Ash: A Secret History (102 page)

Gladness sears through her: rich, amoral, vengeful, entirely of the moment.

“
Clear!
” Ash screamed. Her escort pulled her back; men charged across the stairs into the room on the opposite side.

The Visigoth soldier she has killed is dragged bodily by one arm and thrown against the wall, out of the way.

She tried to see his face, in the dim light. She remembers many of the men she has seen in Leofric’s household. This man is unrecognisable, a little soft brown hair poking out from under the lining of his helmet. Two slashes from her edge have chopped his face apart from temple to cheekbone, eye to mouth.

She remembers almost all the faces of the men she has killed, in five years.

“Block the doors!” Ash shouted, voice pitched brazen-high to carry through the clamour. “Bottle them up! Don’t lose it, guys! We don’t need to kill them!
Take the stairs!
”

She took two steps back, as the mass of men went past her, seeing nothing but torchlight on armoured backs, swords and maces over their heads, no room in here for polearms; and she stepped back again, her chest heaving, breath forcing itself raggedly into her lungs, finding herself beside John de Vere, giving brisk orders to a runner from the perimeter.

“Skirmish at the gate, madam!”

She could not read his mouth, with his bevor up; she could just hear him if she thumbed up one side of her helmet.

“Which gate?”

“Citadel! Some
amir
’s house-guard, fifty men or more.”

“Can we still get out that way?”

“We’re holding!”

Defence is easier than attack: the gate can probably hold. If her men don’t lose heart. More explosions rocked the lower part of the building, echoing hollowly up the stairwell. Taking the next floor down.

Ash turned, Euen’s men with her. Thomas Morgan swore under his breath as the top of the banner caught against the shattered vaulting of the ceiling:

“Other commanders fucking stay still! Other commanders don’t fucking charge up and down the fucking field of battle!”

“Follow me!” She went through the door again, hearing the sound of hammering and banging even with her deafened ears. The mass of armed men had gone through and down the stairs. Angelotti stood, shouting orders.

A dozen of the gun-crew, with mauls, knocked shards of splintered timber under the doors, jamming closed the doors to every room opening on to the stairwell.

“Well done!” Ash walloped the shoulder of his padded jack. “Keep doing it! Follow them down!”

“Yes, madonna! The bang –
bellissima!
”

Ash stepped over Theudibert’s stained, burned legs. Her escort trod indiscriminately on the body until Euen Huw cursed and kicked it sideways on the steps.

But it is
bellissima,
she thought, staring into the dead man’s face. It is
bellissima,
too. like Godfrey says – said.
Fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners
.
⁶

With Morgan cursing at getting the banner down the narrow stairwell, and runners pelting up and down the stairs towards her, it took her long minutes to get down to the next floor. Sounds of shrieking voices and slicing metal echoed up from below.

Two men in Lion livery lay across one threshold, hacked about the face and stomach: Katherine, Ludmilla’s lance-mate; and big Jean the Breton.

Ash knelt down. Jean moved, whimpering. Katherine Hammell opened white eyes in a blood-drenched face; moved one hand to touch her belly, and the half-slashed but still effective protection of her jack.

“Get them upstairs! Move it!” She rattled on past, the clatter of tassets loud in the enclosing stone; four of her escort splitting off to carry the wounded.

Angelotti’s door-team overtook her, running down the steps with complete disregard for safety, hammering rough wedges in as the foot-soldiers hacked arms and hands from doorframes, crossbows shot up rooms, and stone slabs slid shut.

The grenades had chipped the edges of the worn steps, and twice her feet slid out from under her; both times she was grabbed and set back on the steps, and they pelted on down.

Counting floors, Ash thought: Four? Yes. We’re four floors down. Shit, too easy, even if they don’t have all their forces here, too easy! We’re not seeing anybody! Where are Alderic’s men—?

A gust of hot air whooshed into her face.

Hot as fire: blasting her unprotected skin and eyes.

“Stop!” She thwacked Euen across the breastplate to halt him, shoved up her visor, stood listening.

Something teased at her hearing. She frowned, looked questioning at Euen, who shook his head. A sliding, crackling noise.

Boom!

Thirty feet below her, a great number of voices suddenly screamed.

