Ash: A Secret History (111 page)

“Unless they have heard the Wild Machines, madonna, some
amir
will be using the
machina,
even if Lord-
Amir
Leofric is dead. We know it was not destroyed.” Momentarily, there was a ragged note in Angelotti’s whisper. “
If
you were to ask the
machina rei militaris
what orders are being passed between Carthage and the Faris-general, you could tell us how this war goes. I see that you can’t ask. But you could … listen?”

A shudder that was not the bitter cold of the night, not the cold of the rain-soaked underbrush, went through her body.

“I
listened,
in Carthage. An earthquake flattened the city. I can’t listen to the Stone Golem without the Wild Machines knowing, Angeli. And we’ve left them behind in North Africa, they don’t know where we are, and I’m
fucked
if I’ll ever have anything to do with that again! The Wild Machines want Burgundy? That isn’t my problem!”

Except that I’ve made it my problem, by coming back here.

John Price, rumbling his deep voice on the other side of her, said, “Didn’t like the look of them pyramids, in Carthage. Didn’t like the look of the rag-heads, neither. Bunch of fucking nutters. Better they don’t find out where we are. Don’t you go telling ’em, boss.”

If anything could have warmed the stone coldness inside her, it would have been the Englishman’s stolid humour. She remained numb at a level deeper than camaraderie could reach.

Ash forced herself to smile at the straggle-haired billman, knowing her expression to be visible in the moonlight. “What, you think they won’t be pleased to see us? I guess not. After the state we left Carthage in, I don’t think we’ll be winning any popularity contests with the King-Caliph… That’s if his mighty highness King-Caliph Gelimer is still with us, of course.”

Rickard unexpectedly said, “Would the
amirs
still have a crusade in Christendom if Gelimer were dead?”

“Of course they will. The
machina rei militaris
will be telling whoever’s King-Caliph to push the campaign for all they’re worth. Because that’s what the Wild Machines are saying, through it. Rickard, that’s nothing to do with the Company of the Lion.” Ash saw moonlit disbelief on his face. She shrugged and turned back to the Sergeant of Bill. John Price looked at her, as if for orders; she saw fear and trust in his expression.

“This gives us an answer. I’ll bet on it.” Ash reached down and rubbed her booted thighs, easing her cold and sodden legs back into life. “Numbers like this… First, even if he
was
wounded at Auxonne, Duke Charles is still alive. Second: he hasn’t escaped into northern Burgundy. The Visigoths wouldn’t have this much force sitting outside one town in the south if Charles
Téméraire
was dead or in Flanders. They’d be up there trying to finish this.”

“You think he’s in Dijon, boss?”

“I think so. Can’t see any other reason for all this.” Ash put her hand on Price’s mailed shoulder. “But let’s get to the important bit. Have the scouts seen Lion liveries on the city walls?”

“Yes!”

Evident, from his expression, what crucial hope rides on this.

“It’s our lot in there! We saw the Lion Passant Guardant okay, boss! Burren’s lads saw a standard before it got dark. I’d trust his boys to know the Blue Lion, boss.”

Rickard, as abrupt as young men are, demanded, “Can we attack the Visigoths? Raise the siege and get Master Anselm out?”

If Robert’s there, and alive…
Ash snorted under her breath. “Optimist! Do it on your own, Rickard, will you?”

“We’re a legion. We’re soldiers. We can do it.”

“I must stop getting you to read me Vegetius…”

There was a chuckle from the men around her at that.

Ash paused momentarily. A new cold dread sat in her stomach, and gnawed at her:
I’m going to make a decision based on this information, and it won’t be one hundred per cent right – it never is.

She spoke. “Okay, guys – now we’re committed. I’m betting that the rest of the company
didn’t
break out, go to France or Flanders; they’re still in there, with Duke Charles as their employer. So, if the other half of the Lion Azure is sitting inside that siege, we don’t give a fuck about weird shit in Carthage, or
anything
else, we sort out our lads first.”

“Yes,” Angelotti agreed.

“On our own, boss – well, we ain’t going to get no back-up. It’s all bandit country and Visigoths we’ve come through,” John Price said disgustedly. “Burgundy’s the only place that’s still fighting.”

