Part 117 (1/2)

Floria del Guiz looked down at her red-brown hands. She said, ”What did you see? What were you hunting?”

”A hart.” Ash stared at the albino body on the mud. ”A white hart, crowned with gold. Sometimes Hubert's Hart.6 Not this, not until the end.”

”You hunted a myth. I made it real.” Floria lifted her hands to her face, and sniffed at the drying blood. She raised her eyes to Ash's face. ”It was a myth and I made it real enough for dogs to scent. I made it real enough to kill.”

”And that makes you d.u.c.h.ess?”

”It's in the blood.” The woman surgeon snuffled a laugh back, wiped her br.i.m.m.i.n.g eyes with her hands, and left smears of blood across her cheeks. She edged closer to Ash as she stood staring down at the hart, which none of the huntsmen approached for butchering.

More and more of the hunt staggered uphill to the thorn-sided clearing below the crag.

”It's Burgundy,” Floria said, at last. ”The blood of the Dukes is in all of us. However much, however little. It doesn't matter how far you travel. You can never escape it.”

”Oh yeah. You're dead royal, you are.”

The sarcasm brought Floria back to something of herself. She grinned at Ash, shook her head, and rapped a knuckle on the Milanese breastplate. ”I'm pure Burgundian. It seems that's what counts.”

”The blood royal. So.” Ash laughed, weakly, from the same overwhelming relief, and pointed a steel-covered finger at the hart's body. ”That's a pretty shabby-looking miracle, for a royal miracle.”

Floria's face became drawn. She spared a glance for the growing throng, mutely waiting. The wind thrummed through the whitethorn. ”No. You've got it wrong. The Bugundian Dukes and d.u.c.h.esses don't perform miracles. They prevent them being performed.”

”Prevent-”

”I know, Ash. I killed the hart, and now I know.”

Ash said sardonically, ”Finding a hart, out of season, in a wood with no game; this isn't a miracle?”

Olivier de la Marche came a few steps closer to the hart. His battle-raw voice said, ”No, Demoiselle-Captain, not a miracle. The true Duke of Burgundy -or, as it now seems, the true d.u.c.h.ess - may find the myth of our Heraldic Beast, the crowned hart, and from it bring this. Not miraculous, but mundane. A true beast, flesh and blood, as you and I.”

”Leave me.” Floria's voice was sharp. She gestured the Burgundian n.o.ble to go back, staring up at him with bright eyes. He momentarily bowed his head, and then stepped back to the edge of the crowd and waited.

Watching him go, colour caught Ash's eye. Blue and gold. A banner bobbed over the heads of the crowd.

Shamefaced, Rochester's sergeant plodded out to stand beside Ash with her personal banner. Willem Verhaecht and Adriaen Campin shouldered their way through to the front row, faces taking on identical expressions of relief as they saw her; and half the men at their backs were from Euen Huw's lance, and Thomas Rochester's.

In all her confusion, Ash was conscious of a searing relief. No a.s.sault on the Visigoth camp, then. They're alive. Thank Christ.

”Tom - where are the f.u.c.king Visigoths! What are they doing?”

Rochester rattled off: ”'Bout a bow-shot back. Messenger came up. Their officers are in a right panic over something, boss-”

He broke off, still staring at the company surgeon.

Floria del Guiz knelt down by the white hart. She touched the rip in its white coat.

”Blood. Meat.” She held her red hands up to Ash. ”What the Dukes do . . . I do ... isn't a negative quality. It makes, it - preserves. It preserves what's true, what's real. Whether...” Floria hesitated, and her words came slowly: ”Whether what's real is the golden light of the Burgundian forest, or the splendour of the court, or the bitter wind that bites the peasant's hands, feeding his pigs in winter. It is the rock upon which this world stands. What is real.”

Ash stripped off her gauntlet and knelt beside Floria. The coat of the hart was still warm under her fingers. No heartbeat; the flow of blood from the death-wound had stopped. Beyond the body, not flowers, but muddy earth. Above her, not roses, but winter thorn and rowan.

