have tended her. She is finally asleep on this bad night, when storms rack the land. I could sleep - I suppose - but there are not many nights still left to me, and I want to make the most of what I have left.
How quickly my treatments for her became a thing of habit. And how quickly and happily she responded to the influence of scent and light. And warmth, and touch, and pleasure. My poor Berrach: for years she lived in prison and now, when she should be free, she is more securely stapled to the wall than ever. She might as well have chains around her arms and ankles, and all those chains would bear the same inscription: Murah. Oh, how I hate that woman. Day after day I see her, and I attend as I must, and I smile with an expression of humility, when what I should really like is to take her up the highest tower in Mercia and just push her off it. It won’t ever happen, but I am at least free to dream. To people like me, dreams are very often all we have.
I am the unnamed and unspoken favourite of the leader of the Mercians. Now that poor mad Calypso is dead - and all the funeral baked meats devoured, the petals strewn and the air dyed with perle smoke - her sister reigns. Berrach. She is a woman but I do sometimes think of her as a child, a slave child, born into one kind of servitude and then ensnared by another.
The candles are burning down, the air is rich with the scent of the oils. I inhale flowering perle, rose and lavender, patchouli and cedar, sandalwood and myrrh. The servants have taken away the warmed cloths with which I bind (and then release) her limbs. I have worked her body until my own was fit to drop. Sweat binds the hair to my skin. I am almost blind from effort, but I can safely stop now. The pain I extracted from Berrach now inhabits my own body, and it will take some time to exorcise myself of it. But that discomfort I can deal with.
If you were to see my lover asleep you would not know her to be tormented by demons. Asleep she looks almost happy. Early in our relationship she would tell me how much she despised magic, holding it to blame for almost all the evil she had ever met. It would be too much of a blow for her to learn that it is the magic that I have learned and that I can bestow that is all that keeps her sane. She must see that Murah’s powers are magical too, even if they do belong to a place of much greater darkness than I have ever seen.
And yet, does the magic I can work keep Berrach sane? More and more I ask myself these questions. Does the time spent free of demons help or hinder her? Do I rescue a drowning woman from the tide, over and over again, only to let the undertow draw her down again the next morning, when Murah - refreshed - comes into her own? I begin to doubt myself, and because I cannot doubt, because I dare not doubt, I believe that the time has come. I love her, and so I must leave her to face her demons alone. Demons? An inaccuracy. Just the one. For ten long years she has been tormented by Murah, and for ten years I have watched her being eaten up from the inside out.
It takes longer and longer now to calm her. Sometimes, before that process is through, she needs love. When the loving is done she sleeps, and only then - for the shortest time - she is free. What I can do for her, the touches I bestow, remind her of her humanity.
As so often happened, she came through the door from her latest battle talks with Murah like a woman possessed. Which I suppose she is. When she comes through the doorway in this frame of mind even I am afraid of her. She never has hurt me, and I don’t think she ever would, but nothing is definite. But for the moment it is enough for her to throw vases and pots. I had to have the pillars bound about with tapestries after she beat her own head bloody against one. On another very bad occasion I drugged her. Not for any nefarious or pleasurable experience, that one: she was angry enough that night and self-destructive to have opened her veins with her own teeth. Murah’s influence had been at its zenith that night. It was the very dark of the moon, and the best time for Murah to do her work. I have seldom hated anyone so fiercely or finally.
Murah never leaves the court for long. I believe this is because she is afraid. She stays on and on like some kind of infection or, worse still but more likely, some kind of parasite that has battened onto Berrach and which has obtained a taste for her blood. Like a tick she will not be pried loose, she is too well embedded. She is furious, always, and as close to insane as anyone or anything I have ever witnessed.
The shadow of Murah lies over this country like a blight. It lies upon Berrach like I have had to put up with the shadow of Murah. She is sleeping now, the most powerful woman in Mercia, bar none. She’s exhausted and only then is she free. I know what Murah did to her, I know what Murah told, and showed her. Berrach should have been a powerful and respected leader of Mercia, and instead she has spent ten years mewed up, in thrall to Murah, herself a thing of nothing but evil, with no redeeming features at all. Sometimes I see Murah’s expression, when she does not know I see, and I understand that it is more than Berrach’s power that she envies. And I know that I would rather die than be with her.
I was born into the world of servitude, and for many years it was all I knew. My family had been taken as fortunes of war; my mother and her sister were sent as slaves to the Mercian court. I began my life as a kitchen slave, a role thought to be less harrowing and better fed than most, but which left me thin and nervous. When I was ten years old they took me away from the kitchens and sent me to serve the Elders of Mercia. This was promotion and I acknowledged the fact. Because I could work hard and did work hard, I earned what possible promotion existed: I was given my own room, and a little time I could call my own. I was no longer a slave; I had become a servant. That may not sound like much of a distinction, but if you’ve ever been a slave you would appreciate the shift.
