Untitled
Ashe: Book Three
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17 - 18 - 19 - 20 - 21 - 22 - 23 - 24
Chapter 1
Prologue
She stood looking over the battlefield, blood on her hands and face, and she wept. This time there had been no luck either side: in the middle of the fighting, the wind had changed direction and the earth had shifted beneath them. And it had been from within the earth itself that the rocks had come, rocks that fell impartially. At one moment there had been hundreds of them fighting, Ashe sharing the forward movement with Harper, each commanding a half of the force, and then there was nothing but a sound of ripping earth and a mass of fallen bodies. Ashe had been one of the first to be struck by a rock and sent flying, but the ground against which she had fallen had been softened by the days of rain (the battlefield had become a quagmire) so although she had lost consciousness for some time, she had retained her life. Harper and her forces had not. After that, night had fallen like one more rock, and Ashe had no memory of leaving the field.
“Please…? Is there any more water?”
“I don’t know.” She reached out a cautious hand into the utter darkness. There was no light of any kind, and there had been no time for her to find the necessities for a fire. Her fingers reached around the neck of the flask and she judged it to be less than a third full. Not enough for them both. Well, she could manage without; her companion couldn’t. She said, “There’s enough left. Can you take the flask or shall I hold it for you?”
“I… can’t move.”
“Then I’ll hold the flask for you. Don’t worry. And don’t drink too quickly. Sip it if you can. Alright?” She managed to raise the girl’s head a little and then used her thigh to provide a pillow. It was hard to ensure that she did not spill much water, but a little splashed onto the hard stone floor of the cave.
She heard the girl swallow, and tilted the flask up. Then she lowered it again.
“That’s much better. Thank you.”
“Let me be sure that I’ve got the cork back in. Tomorrow, as soon as it’s light, I’ll find us some more water. I can hear the river; it can’t be far away.”
“You can hear the river from here?”
“I’ve got good ears.”
“Better than mine. Why is it so dark?”
“It’s the dead of night and the black of the moon, and we’re lying in the shadow of the mountains; in the morning we’ll be able to look around.” Ashe wasn’t comfortable in the utter darkness: it felt as if she might be any minute swallowed up by it.
“If I’m still here by morning.”
“Of course you’ll still be here.”
“When I couldn’t see, I thought I was dying, or had gone blind. Will you still be here?”
“I won’t leave you here alone.”
“Do you promise? I know that I shouldn’t ask you… We might not even be on the same side.” The girl must be very young, thought Ashe, to ask for such a promise, let alone to expect it would be made.
“In the night, in the dark, all sides look the same. Just as all cats are black in the night. But I’m certainly not going to argue semantics with you: I’m too tired for debate.” She was, too, and heartsick with the events of that year.
“How did you get here? Were you with the assaulting force when the rocks rained down?”
“Yes.” They had been in the thick of it. The rocks had decimated both sides of the battle.
“Did the rocks…?”
“Hit me? Yes.” It was an effort to move, an effort even to speak. She hadn’t yet looked to see how much damage had been done. Hadn’t wanted to know, and now it was far too dark to see. “I was lucky. Those around me went down like reaped barley. The slope of the hill caught us at a disadvantage.”
A much longer pause. Ashe didn’t realise what information she had just given away. The pause only ended when the girl said, with ice in her voice: “You’re one of the those fighting against the Rule of the Red Temple.”
“Yes, I am.”
“My whole family, and all the families around us came to the defence of the Rule. You and I are on opposite sides.”
A deep sigh. “People are fallible: they make mistakes. Those who ran the Red Temple fooled a lot of people for a very long time.”
“You’re saying that my family were wrong to fight and die in defence of the Rule of the Red Temple?”
“I’m saying that anyone fighting in the defence of the Rule is… misguided, to put it as kindly as possible. Misguided. Also wrong.”
“If I could, I’d fight you. I would certainly challenge you.” The voice that came out of the darkness was spiky with fear but tinged with bravado. The girl couldn’t stand on her own two feet, let alone pick up a weapon.
Ashe leaned back against the cave wall and wondered if fate would ever imprison her with someone she might get on with. It would be nice but it seemed unlikely. The last time she was trapped with someone this young and this opinionated was when she’d met Coll and Fallon. And look how that had turned out.