“They should have attacked the Turk,” Angelotti said quietly. “We know now, madonna, why the lord-
amirs
chose to attack Christendom and leave the Empire of Mehmet whole on their flank.”

“The Stone Golem gave them that strategy.”

Abrupt in her memory, she hears the voices that spoke through the
machina rei militaris
in Carthage: ‘
BURGUNDY
MUST
FALL
.
WE MUST MAKE BURGUNDY AS THOUGH IT HAD NEVER BEEN
—’

And her own voice, speaking to the Wild Machines:
Why does Burgundy
matter?

The cold mud slid away under her heels as she stood up, chill in the wet moonlit night.

I still don’t know why.

I don’t want to know!

The tension between what she felt, and what she could say in front of these men, momentarily silenced her. Quietness and cold made her shudder. Dripping trees sprayed her with water, as the wind blew up briefly before dropping; the stillness of pre-dawn not many hours off.

She looked around at their white faces in the moonlight. “Remember who’s in there. The other side of the guns and siege engines and six thousand Carthaginians. Just remember.”

Antonio Angelotti got to his feet, mud-soaked. “The city’s held out nearly three months, madonna. Things will not be good in there.”

The same thought in both their minds: a memory of empty French villages, frozen under the eternally black sky where day never dawns. Half-timbered houses burned and abandoned; charred wood covered with snow. Sties empty; paddocks scraped down to flint and clay. A child’s ragged linen shirt left frozen in the muddy ice, with preserved boot-marks treading it down. Houses, farms, all empty; their reeves leading the people away; lords and their bailiffs gone beforehand; towns left with empty, devastated streets, not the neigh of a horse, nor the stink of a gutter remaining. And those who could not flee dead of starvation, and stacked like icy kindling-wood; not all the bodies untouched.

In a siege, there is nowhere to flee to.

Angelotti added, “We should get Roberto and the men out.”

Ash turned back to Price. “There’s the three main gates into the city… Any sally-ports?”

Price nodded. “Yeah, my lads were looking at ’em when we were here in the summer. There’s about half a dozen postern gates, mostly over the east side. There’s two water-gates down this side, where they diverted the river through the town to the mills. You want us to sneak Master Anselm and the company out down a mill-race, boss?”

“That’s right, Sergeant.” Deadpan, Ash looked at him. “One at a time. It should take, oh, about three days, provided we do it in the dark, and nobody notices!”

John Price gave a short, choked laugh. He wiped his nose on the back of his sodden mitten. “Fair enough.”

She thought,
I want to despise him for responding to so blatant a manipulation.
A wry smile moved her mouth.
But all I wish is that someone would do the same for
my
morale.

We are committed, that’s for sure.

Ash turned until she could see Angelotti’s dirty angelic features, as well as Price. Rickard hovered behind her, with Price’s men.

“Send the scouts out again.” Her voice dropped chill into the bitter air, warm breath turning to white mist as she spoke. “I need to know if the overall commander of the Visigoth forces is here, too. I need to know if the Faris is here at Dijon.”

“She will be,” Angelotti muttered. “If the Duke is.”

“I need to be sure!”

“Got you, boss,” Price said.

Ash squinted in the white light: a calculating look at the distant fires in the western camp of the Visigoth army. “Angeli, can you get one of your people up through the engineers’ camp to the walls without being noticed?”

“Not difficult, madonna. One gunner looks very like another, without livery.”

“Not a gunner. Find me a crossbowman. I want to send a message in over the walls. Tied to a crossbow bolt is as good a way as any.…”

“Geraint will object, madonna? To my telling his missile troops what to do?”

“Find me a man or woman that you trust.” Ash turned away from the valley. The ground squelched under her boots as she staggered back towards the cover of the waist-high soaking bracken, and the wet trees.

In memory – not in, never in, the silent recesses of her soul, now – in memory she hears the Wild Machines say ‘
BURGUNDY
MUST
FALL
!’ And a sardonic, quite different part of herself asks,
How long do you plan to ignore this?