My work for the Elders cut me off from my family once and for all. That was how it worked: I believe that one of my sisters saw me tread a lonely path away from the kitchens to the towers in which the Elders held court, and life, but I never again saw either my mother or my aunt. I hope that they felt they had redeemed my life through their strict adherence to the laws of Mercia.
For such a long time I was careless of having so little, because it did not seem little to me. I was sometimes unhappy, I was lonely every day of my life, but I was my own counsellor. Fate or fortune had a role for me somewhere: all I had to do was wait, and be obedient, and I would find my path.
When I was fifteen the control of the palace and the country shifted: Calypso, who had only recently become ruler of Mercia, became consort to Laure, who would in time inherit all of Lammor. There were celebrations of a sort, and all sorts of potential changes were voiced: Lammor and Mercia would merge and become powerful and rich beyond dream. But the good times did not last: they barely even began. Soon Mercia and Lammor both were at war. A strange sort of war that changed Mercia and Calypso for ever.
In those dim days Berrach’s existence was not a secret to me, but the whole of my life, and my experiences were a secret to the rest of the world. I knew that if I ever spoke a word of what I knew to anyone, the Elders would have hanged my mother and my aunt in front of me, and then they would have hanged me, too.
Berrach was Calypso’s sister. If I hadn’t already known, I should easily have guessed. Berrach was in many ways like her sister in terms of colouring and build. But Berrach - I knew this as soon as I first saw her - was cleverer by far. And at the same time, not nearly as smart.
Berrach never saw me until Calypso was dead and she had taken up the first hesitant hold over Mercia. I washed and dressed her hands when she had broken her cup. She looked through me and then at me, and then she smiled. And I knew - later - that she wanted me. I went to her room and waited there.
She was not at all as I had thought she would be. I had anticipated roughness, even cruelty, but she was neither rough or harsh, just clumsy and inexperienced. She had spent the earliest part of her life in a prison: how could she have known more or better?
Our first night together was not as one might have expected: suddenly Berrach had power not only over Mercia, she had power over its inhabitants. She stumbled into her room that night to find me there. She knew next to nothing about making love, but she was passionate, her passion being all the more touching because it was so broken and uneven. That first night when she fell asleep wrapped around me, one of her hands holding both my wrists, I understood that she was trying to save face. If we might be woken by servants or Elders, we slept like that. But every night when no-one and no thing could intrude upon us, she curled her back into my stomach, and let me hold her. For that, if for no other reason in the world, I love her.
And as I love her, I must leave her. More than anything in the world I want to stay, but there are things beginning to happen that I should be involved in. I want to meet Ashe. I know that she is isolated, I know that she survived a battlefield that took almost everyone else, and I know that she has become the nursemaid to two children. I have a little more time here, but not much. I must wait for Murah to leave us and then I will leave too. Well, watch me go. I will ride on the wind. But not to Caer Arianrhod, or Teas Dir. I am going to the edge of the world, to a lost battlefield where a fallen warrior nurses two children in a cave. I go to reclaim my own, if it is not too late to do so. I need to get there before Ashe does something rash.
III
Ashe’s second patient slept more easily than Sanna, but her sleep ran much closer to death than Ashe knew. Rose had never been the most adept of warriors: her sister used to tease her, saying that she could not even cross a single room without falling over something, and they were probably right. But Rose didn’t care; it didn’t matter that she was not the greatest warrior, or the most ambitious of her family, her skills lay in other areas.
Despite her lack of fighting skills, Alexis’s training had made itself felt, and Rose had done her best on the day of the battle. Her family had done its best to keep her safe, but before the rocks fell she had been engaged in one-to-one combat with a woman twice her age and weight. A single, glancing blow to the head and she’d gone down in a haze of shifting perspectives, forgetting in an instant all that she was, and all that she had dreamed of being. She was down and bleeding before the rocks began to fall.
Rose had known that she was not well enough to fight, but she had kept that a secret from her family, fighting a fever that had been with her for days. Once down and unconscious, she was overtaken by the cold rain that soaked her, and the frost that followed after. Fever wracked her. Once she had dreamed herself back at home, lying on a fresh bed that was covered with soft sheets and blankets, her family around her, safe, unscathed. Waking from that dream had almost finished her.
Rose’s hallucinations allowed her to see herself as if from a great distance, only one more body amidst many. She saw her former body to be worn by time and nature until nothing but sun-bleached bones remained, about which the heather flourished. Sea pinks poked up through her ribcage, pale purple harebells sprouted through the bones of her fingers, and around her skull sprang up springy, scented coltsfoot. Rose dreamed the sensation of flower stems pushing up through her ribcage and woke again, her eyes filled with tears.
