Ash: A Secret History (116 page)

Floria blinked. “Good God, woman. You’ve been keeping this lot on the road by sheer will-power. And you think we’re
wrong
to be here?”

“Like I said on the beach at Carthage – I think we should have sailed for England then.” Ash shivered in the morning cold. “Or for Constantinople, even, with John de Vere, and taken service with the Turk. Got as far away from the Wild Machines as possible, and left the Faris to whatever shit there’s going to be in Burgundy.”

“Oh, bollocks!” Floria put her fists on her hips. “
You?
Leave Robert Anselm and the rest of the company here? Don’t make me laugh! We were always coming back here, whatever happened at Carthage.”

“Maybe. The
smart
thing to do would be to cut our losses and start again with the men I’ve got here. Except that people don’t sign up with commanders who dump their people.”

Some internal honesty prompted, unexpectedly:
But she’s right, we were
always coming back here.

She squinted into the morning wind, her eyes tearing, thinking,
weather’s bad even for November, and that’s a weak sun.
And it’s been so cold, south of here, for so long now. There won’t have been a harvest.

“Too late now,” she said, hearing herself sound almost philosophical. She smiled at Florian. “Now we
are
here – there isn’t anywhere else to go, except behind the nearest walls! Better dead tomorrow than dead today, right? So you can pick between Dijon falling sometime soon, and the legions up ahead finding us tomorrow…”

She felt an immense release, as if from a weight, or an unrelenting grip. Fear flooded through her, but she recognised it and rode it; let herself become fully aware, again, that it is not merely the usual business of war that concerns her.

Floria snorted, shaking her head. “I’ll get my deacons praying. Fix where we’ll be in line of march. Where will you be, on this moonlight flit? In front, as usual?”

“I won’t be with the company. I’ll join you in the city, before dawn.”

“You’ll
what?
”

Ash beat her cold hands together. Warming circulation pricked at the impacts. Cool, damp air touched her face.

Her gaze met Florian’s: whimsical, bright, utterly determined.

“While the company’s making an entry into Dijon tonight, I’m going to get some answers. I’m going to go down to the Visigoth camp and talk to the Faris.”

IV

“
You’re mad!
”

In the wet, muddy daylight, Ash suddenly grinned to herself.
I can still talk to Florian. At least I still have that.

“No. I’m not mad. Yes: we had a defeat at Carthage. Yes: I needed to
think.
Yes: I am going to do something.” Half teasing, she added, “Once my banner goes up in Dijon, the Faris will know I’m alive anyway.”

“So don’t raise it!” Exasperated, unguarded, Floria waved her hands in the air. “Come off it, Ash. Forget chivalry. Keep your banner rolled up. Sneak out when we
do
leave Dijon! But don’t tell me you’re going out there to try and
talk
to her!”

“I could tell you a lot of good reasons why I should talk to a Visigoth army commander.” Ash wiped her muddy hands together, took her sheepskin mittens from her belt, and put them on: still damp and uncomfortable. “We’re mercenaries. I’m expected to do this. I’ve got to look for the best deal. She might just give us a
condotta.
”

Florian looked appalled. “I know you’re joking. After Basle? After
Carthage?
The minute you show your face, they’ll ship you back across the Med! They’ll string you up for the raid! And then Leofric will poke around in what’s left!”

Ash stretched her arms, feeling the ache in her muscles from the night’s exertions; watching the camp beginning to pack up. “I’d take any help I can get, including Visigoth, if it means getting the company out of here before whatever the Wild Machines have planned for Burgundy starts happening.”

“You’re nuts,” Floria said flatly.

“No. I’m not. And I agree about what sort of a reception I’m likely to get. But it’s like you said – I can’t hide from this for ever.”

Florian’s dirty face scowled.

“This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard you say. You can’t put yourself in that much danger!”

“Even if we get into Dijon okay, we’re only hiding. Temporarily.” Ash paused. “Florian – she’s the only other person on God’s earth who hears the Stone Golem.”

In the silence, Ash turned back to find Florian looking at her.

“So?”