The sound howled up the stone shaft. Over it, she heard the sound of creaking, breaking wood; and a hollow roar of flames.

“Shit!” Ash gripped the hilt of her sword and ran down the curving steps.

“Boss,
stop!
”

One boot heel slipped. She grabbed for the wall with her free hand, ripping the leather palm of her mail mitten, and skidded to a stop on her arse on the next pie-shaped big step with a room opening off it. Fifth floor down.

There was nothing beyond.

“Carracci?” Ash shouted.

At the rim of the step, ahead, was darkness. Empty darkness.

She stood up and limped across to it, for once careless of the door at her back; and heard a clatter of boots as Euen’s men moved in, and ignored them, ignored them, because what was in front of her
was
nothing, nothing at all.

The stone stairs ended where she stood. She was looking down a sheer masonry drop into blackness, where flames flickered, stirred…

Furnace-hot air shrieked up from below. She clamped her hand over her mouth, leaning forward, looking down. Light flared.

“Shit,” Euen Huw breathed at her side.

“Pity of Christ!”

The stairwell went on down, a slick-walled empty stone shaft fifteen feet across. At the bottom, fierce flames roared up among a great mass of tangled ropes, planks, beams, and splintered wood.

Black against the fire at the bottom of the shaft, fallen men writhed and screamed.

“
Get ropes! Get scaling ladders! Get them down here! GO!
”

Sick-faced, Euen Huw turned around and pelted back up the stairs.

Ash stayed quite still, looking down at men in mail shirts and padded jacks and helmets, who had plainly fallen fifty or sixty feet straight down. And not down on to stone, but on to the collapsed wreckage of stairs.

Deliberately collapsed. The stairs for these last two floors weren’t stone. They were wood—

Ash knelt, reached down at the side of the shaft, finding what she expected: a hole in the masonry big enough to socket a wooden beam, which would support wooden stairs.

Which can be brought down, tripped, collapsed, whenever an enemy gets in.

The sounds of screaming echoed up from below, and the roar of fire.

“A bolt-hole shaft,” Ash said, and became aware it was the Earl of Oxford, panting, standing beside her and staring down, his expression blankly fierce. She stepped to one side to let the men with rope ladders through. “That’s where they are. Alderic, the household troops, Leofric if he made it.”

“They collapsed the stairs and fired them, with our people on them.” John de Vere knelt, constrained by his leg armour, staring over the edge into bitter blackness and flames. “And now they will have barricaded every door down there, and it will take more than powder to get through.”

“More powder than we have,” Antonio Angelotti said, beside her. His eyes were brilliant in his blackened face: wet.

“Shit!” She smashed her mailed fist into the wall. “Shit.
Shit!
”

“Out of the way!” a low-pitched, ragged voice ordered.

Ash stepped back again, letting Floria pass her, which the woman did without a look; merely ordering Faversham and a lance of men to help her carry up two bodies, which the ladders had brought up. Carracci was one, helmet gone, screaming. His high-coloured face and white-blond hair all one colour now: burned black.

“Pity of Christ,” Ash said again, her face wet and her voice shaking; and then she straightened, walked to the edge, and looked down at the men on the ladders, dangling over fire, desperately trying to get within reach of the broken bodies of the fallen.

Superheated air breathed across her face.

“Back up the ladders!”

“Boss—”

“
I said pull out! Now!
”

As the last man came up, flames licked at his heels, soaring up.

Black smoke and panic filled the shaft.

Coughing, tears streaming down her face, Ash began to push and shove men up the stairs, Morgan with her with the banner, Euen’s men at her side; John de Vere grabbing men and throwing them up the steps, climbing, climbing in searingly hot air and soot, until she staggered out last across a stone threshold and out into air cold by contrast – the ground floor room of House Leofric, open to the sky.

“They have air-shafts!” Ash bit back a fit of coughing. “Air-shafts! They can feed the fire! Turn the whole thing into a chimney!”

Someone put a leather flask to her mouth. She gulped water, stopped, coughed it back up again, her mouth bitter with bile. Another mouthful; this one swallowed.

“You okay, boss?” Euen Huw demanded.

She nodded abruptly. Heads were turning, at the defended windows, the other doors, the arquebusiers poised to shoot up into the shattered roof. To the Earl of Oxford, she yelled, “They’ve turned it into a chimney! We haven’t got time to wait for the fire to burn out, there’s too much timber down there!”