Rescued, she remained senseless until very late the next night, when she woke to find herself lying on a bed of bracken and heather, a warm cloak shielding her from the fangs of cold. The only light in the cave came from the small fire that glowed towards its mouth, and to the side of it, looking out into the silvered darkness, she saw and recognised the figure sat beside it.
I know you, thought Rose. I remember seeing you for the first time long before I was old enough to join my family to fight against the Red Temple. Ashe. My grandmother, one of Caer Arianrhod’s wise women, whispered your name to me that day. You’d come from Lammor, she said me, but that had not been your natural home. You came from much further away, and had once crossed the mountains where the cannibals live. They’d nearly eaten you. You arrived in our country to become Betany’s consort. You and Betany have a daughter who is the same age I was when I first saw you. I remember that my grandmother was a bit shocked at how different you looked from us. But she changed her mind in time. She told me all sorts of stories about you: she said that while you didn’t look it, you were a magical being. She told me that even though Calypso had murdered you, you’d risen up again from the water in which you had bled and drowned.
Rose wanted to cough but her body was not strong enough to let her. She moaned without meaning to, and then felt Ashe’s arms around her, holding her so that she could catch her breath. Ashe then fed her water into which distilled perle had been dropped, and by the time Ashe lowered her back onto the bracken Rose was already sleeping.
Ashe’s touch was instructive: Rose had absorbed from her in the brief contact the knowledge that the rest of her family were dead. She had gone into battle surrounded and buffeted by them, kept safe and kept alive. Now she was alone: even her grandmother had passed away, in the bitterly cold months of the previous winter.
IV
Sanna dreamed that Ashe was a demon who had saved her from the battlefield for the sole purpose of eating her. Why Ashe had not already done so was an issue Sanna’s thoughts skipped blithely round. Ashe was a demon: that was all.
To Sanna’s family and the other occupants of the village on the south slopes, where crops grew well and strongly, and the comforting protection of the Red Temple was at its most benign, it was hardly to be remarked upon that the first rumours of an uprising against the Red Temple were dismissed as no more than passing madness. Before these rumours could do more than irritate, solid fact arrived in the shape of a force come from Caer Arianrhod. Said force presented to the Red Temple an ultimatum: bring out Murah and all the other servants and resign the Red Temple. Said ultimatum rejected, the long war between Caer Arianrhod and the Red Temple commenced. The day after the ultimatum the placid and the non-aggressive servants of the Red Temple emerged unexpectedly to take action. When she came of age, Sanna and her companions were taken from their work in the fields and taught how to fight.
At the beginning of the conflict there had been all sort of unlikely and impossible happenings, the first of which arrived when the elders of Sanna’s village learned that Teinne - who was surely one of their most reliable neighbours - had sworn an undying allegiance to the leader of Caer Arianrhod. The people of Sanna’s village agreed that this partnership must stem from the savage and corrupting influence of Betany’s consort, Ashe, and they spat when they mouthed the name. Said demon must have used dark magic to cloud more than one set of wits with a monstrous magic all her own.
This monstrous and corrupting entity - Ashe - was clearly a demon. A changeling. What else could she possibly be? And while none of Sanna’s village had seen Ashe they could one and all describe her. Who could possibly take for mortal the figure with crooked limbs, dark skin, black hair and burning red eyes? And fangs. And probably claws, too. Ashe had been bred deep within the depths of the earth. She abhorred daylight. She existed on a diet of red wine mixed with the blood of children, though she preferred - vampire-like - to take her nutrition straight from the vein. At first Sanna and her friends had made a game of their fear; as they pounced and stabbed in martial training it was always Ashe they envisaged as they drove the points home. This aspect of training had been cathartic for them all. Now, feverish and rambling, Sanna dreamed that she was again playing the game of Ashe. And losing.
All night Sanna fidgeted and twisted on the narrow heather-filled mattress; there had been times when Ashe had had to hold the girl back from throwing herself onto the floor of the cave. Some of the ramblings that reached Ashe’s ears made that support very painful to maintain. Awake and exhausted, she thought back to her companion and co-leader of the Caer Arianrhod army, the energetic and almost wordless Harper.
Harper had fought in Betany’s army for almost five years before coming to share its leadership with Ashe. The two had met, liked one another, and decided after time spent in the field that they could work together. Betany, through no desire of her own, had never stood by Ashe’s side since their battle against Alexis and Calypso. Ashe had brought about that agreement. “If I die or you die then Callie still has one of us. We can’t risk fighting together. If I die the world goes on, but Caer Arianrhod needs you.” Betany had argued, been forced to agree, and minded horribly. There was no-one beside whom Ashe would have more confidently stood, but she feared the Red Temple. If Betany remained at Caer Arianrhod then the city would stand. Such was Ashe’s superstitious belief, and it stood unquestioned. So it was with Harper, not Alexis or Betany, that Ashe went to war.