“So I need to know … if she hears the Wild Machines, too.” Ash held up her hands. “Or if it’s just in my head. I need to know, Florian. You all saw the Tombs of the Caliphs. You all believe me. But she’s the only other person on God’s earth who
knows.
Who will have heard what I heard!”

“And if she didn’t?”

Ash shrugged.

After a pause, the surgeon asked, “And … if she did?”

Ash shrugged again.

“You think she knows something about this that you don’t?”

“She’s the real one. I’m just the mistake. Who knows what’s different about her?” Ash heard bitterness in her own voice. She cocked a silver brow at the woman surgeon, and deliberately grinned. “And she’s the only one who can tell me I’m not nuts.”

Shrugging sardonically, Florian muttered, “You’ve been nuts for years!”

There was nothing unfamiliar in the woman’s affection. Or unfamiliar about her complicit, unverbalised consent. Ash found herself smiling at the dirty, tall woman. “You’re a doctor, you’d know!”

A sharp
thock!
made Ash turn her head: she caught sight of Rickard and his slingshot – and tree-bark scarred down to raw, white wood thirty yards away, from his practice shot.

“If you show yourself,” Florian said, “the Faris won’t be the only one who’ll find out where you are. Carthage; the King-Caliph; the
Ferae Natura Machinae.
”

“Yes,” Ash said. “I know. But I have to do it. It’s like Roberto always says – I could be wrong. What use am I, if I’m not sane?”

At dusk of that day – it came early, from a frozen sky empty of clouds; under which her officers complained lengthily after the announcement of her decision – Ash gave penultimate orders.

“A first-quarter moon rises about Compline.
¹¹
We move then, after mass. If there’s messages from Anselm, send them to me. Call me if it clouds over. Otherwise – I’m getting a couple of hours’ sleep first!”

A last tallow candle, unearthed from the bottom of a pack, stank and flickered in the command tent as she entered. Rickard stood up, a book in his hands.

“You want me to read to you, boss?”

She has two books remaining, they live in Rickard’s pack: Vegetius and Christine de Pisan.
¹²
Ash walked to the box-bed and flopped down on the cold palliasse and goatskins.

“Yeah. Read me de Pisan on sieges.”

The black-haired young man muttered under his breath, reading the chapter headings to himself, holding the book up close to the taper. His breath whitened the air. He wore all his clothes: two shirts, two pairs of hose, a pourpoint, a doublet, and a ragged cloak belted over the top of them. His nose showed red under the rim of his hood.

Ash rolled over on to her back on her pallet. Damp chill draughts crept in, no matter how tightly the tent-flap was laced down. “At least we didn’t have to eat the mules yet…”

“Boss, you want me to read?”

“Yeah, read, read.” Before he could open his mouth, Ash added, “We’ve got a moon just past first quarter; that’s going to give us some light, but it’s rough country out here.”

“
Boss…
”

“No, sorry: read.”

A minute later she spoke again, a bare few sentences into his reading, and she could not have said what he had read to her about. “Have any messages come out of Dijon yet?”

“Don’t know, boss. No. Someone would’ve come and said.”

She stared at the pavilion wheel-spokes. The cold burned her toes, through her boots and footed hose. She rolled over on to her side, curling up. “You’ll have to arm me in two hours. What have they been saying about Dijon?”

Rickard’s eyes sparkled. “It’s great! Pieter Tyrrell’s lance are blacking their faces. They’re betting they can get into the city before the Italian gunners, because they’ll be dragging Mistress Gunner’s—”

Ash coughed.

“—Master Angelotti’s swivel-guns!”

She rumbled a laugh under her breath.

“Some of them don’t like it,” Rickard added. “Master Geraint was complaining, over at the mule lines. Are you going to get rid of him like you got rid of Master van Mander?”

Preparations for the battle of Auxonne, when the sun was still in Leo: it seems a lifetime ago. She barely remembers the Flemish knight’s florid face.