“Would you? That’s undeniably brave of you, though naive. But for all I know you’re the undefeated champion of whichever city you hail from. Of course, you’ll have to get fit again first. Tell you what: wait until you’re walking again and then challenge me. For the moment it would be better for you not to get agitated: your body has enough to deal with without you exacerbating that fever. Besides, if you kill me, and take the water flask for yourself, you will die. Would that make you feel satisfied? Is the defence of the Rule really so important to you?” Ashe’s voice trailed off; all she wanted to do was sleep.
“My family lived in the shadow of the Red Temple; their rule blessed our crops and kept us safe. The Red Temple kept us in clothes and food and safety. And when the accursed ones rose up against the Rule we were honoured to at last repay something of the debt we owe to the Temple.”
I should have burned it down when I had the chance, thought Ashe. And if I get to live that’s exactly what I’ll do, even if I burn with it. “I suspect that your crops would have done well enough anyway: those valleys were blessed with good irrigation and plentiful sunlight. And as for clothes and food and safety… Oh, who cares?” She didn’t. “Before we go further down this road, I should mention to you that - in all probability - the clothes the Red Temple bestowed upon you were stripped from the bodies of those they’d conned, invited in, entertained…,” (or not: Ashe thought of poor long-dead Hero) “..and then murdered. I just hope they never gave you meat to eat.” That was an image her nightmares loved to re-visit. She shook her head against the idea. “Anyway, all that aside, if I’m to believe you, you’d die defending the Rule?”
“I’d be proud to do so.”
“Then I consider myself challenged. And once the Red Temple is defeated - or not - I will meet you, and we will fight. If I make it out the other side,” she added, thoughtfully. “But for now I’m tired, even if you aren’t, and I need some sleep. Tomorrow I’ll get water. And maybe by tomorrow the war will be over.” Slim chance of that, she thought, rolling onto her back. It’s been ten years since you inadvertently began the battle. And I really am so very tired. “Do you think you might be able to sleep?”
“I… can’t sleep. I hurt too much.” The girl’s voice had lost all its arrogance. Now it was the voice of a child in pain, and although Ashe wanted to ignore it, she could not. She rolled out of the doze she had just embraced and put out her hand.
“Let me feel your forehead. Ah, hell, you’re feverish again. You’re sweating badly. Damn. Here, have some more water. And remember to sip - ”
But the fever, or the fervour of her belief systems, was driving the child into a state approaching hysteria. “I won’t be touched by you! And I won’t accept more help from a defiler of the Rule. I don’t want your water. I’d rather die.”
Ashe sighed hard. She was too old and too tired to waste any more time in reasoning and said, simply, “Then I’m afraid you’ll go thirsty,” arranged her cloak so that it comprised pillow and cover both, and directed herself to sleep.
But of course she was wide awake. Something in the girl’s anger had not so much cut as stung her, and Ashe thought she had grown beyond such things.
She closed her eyes tight and then re-opened them, but the darkness was equally profound either way. With closed eyes and aching limbs she listened to the distant voice of the river. She could hear the water touch the tall reeds and withdraw again, felt the light riverweed twist and turn beneath the surface. She thought of Betany, of Calliope and the dark world beyond the reach of the cave. She thought of the long expanse of war and regretted it entirely.
Only then did Ashe sleep.
*****
As dawn broke over Caer Arianrhod, Betany hurried through the palace, which had become half-hospital almost a decade before, when the war with the Red Temple had created so many casualties that drastic action in all directions needed to be taken. She had a further council of war that morning, and expected Alexis to report back on the current situation. But nothing was going according to plan. If anything had, she would not be on one side of the world while Ashe was on the other. She would not be wondering if their daughter would recognise Ashe when Ashe returned. As of course she would do. It was just that – “Your Highness.” Betany spun around and Alexis stood before her, an Alexis as much changed as the rest of them. “I know that we aren’t meant to meet until – “
“Oh, as if I care.” Betany hugged Alexis hard and then let her go. “Have you heard anything – ”
“Of Ashe’s army?” It was really Harper and Ashe’s army, but neither Alexis nor Betany ever called it that, except in front of Harper. “The only report I’ve had is old. They were meeting the forces of Red Temple on the lower mountain slopes. Harper’s last message told me that and little more. The silence worries me, of course, but by the end of today we should know something.” News now travelled more quickly: there were always riders ready to relay messages between the different lands.
Betany went to the window and looked out onto the courtyard. Once said courtyard had been a place of constitution, the ground paved with patterned mosaics of every kind, each illustrating a separate season. Now snow lay in neglected heaps and lines had been drawn over the mosaics, directing newcomers to the hospital wards, the palace proper and the weaponry. Alexis, now based at Caer Arianrhod, was in charge of training up the new forces to fight in the old war.
