Part 130 (1/2)
”She had a baby-?” Ash stopped and blushed.
”Just some man she f.u.c.ked one night,” the surgeon said contemptuously. ”He wasn't her lover. We had fights about that. We had more fights about Joseph - the baby. I was jealous, I suppose. She gave so much time to him. We were in the cells for two months. Joseph died, of pneumonia. Neither of us could cure him. The day after that, they took Esther out and chained her up and burned her. The day after that, I had a message that Tante Jeanne had paid my ransom: I was free to go. So long as I left Rome. The abbot there said they'd have to burn male sodomites, but what did it matter what a woman did? So long as I didn't practise medicine again.”
Floria's words dropped into the cold air of the chapel, delivered with a numb bravado that Ash recognised. We do that, all of us. After a field of battle.
”My aunt's been creeping round me since I got back,” Florian said. ”Bishop, did she tell you that the last thing I did when I was here in August was punch her? I laid her out in the public street. I'm not surprised she's gone behind my back to you. But did she tell you? - she could have paid Esther's ransom too. She just chose not to.”
”Perhaps . . .” John of Cambrai was evidently struggling; he stared away at the mosaics. ”Perhaps there was too little money for her to do anything but rescue family?”
”Esther was 'family'!” Florian's tone lowered. ”My father wasn't dead then. She could have written to him, if she wanted money.”
”And the Abbot of Rome,” John went on, ”would have been looking to burn Jews - if I remember the time right, there were bread riots; blaming it all on a Jewish woman would have been an acceptable crowd-pleaser. He would have been more wary of burning a Burgundian woman who had been born n.o.ble, and who evidently had n.o.ble family still alive. No matter how she was behaving at the time.”
Seeing his face, how he simultaneously seemed to want to hold out his hands to Floria, and to back away, Ash understood.
He's a man who chases women. But he can't chase Florian: Florian's not interested in men. I'm not sure it's a church thing at all with his Grace of Cambrai.
As if to confirm it, John of Cambrai gave her a conspiratorial glance. It lasted no more than a second, but it was gravely and heteros.e.xually flirtatious, invited complicity; said, without words, you and I are not like this, woman. We're normal.
Momentarily intimidated by green robes and rich embroidery, Ash looked away.
G.o.dfrey would never have said any of that. Robes don't make a priest.
She shrugged one arm out from under her cloak, and put it around Florian's shoulders. ”That poisonous old cow's been mischief-making, but so what? I was there: Florian made the hart. She's d.u.c.h.ess. If Jeanne Chalon doesn't like it, that's just tough s.h.i.+t.”
”If she spreads it around,” Floria started.
”So what if she does?”
”In the company, last summer-”
”That's soldiers. And they're all right with you now.” Ash brought her other arm out from under her cloak, and put it on Florian's other shoulder, turning the woman to face her. She spoke with great intensity, driving her point home. ”Understand this. Olivier de la Marche will do what you say. So will his captains. And there's an army outside Dijon. Internal dissent would be suicidal right now, but the chances are that it won't happen. People have got other things to worry about. And if there are some people who still want to make trouble - then you put them in jail, or you hang them off the city walls. This isn't about them approving of you. This is about you being their d.u.c.h.ess. That means keeping everybody rounded up and pointed in the same direction. Okay?”
Whether it was Ash's intensity, or the sheer confusion on the bishop's face, Florian started nervously to smile.
”The Burgundian army has provosts,” Ash added, ”and the Viscount-Mayor has constables. Neither of them have them for the fun of it. Use them. If it comes to it, the bishop here can be 'retired' under house arrest to the monastery up in the north-east quartier.”
Bishop John approached. ”Understand me.”
Ash, not sure how much of his change of tone was a response to the thought of military power, backed off.
He reached out and took Floria's hands. ”Madame cher d.u.c.h.esse, if I'm aware of your - spiritual difficulties - then equally I'm aware that I have . . . difficulties of my own. Whatever you are, I am your father in the church, and your servant in the duchy.”
The rich colours of the mosaics behind him glinted, in the s.h.i.+fting light. Now that he was next to her, Ash realised that Bishop John stood an inch or two shorter than Floria.
”What you are is our d.u.c.h.ess.” He shook both her hands in his grip, for emphasis. ”G.o.d save us, Floria del Guiz, you're my brother's successor. If G.o.d lets you take the ducal crown, it isn't for any of us to disobey His will.”