“Will the heat crack the shaft? Their doors?”

Angelotti, taking off his helmet and wiping his wet curls back, said, “No, my lord. Never, with this thickness of wall. This whole place is carved down into the headland.”

“They can just pull back into the outer rooms,” Ash yelled bitterly. She became aware that she could hear herself, her deafness fading. More quietly, she said, “They can stay in the outer rooms, wait for the fire to go out, and then I’ll bet they have ladders and stores down there. They’re used to doing this. Shit, I should have seen this one coming! Geraint, Angelotti, how many people did we lose?”

“Ten,” Antonio Angelotti said, grimly. “Nine if Carracci lives.”

The courtyard windows were still full of pavises, the crossbowmen ceasing to crack jokes, winching their bows with their eyes on the increasing smoke pouring out of the stairwell. A cold wind blew across the shell of the house here. In the middle of the floor, Floria knelt with Richard Faversham, over Carracci, her hands black.

Ash crossed to her. “Well?”

“He’s alive.” The woman reached out, her hand hovering over the injured man’s face. Carracci moved, moaned, unconscious. Ash saw that the lids of his eyes had been burned off.

“He’s blind,” Floria said. “His pelvis is shattered. But he’ll probably live.”

“Shit.”

“This is where we could do with one of Godfrey’s miracles,” Floria said, brushing her hose as she stood up, and her tone changed: “What is it? Ash? Is Godfrey
here?
In Carthage? Have you seen him?”

“Godfrey’s dead. He died in the earth tremor.” Ash turned her back on the woman’s expression. She spoke to Antonio Angelotti. “We’ll try what powder there is left. See if you can blow the bottom of the shaft. Don’t risk men.”

“I’ve got no powder left!”

“Send to the gates?”

“Not enough to do this, not even if we leave them with none. It took everything to crack the House!”

For a moment she and the Italian gunner looked at each other. Ash gave a small shrug, which he returned.

“Sometimes, madonna, this is the way the Wheel turns.”

They stood together, Ash and Angelotti, Floria and Richard Faversham; Euen Huw and both noble de Veres watching the momentary silence. The men at the windows went quiet.

Tears ran from her eyes, stung by the pouring woodsmoke coming up the shaft and into the room. Ash shook her head slowly.

“No point trying to take another quadrant, my lord. We won’t have enough powder to try and blow a connecting way through. I really think we’re fucked.”

De Vere swore resonantly. “We can’t fail now!”

“Let me think—”

Scaling ladders, to the foot of the shaft. Then what? Fifty men at the bottom of a stone tube, facing three-foot-thick stone slabs, locked across doorways. No more powder. What are we going to do, chip away at the doors with daggers?

“Hang on – how
deep
is the shaft? Euen, which of your guys went down the ladders?”

“Simon—”

A young lad hauled through the group of men to her, by Huw’s hand on his shoulder: another long-boned boy, brother to Mark Tydder.

“Yes, boss?”

“Could you see where the lowest doorways were, down there? Were they level with the base of the shaft?”

The young man in Lion livery coloured up to his hairline at the attention fixed on him: his lance-leader, his boss, the mad English Earl. “No, boss. All those doors were above my head. The stairs went further down than the lowest floor.”

Ash nodded, glanced at the Earl of Oxford. “Violante told me there are cisterns in the rock, water supplies – if it was me, I’d have it fixed up so I could flood the stairwell. Drown any attacker down there like a – rat.”

John de Vere frowned. “And drain it, after?”

“This headland’s a honeycomb!”

Are they down below, under her feet, six storeys deep in the rock? ’
Arif
Alderic commanding his men to bring the stairs down, fire the wreckage? Lord-
Amir
Leofric giving bright-eyed orders, in the unknown, room where the
machina ret militaris,
the Stone Golem, stands?

She met de Vere’s gaze, with plainly the same thought in it.

“Madam,” he said bluntly, in front of her men, “ask your voice. Ask the Golem.”

She abruptly turned, gestured for everyone to move back, even her frowning officers; and was left with the Earl of Oxford in the centre of the room. “
Amir
Leofric only has to ask it what I’m saying, and he’ll know what we’re doing.”