“If… If something had happened to Ashe, we would know about it.”
“Yes. I can’t imagine a Guardian passing and us not know. But I’ve seen Ashe come back from near-death. Hell, I’ve seen her come back from death in all its glory, and that was after I helped send her there.” Alexis remained ashamed of that slaughter. Ashamed of Ashe’s second death, about which Betany still knew nothing. Alexis shivered, ashamed of herself and of her past. Her time with Calypso, now dead for almost ten years, seldom came to mind. Strange to think that such a person should be so long dead and so seldom remembered.
“Alexis, that was long ago. If Ashe can manage never to mention it, I should have thought that you could do the same.”
“I’m sorry.” Alexis’s shoulders drooped. She looked suddenly much older and grimly tired. “I had forgotten it. I just have trouble sometimes believing that Ashe can have forgiven me.”
“She has, believe me. But if it makes you happy, when she’s next at court I promise you to bring the subject up. ”
“Uh,” Alexis shook her head. “I think I’d rather you didn’t.”
“So let it go. And we meet in an hour. Is that still alright? I need to check in on Callie.”
“Great. Well, when you do, would you please remind her that she’s too young to go to war.”
“Whereas Skye’s never seen trying to sneak out onto the training grounds.”
“Alright. You attend to your daughter, Your Highness,…”
“And you attend to yours. In an hour.”
*****
Wonderful to wake to light. Less wonderful to wake cold and stiff, and to look out over a sea of silvered frost. Ashe shook the flask and found to her dismay that what little was left had frozen. Oh, to be home beside Betany in a warm bed or beside a good fire, with nothing more important to do than spend the day in one another’s company. Ashe sighed. But with light came vision and the need for action.
The girl who lay on the other side of the cave was sleeping very deeply. Had she been capable of the movement she would have dragged herself further from Ashe, but she was far too badly hurt for such actions. Ashe looked down at the pale face and at the dried blood that decorated her hands and clothes. The wound she had been unable to work with in the darkness had bled in the night. The child had pushed her hands against it to stem the flow. But she had not cried out, and Ashe had slept on. Disgusted at her own unconscious negligence Ashe knelt beside the sleeping girl and listened to her breathing. The girl was sleeping more deeply than Ashe would have liked, but the fact was useful: she picked up both their flasks and left the cave.
As she scrambled and slid down the bank to the valley floor Ashe wondered how the hell they had ever reached the cave in the first place. Her memory of the previous day was faulty. The fighting had been brutal and unrelenting, and the rock fall had been something from nightmare, with the earth itself spewing up boulders that came cascading down. If the action had been the work of the Red Temple it had been an impartial attack: both sides had been knocked out.
Ashe had cuts on her hands by the time she finished sliding down to the floor of the valley. She thought: I’m getting too old to be messing about in the undergrowth in order to save a girl who already hates me and would like to see me dead. Hell, it’s more than a decade since I fell through the doors of the Red Temple, and if there was anything to be gained in confessing how much I wish I’d never found it, I’d go ahead and do just that.
She dusted down her clothes on reaching the base of the valley, and checked for her sword. Nothing was safe and no-place was certain, and the other way around. Ashe had spent the best part of ten years trying to put an end to the Red Temple, and she had as many scars to prove it. Since that one strange meeting with one other of the Guardians, she had heard nothing from them. She sensed - without proof of any kind - that there was more than a single war waging. If so, then the fighting was on two separate planes, and Ashe couldn’t imagine a good conclusion to either. She felt the previous ten years’ worth of fighting in her legs and back as she made her way to the river’s edge, and as she knelt down and touched her hands to the water, she felt the same sense of comfort and peace that the element bestowed. While she doubted that she would ever see Calliope and Sam again, she seemed to sense their presence that morning, and while the touch of the water was cold, it was almost oddly comforting. If she was wrong - if there was nothing kindly in the manner in which the water lapped at her boots - she really didn’t want to know.
Standing up again and gazing all about her, Ashe thought that it must have been a glacier that carved out the valley, which was broad and u-shaped. She remembered some things from her early education, though they seldom did her much good. Yes, a couple of million years ago the glacier had eased out the shape in which she stood, and as it had receded, so it had left in its wake a thousand scattered rocks, huge and jagged. Ashe had had no choice but to cross the broad and essentially cover-less expanse of flat ground between her vantage point and the river proper. She had used what few rocks there were to take a bearing, and she was aware of no sense of threat. The valley was almost silent, which made no sense at all. There were few trees – those that existed were short and had been twisted into tortured shapes by the winds that blew – and no birds. Not even so much as a raven, or a solitary buzzard gliding by.