”Crown? The crown doesn't matter. What does a piece of carved horn matter!” Florian freed her hands and took a step forward. She made a fist; thumped it against her chest. ”I know what I am, but I don't know why I am, or how! Suppose you tell me? You expect me to come back to a city I haven't seen since I was a child, and do this? You expect me to come back to strangers, and do this? You tell me what's going on!”
Her breathless voice fell flat against the walls, the mosaics deadening the acoustics. A whisper of sound went up the brick-lined shaft, towards the grating and the air. As if they stood in the bottom of a dull, soundless well.
When John of Cambrai did not answer, the surgeon became icy.
”I haven't taken communion since I left the Empty Chair. I don't intend to start now. There's not going to be a ma.s.s tonight; you can tell the acolytes to go home and get some sleep.” Florian shrugged. ”If you want a vigil, tell me why the Dukes of Burgundy are like they are. Tell me what I've been stuck with. Otherwise I'll just curl up in the corner and sleep. I've slept worse places on campaign: Ash will tell you.”
”Yeah, but you were drunk then,” Ash said, before she thought.
”Madame d.u.c.h.esse!” the Bishop protested.
Florian said something to him. Ash took no notice. The s.h.i.+fting light on the shrine caught her eye, under the far barrel-vault, and her vision finally adjusted enough to let her make out the dim, painted carvings.
She turned away from the bishop and surgeon, walked straight past the plain altar, to the shrine. Marble, painted and gilded, glowed in the light of thigh-thick beeswax candles.
”Christus Viridia.n.u.s!” she blurted out. And then, as both of them looked at her, startled, she pointed. ”That's the Prophet Gundobad!”
”Yes.” Bishop John's demure features showed no expression that might not be a trick of the s.h.i.+fting light. ”It is.”
Florian stared. ”Why do you have a shrine to a heretic?”
”The shrine is not Gundobad's,” the bishop said, moving forward. He pointed to one of the minor figures. ”The shrine is Heito's. Sieur Heito was Duke Charles's ancestor. And will have been yours, your Grace, it now becomes apparent.”
”I didn't expect to find him here.” Ash reached up and touched the cold carved marble of Gundobad's sandal and foot. ”Florian, the Duke was going to tell me before he died. I suggest you ask the bishop, now . . . 'Why Burgundy?'”
Turning, she caught an expression on Bishop John's world-weary face -something approaching excitement. Mildly, he said, ”The d.u.c.h.ess brought you, demoiselle, but it is her decision as to how she spends her vigil. Remember that, and show due respect.”
”Oh, I respect Florian.” Ash put her fists on her hips, mentally closing ranks without a second thought. ”I've watched her puke her guts out, outside the surgeon's tent, and come back in and take a longbow arrow out of a man's lung-”
Of course, it would be better if she hadn't got drunk in the first place.
”-I don't need a gang of Burgundians to tell me about Florian!”
”Quiet,” Florian said, with something of the blurred chill in her eyes that she had, covered in hart's blood, at the end of the hunt. ”Bishop - you told me what Charles of Valois brought here. You told me what Duke Philip brought. You didn't ask me what I've brought.”
”Questions,” Bishop John said. ”You come with questions.”
”So do I,” Ash muttered, and when the b.a.s.t.a.r.d son of Philippe le Bon looked at her, she jerked her thumb at the shrine. ”Do you know what you've got there?”
”That is Gundobad, prophet of the Carthaginians, at the moment of his death.”
”Gundobad the Wonder-Worker,” Ash said steadily. ”I know about Gundobad. I know a lot about Gundobad, since I went south. Leofric and the Wild Machines, between them - I know what really happened, seven hundred years ago. Gundobad made the land around Carthage into a desert. He dried up the rivers. How the h.e.l.l . . .” Ash's voice slowed. ”How the h.e.l.l did the Pope's soldiers manage to burn him alive?”
She ignored Florian's quick shudder: it might have been the older woman feeling the cold.
”You have a point,” the surgeon said, her voice steady.
”He was the Wonder-Worker” Ash said again. ”If he could do that to Carthage, to the Wild Machines: he shouldn't have died just because some priest ordered it!”
With a glance at Floria del Guiz, Bishop John demurred, ”He cursed Pope Leo26 and brought about the Empty Chair.”
There are side-panels in the chapel, one of which is the death of Leo - blinded, hunted, torn into sc.r.a.ps of flesh - but she knows that story too well to look.