“Find me Geraint, and Father Faversham,” she ordered Rickard; waiting at the edge of the black depths of the wood. “Euen Huw, Thomas Rochester, Ludmilla Rostovnaya, Pieter Tyrrell. And Henri Brant, and Wat Rodway. Officer meeting, soon as we’re back at HQ. Okay, let’s
go!
”

Avoiding sodden branches, and keeping a footing on the rough ground and undergrowth, took all her attention, and she gladly surrendered herself to that necessity. Ten or so armed men lumbered up out of the bracken and briar, cursing at the wet darkness under the trees, and took up their places around Ash as she went. She heard them muttering about the fucking
size
of the fucking rag-head army, God love us; and the lack of game in the woods, not even a God-rotted squirrel.

The true wildwood, even in winter, would have been impassable; progress measured in yards, not leagues, per day. Here on the cultivated edges, where charcoal-burners and swine-herds lived, it was possible to move fairly quickly – or would have been, by daylight.

The sun!
Ash thought; one hand on the shoulder of the man in front, one arm cocked up to shield her face, able to see nothing but blackness.
Dear God, two
months travelling in pitch-darkness, twenty-four hours a day: I hate the night, now!

A league or so away, they paused to light lanterns and went on more easily. Ash swatted a wet, leafless hornbeam branch out of her face, following the back of the man in front, a crossbowman, sergeant of Mowlett’s lance. His mud-drenched cloak swung in her vision, held down by the leather straps of belt, bag, and bolt-case. A twisted rag had been tied around his war-hat, above the brim; it might once have been yellow.

“John Burren.” She grinned, pushing her way through wet briar to walk beside him. “Well, what’s
your
men’s guess – how many rag-heads down there?”

He rasped, “A legion plus artillery. And a devil.”

That raised her brows. “‘Devil’?”

“She hears devil-machines, don’t she? Those damned things in the desert, like you showed us? That makes her a devil. Fucking bitch,” he added, without emphasis.

Ash staggered sideways in time to avoid a tree, looming black in the faint lamplight. Confronted by his broad back, she said wryly and on impulse, “I heard them too, John Burren.”

He looked over his shoulder, his expression in the darkness uncomfortable. “Yeah, but you’re the boss, boss. As for her… We all got bad blood in families.” He skidded, avoiding underbrush; regained his balance, and stifled the noise of a phlegmy sniff in his cupped hand. “And anyway, you didn’t need no voices at
all
to get us out of that ambush outside Genoa. So you don’t need ’em now, Lion
or
Wild Machine, do you, boss?”

Ash thumped him on the back. She found a smile creasing her mouth.
Well,
hey, how about that? I said I wanted someone to improve my morale…

Green Christ, I wish I thought he was right! I do need to ask the
machina rei militaris.
And I can’t. I mustn’t.

An hour travelling in the dark with lanterns brought them to the pickets and the muzzled, silenced dogs. They passed over the dug-trench-and-brushwood walls into the camp: two hundred men and their followers encamped under mature beech forest.

Most of the beech trees were already de-barked to above the height of a man’s reach, feeding the meagre fires that now gave the only light. The borders of a streamlet were trodden down into a wet, black slick. On the far side, Wat Rodway’s baggage-train helpers clustered around iron cook-pots on tripods. Ash, muddy and wet to the thigh, made first for the banked fires and accepted a bowl of pottage from one of the servers. She stood talking with the women there for a few minutes, laughing, as if nothing in the world could be a worry to her, before handing back a bowl scraped dry.

Angelotti, bright-eyed, huddled his cloak even more tightly around his lean shoulders and pushed in beside her, close to the flames. His face bore the mark of weeks on basic rations, but it did not seem to have depressed his spirits; if anything, there was an odd, reckless gaiety about him.

“Another one of Mowlett’s men has come back here before us, madonna. You could have spared yourself sending those other scouts – he has the answer to your question. Her livery’s been seen, and her person. The Faris is here.”

The blast of heat from a wind-blown flame of the campfire does not make her flinch: she is momentarily lost in memory of a woman who is nameless, whose name is her rank;
⁶
whose face is the face that Ash sees in her mirror, but flawless, unscarred. Who is the overall military commander of perhaps thirty thousand Visigoth troops in Christendom. And who is more than that, although she may not know it.