If the world had moved on as it should have done – and Ashe had a very clear-cut idea of how she would have liked the world to be – then she’d be happily situated at Caer Arianrhod, learning from Betany how to rule a country, and watching Callie grow up. At this rate, thought Ashe, filling the flasks, she won’t know who I am by the time I get home. It was a short, cold and biting thought, and it made her shiver.
It was hard to leave the river’s edge. At least there no tainted air could harm her. The day before, when the battle was at its most ferocious, the air had changed and become thick and gritty and poisonous. The reeds shifted in the winter wind, their song a dolorous chorus. Ashe stared for one last instant at the water, letting her focus relax and shift, thinking of Sam, thinking of Calliope. She even touched the water one last time, letting her fingertips brush the roof of the river, and closed her eyes momentarily to imagine that she felt Calliope’s touch against her skin. Then she returned to being a soldier, shook away sentiment, and got on with the task in hand.
Hard in the biting wind that sprang up to do what she had to do, to strip off her upper garments in order to establish just how bad were her own injuries. Gritting her teeth Ashe prised apart her layered clothing, reluctant to know the worst, and stared briefly and coldly, at the injury received the previous day. The damage done by the jagged rock that had struck her looked ugly and fresh. The pain at the moment of impact, together with the rock’s own force, had sent her flying. Lucky in the violence of landing not to bite off her own tongue, but it was hard, looking at ragged flesh and dried and fresh blood, to feel any great sense of cheerfulness or relief. The smell of the blood made her think back to that awful room at the Red Temple, where the cloying scent of burning petals and hot blood had combined in a fetid odour. At least now the air smelled clean once more, a million miles from the stink of the Temple.
The water was colder than death, and the river’s surface was dotted with chunks of ice. In stiller patches and in the long cold night before, parts of the river must have frozen over altogether. Ashe got clumsily to her feet and made her way back through the icy morning to the cave and its irritable inhabitant.
Her enemy lay almost still on the floor of the cave. In the daylight Ashe saw that the girl was even younger than she had at first thought. She was still breathing, though her chest moved only slightly at each inhalation and exhalation. Ashe shrugged at the cold of the morning and took off her own cloak. She made up a proper bed for the girl, wrapping her cloak around heather torn up from the banks outside to serve as a mattress. Once the girl was more comfortably settled Ashe checked over her injuries. The deepest wound looked more ugly than before, and the edges gaped. Ashe had made up a patchy but effective wash with which to clean the wound, which she then dressed.
The girl woke, but she was barely conscious and knew nothing of Ashe. She did drink a little of the water, but could not speak. Ashe shook her head and left the cave for the battlefield.
The cave was oddly positioned in the low bank that separated the valley proper from the battlefield. When she had glanced up at it from the riverside she wondered again how she had ever found it in the first place: it was almost invisible to view. She had no time to ponder the issue but set herself the task of trudging down the bank.
She heard the battlefield before it came into view: rooks and ravens and crows were all at work. Jackdaws too littered the ground, lifting into the air only to screech and squabble before returning to their choice of carrion. The sound that accompanied their work made Ashe’s stomach lurch and turn. Everywhere the rocks lay, at least a thousand of them. No wonder they had annihilated virtually all the field. Where there was blood on the ground it had mixed with the mud and rain and then frozen, so although the sight of the plentiful dead might be abhorrent, Ashe was spared the metallic stink of blood and incipient decay. It seemed a very small mercy.
The day of the battle the winter rains had racked the site. The water had poured down from dawn until dusk, and it had made the muddy ground cling like chains to the feet of all. Ashe looked around for answers and found none: she could only assume that the earth had simply opened, spat out its worst and closed up again. At least today there was no rain. Today, but for the cawing of the birds, the world was silent. There was no arctic wind to come blazing over the hills. Ashe shivered and wondered what she would have given - just then - for a bath and a change of clothes. She knew that she must find another cloak to replace her own, and while it was only sensible to strip one from one of the dead, she was very reluctant to do so. Had there been a camp she could have pillaged, she would have been much happier. But no camps remained: the rocks had razed them both to the ground.
But the cloak she found and took was a good one: a cloak for fighting in, leather one side and warmly lined. If she stuck to it, perhaps sooner or later she could wash away the stink of blood inadvertently woven into its fibres.