Making the miraculous mundane.

Ash said slowly, ”You keep the world as it is.”

Looking up into Floria's face, she surprised anguish.

”Burgundy has its bloodline, too. The machines bred Gundobad's child,” Floria del Guiz said. ”And this is an opposite. The Machines want a miracle to wipe out the world, and I - I make it remain sure, certain, and solid. I keep it what it is.”

Ash took Floria's cold wet hand between her own hands. She felt an immediate withdrawal that was not physical: only Floria giving her a look that said, What happens now? Everything is different between us.

Sweet Christ. d.u.c.h.ess.

Slowly, her eyes on Floria's face, Ash said, ”They had to breed a Faris. So that they could attack Burgundy the only way it can be attacked: on the physical, military level. And when Burgundy is removed . . . then they can use the Faris. Burgundy is only the obstacle. Because 'winter will not cover all the world' - won't cover us here, not while the Duke's bloodline prevents the Faris making a miracle.”

”And now there's no Duke, but there is a d.u.c.h.ess.”

Ash felt Floria's hands trembling in hers. The hazy overcast cleared, the white autumn sun throwing the shadows of thorns sharp and clear on the mud. Five yards beyond the sprawled body of the white hart, rank upon rank of people waited patiently. The men of the Lion company watched their commander, and their surgeon.

Floria, her eyes slitted against the sudden brilliance of the sun, said, ”I do what Duke Charles did. I preserve; keep us quotidian. There'll be no Wild Machines' 'miracles' - as long as I'm alive.”

Message: #350 (Anna Longman) Subject: Ash Date: 15/12/00 at 03 . 23 a.m.

From: [email protected] Anna - I know. It seems unbelievable. But it appears to be nothing less than the truth. No previous survey shows this sea trench. Not before we started looking here.

Isobel brought one of the tech people to the meeting I've just come out of, and showed us downloaded satellite surveys. Not that there are many, the Tunisian military being as sensitive as any other military - but what we have are unambiguous.

Shallow water here. No deep trenches below the 1000-metre mark.

And yet, our ROVs are down there now, as I'm typing this.

I don't like this, Anna. The Middle East and the Mediterranean have been far too closely surveyed to say, now, that this could all be down to lost or misinterpreted evidence, distorted a.n.a.lysis, fake doc.u.ments, or fraud.

I cannot genuinely deny this. According to recent satellite scans, and according to British Admiralty charts, the seabed where we found the trench used to be flat. Not silt, not a trench; nothing but rock. G.o.d knows, given the submarine warfare in the Mediterranean sixty years ago, the Admiralty charts are pretty substantive! It isn't a geological feature anyone could have missed.

I have just suggested, in Isobel's meeting, that we look for seismograph readings: there may have been a recent earthquake. She tells me that's what she's been doing over the last ten days: pulling in all the favours she has with various colleagues, to check the most up-to-date satellite reports and geological surveys.

No earthquake. Not so much as an undersea tremor.

I'll post to you again when I have had some time to think this over - it's only been a few hours since Isobel called her meeting; she and her physicist colleagues are still at it, talking into the small hours of the morning.

I went up on deck. Looked into blackness, tasted wet air. Tried to come to terms with this idea - a hundred ideas going around in my own mind - no: I'm not making sense.

One line of Florian's haunts me. Mediaeval Latin translation can be h.e.l.l - is 'dn' an abbreviation for _dominus_ or _domina_: masculine or feminine? Or it is in fact 'dm', for _deum_? Context is all, handwriting is all; and even then a sentence may have two or three perfectly viable different translations, only *one* of which is what the author wrote!

I _know_ the 'hand' of Fraxinus/Sible Hedingham: I have for eight years. I can't realistically make it read anything else.

What Floria says *is* ”You hunted a myth. I made it real. ”

- Pierce * * *