Harper’s family had come from far away, in a small country bounded by mountains. Through the centre of their settlements ran a broad river, and there the children learned to swim before learning how to walk. The river dictated to them the fashion of their lives. At Caer Arianrhod, the use of forward planning and extensive storage larders to some extent mitigated the harsher seasons, but in Tir Deas a severe winter could reduce their population by half.
The rigidly-maintained life lived by the occupants of Harper’s village did not suit the woman once she had reached early adulthood. Ambitious without knowing in which direction, anxious for action and change, Harper had left Tir Deas in search of adventure.
She did go back to Tir Deas, once, taking Ashe with her. Ashe was enchanted, not so much by the village proper and its strict tenets, but with the river itself.
Encountering said river in late spring, with the current strong but not overwhelming, it had been all Ashe could do not to strip off and dive straight in. Or not strip off at all… But she was an emissary of Betany’s, and some measure of polite behaviour was assumed.
The river was the strangest place, unlike any other Ashe had seen. The water was utterly clear, and the riverbed - visible in the shallower reaches - shone back up at the observer, blue-white as sunlight on bone. Diving down as far as they could and staying down for as long as they could Ashe and Harper both found a place out of time and thought. The sensation of that descent returned to Ashe often, and it felt to her like the response to a caress. When she dreamed that sensation, she invariably remembered Calliope.
Harper had been Ashe’s first contact with the people of Tir Deas. Betany knew of them, naturally, and had visited on more than a single occasion. Gowdie, whose liking was for a wilder and less sheltered existence than Caer Arianrhod supplied, was very fond of Tir Deas. She thought their world close to perfect; a comparatively simple, seasonal world, around which a fixed community lived out their lives. Much was made of the solstice, there, and in mid-winter the people of Tir Deas marked the need for the return of the sun with an amazing bonfire that could be seen for miles around.
In Caer Arianrhod Harper had found a home. The seasonal, agricultural world did not suit her. Too forceful and too passionate to fit in well at home, while Harper’s family did not encourage her leaving, they made no move to stop her. The woman had made her way to Caer Arianrhod over time, staying with different communities along the way, honing her fighting skills and picking up what she could of the local knowledge. She had arrived in the court one morning, having walked through the whole of the night before. It had been a time of tremendous cold and she had seen that she could walk all night or sleep and die. That had been the worst winter any of them could recall: even in Caer Arianrhod it had snowed. Callie was very small, and Ashe was briefly back from the war.
Harper had been first recruited to work under Alexis, who found the woman to be steady, diligent and almost preternaturally brave. Ashe, who had come to know Harper a little better saw that what Alexis took to be bravery was really an absence of fear. Harper threw herself blindly into whatever situation she found herself, and fought resoundingly once there, but she was not always careful of those she led, and Ashe saw as much. In time it was decided to place Harper with Ashe and not with Alexis. Ashe could see a situation arising, otherwise, in which Harper and Alexis would one day beat each another to death.
Harper had been in love when she left Caer Arianrhod to march with Ashe and an extensive army in what was hoped to be the last episode in the war against the Red Temple. Her most recent lover remained behind, where she was of intrinsic use to Betany, thus enabling Harper to compartmentalize her life. Ashe wondered how she would take the news of Harper’s death in that last, disastrous struggle
Ashe leant back against the cave wall and meditated. For the first time she did not know what course of action to take. It had been made perfectly clear to her that some deeper entity than the Red Temple alone stood in opposition to both powers. This knowledge made a madness of sending in any army at all, as any army could be flattened by the landscape before even drawing their swords. Therefore Ashe did not want to send to Betany for another force, and whatever else she might do, her first loyalty, now, was to care for Rose and Sanna.
Ashe’s dreams over the preceding nights had been nightmares all. In the most common of these she would find herself again and again in a situation where the Red Temple took on human form (though she did not recognise the woman she felt she should have done) and they fought. And every time that Ashe hacked her opponent down, she rose up again, taller and stronger than before. The light in the woman’s eyes was demonic: when Ashe looked at her she was immediately back in the Red Temple proper, where she had seen the various temptations on offer for the flesh-and claw demons they really were. No. Ashe shook her head. She would not send anyone else into that place.
Now that Sanna and Rose were sleeping, Ashe had time to think. To remember the past was to go nowhere of practical use, so Ashe let those memories rush her one last time. The rock fall that had been so sudden and so decisive; bodies falling all around, coating the landscape. And then she had seen Harper, thinking the rock fall another of the Red Temple’s underhand tactics, swinging her sword wildly and madly in the instants before her death. Ashe had been too far away to reach her, but she forced a route between them before Harper died, seeing for one brief moment before death blotted out thought, an expression of agony, fury and resignation. Even as she had absorbed that horror, Ashe too was struck, and sent flying out of the action. When she came round, and staggered to her feet, the birds had already begun work on her former friend.
To be continued in chapter 3