Contact with the cloak brought Ashe’s attention back to the task in hand. Water was no longer a problem, and, sewn into the lining of her own cloak and not at first sight visible, she had a collection of herbs and powders that - appropriately brewed and applied - should offer an ease to pain and an encouragement to healing. Rhea would have been proud of her, but the memory of the wise-woman, transitory as it was, did not please Ashe. Rhea was anathema. Ashe never wanted to see her again. Think of something else, she told herself, or someone.
Alright, what else could she find and did she need if she was to take care of the child and then set off toward Caer Arianrhod, half a world away? Well, horses would have helped, but they were all gone, frightened away by the rock fall, so walking was all she could do. What little remained of the camps was mostly wrecked and useless, but she was lucky enough to find a tent that she could mend, a small supply of food, and - most usefully - a cooking pot. These discoveries buoyed Ashe up beyond all measure, but her cheerfulness lasted only the shortest time. She had thought herself inured to scenes of violence, and might have missed this one forever, had she not tripped, and almost fallen over a ridge of earth and stones.
On a little slope that slipped to the west away from the battlefield proper, there lay a family group. Ashe would not have recognised any of them, so twisted and torn were they, stained with mud and blood in equal measure, had she not noticed their shared affectation (Betany had once teased them over it) of wearing silver fastenings to their cloaks, and silver buckles to their belts. They had died within feet of one another, and just out of reach, three generations of one great Caer Arianrhod family, now reduced to nothing by the process of war.
Betany had known and loved these people, which meant that Ashe respected and valued them too. But what snapped her reserve and sent her down to her knees in the mud, to mourn for them as she might have wished to mourn for all, was the knowledge that they had followed her, Ashe - someone from another land and not in any way known to them - to this empty, desolate place. They had loved Betany, but it was not by Betany’s side that they had fought and died.
A lifetime away, and entirely forgotten by Ashe, she had built a cairn on a mountainside, which activity had killed her. The action had put Teinne on the side of Caer Arianrhod when war broke out. Now, good sense apart, and while she knew that what she did would make no difference to anyone, Ashe brought them back to lie together. The dead might not feel the sentiment, but she could not have done otherwise, and she could not bury the whole field. Her eyes were so blinded with tears that she could see very little, and it was only when she reached for the last of them, the youngest, that she detected a trace of movement.
To find life in the midst of death was unlikely enough, but Ashe had just done so twice.
The amount of gore covering this one was what had blinded her to the chance of life, but now she felt for injuries with the gentlest of touches and could find nothing but a bloody scalp. Something had hit this one hard and very fast and she had gone down so violently and so quickly that those around her must have thought her dead. That would have made them fight all the more fiercely, but death had taken them all the same. She took water and poured it gently over the girl’s forehead and scalp until she had found the wound and washed it clean. She felt with cautious fingers but found no injury to the skull. Alright. She put together a kind of hurdle onto which she placed child and pack, and set off. It seemed to take forever to regain the cave. In the distance the sky was cloudy and oppressive, and Ashe feared for a storm. She needed time and she needed light, and neither seemed to be forthcoming.
On reaching the cave she took a moment to register how quickly her perceptions had shifted. Only that morning she had thought the cave bare and unwelcoming, but now, coming to it from the cold and the wet (it had begun to rain) it was as comforting as a bath and change of clothes would have been.
Now she had two sickbeds, two children to look after. Life would be easier if she’d been the sole survivor. Alone she could have set off in a fixed direction, to Caer Arianrhod, or to the Temple itself, to do her best to burn it to the ground. Now there were new priorities: she lit a fire just inside the cave and heated water while she began to unpick the inside of her own cloak.
Ashe had learned a lot through the years of war. In addition to the treatments she had learned she understood the basics of anatomy and medicine, biology and first-aid. She knew how to judge when life was almost extinct, and could recognise when life should not be maintained. Ashe had been prepared to find - on regaining the cave - that the injured girl might have on that expression of emptiness that appears when the body begins to crumble, but instead she had found her sleeping peacefully. Soon the water was hot enough and she began to blend a little of it with one powder to make a dressing for their wounds. That done and applied, she emptied out the saucepan and began to brew a soup they could all share, even if she had to feet it to them. Her stomach growled mournfully, empty since the previous day. Until that moment hunger had been the least of her concerns, but now it struck Ashe that even she had to eat.
To be continued in chapter 2