Ash curled herself tighter against the cold. Her breath left dampness on the wool of her hood, by her mouth. “No. Joscelyn van Mander came in this season, with a hundred and thirty men; he never made himself part of the company; it made sense to bounce him back out again.” She sought the boy’s face in the dim light, seeing his flaring brows, his unpremeditated scowl. “Most of the disaffected men around Geraint have been with me for two or three years now. I’ll try to give them something of what they want.”

“They don’t want to be stuck in a town with a bloody big army on the outside!”

The guy-ropes creaked. The tent wall flapped.

“I’ll find a compromise for Geraint and his sympathisers.”

“Why don’t you just order them?” Rickard demanded.

She felt her lips move in a wry smile. “Because they may say ‘no’! There isn’t much difference between five hundred soldiers, and five hundred refugee peasants. You’ve never seen a company stop being a company. You don’t want to. I’ll find some way of satisfying their gripes – but we’re still going to Dijon.” She grinned at him. “Okay; read.”

The young man held the book up to the taper.

“It isn’t that bad a tactical situation,” she added, a moment later. “Dijon’s a big city, must have ten thousand people in it, even without what’s left of Charles’s army; the Faris can’t have her people cover every yard of the walls. She’ll be covering roads, gates. If the sergeants can get us moving and keep us moving, we’ll get inside, maybe without fighting at all.”

Rickard rested his finger on one illuminated page, and closed the cover of the book. The tallow candle gave hardly enough light to show his expression.

He said suddenly, “I don’t want to be Anselm’s squire. I want to be your squire. I’ve been your page. Make me your squire!”

“‘Captain Anselm’,” Ash corrected automatically. She reached over her shoulder, hauling goatskins and sheepskins over her fully dressed body.

“If I don’t get to be your squire, they’ll say it’s because I’m not good enough. I’ve been your page again since Bertrand ran off. Since we found you in Carthage! I fought at the field at Auxonne!”

On that outraged protest, his voice slid up the scale to squeak, and down to croak. Ash flinched with embarrassment. She snuggled the sides of her hood back, ears bitten with cold, so that she could hear him more clearly. He rose and banged about in the dark tent for some minutes, in silence.

“You’re good enough,” Ash said.

“You’re not going to do it!” He sounded suspiciously close to tears.

Ash’s voice, when it came, was tired. “You didn’t fight Auxonne. You’ve
seen
what it’s like in the line, Rickard, you just don’t
know
what it’s like.”

The edges of swords and axes slice the air, in her mind:

“It’s a storm of razors.”

“I’m going to fight. I’ll go to Captain Anselm.”

Ash heard no pique in his tone, only a sullen, excited determination. She shifted herself up on her elbow to look at Rickard.

“He’ll take you,” she said. “I’ll tell you why. Out of every hundred men we get, ten or fifteen will know what to do in the field when the shit hits the fan, without being told, either by instinct or training. Seventy men or so will fight once someone else trains them, and then tells them how and where. And another ten or fifteen will run around like headless chickens no matter
what
you train into ‘em or tell ’em.”

In the line of battle, she has grabbed men by their liveries and thrown them bodily back into the fight.

“I’ve watched you train,” she finished, “you’re a natural swordsman, and you’re one of the ten or fifteen any commander picks out and goes, ‘you’re my sub-commander’. I want you alive the next two years, Rickard, so I can give you a lance to command when the time comes. Try not to get killed before that.”

“Boss!”

The warmth from the furs hit some level that allowed her body to stop shivering. A wave of tiredness rose up, drowning her; she barely had time to register Rickard’s pleased, inarticulate, aggressive surprise; then sleep took her down like a fall from a horse, no impact, only oblivion.

She was aware that she rolled on the pallet, under the blankets.

Something gave, under her body.

She heard a hollow crack, a noise like a man putting his foot through a waxed leather bottle. Close to her. She stirred, heard guards and dogs beyond the canvas walls, shifted one arm sideways, and felt some obstruction give under her ribs.

The solidness cracked, broke with a wet noise.

Ash slapped her hand across the pallet, down by her side. Something slick and solid impaled itself on her thumb. She felt the nail resisted by obstruction, then whatever it was split, squelchy as a ripe plum. Her hand became suddenly slimy and wet.

She smelled a familiar odour: a sweet richness, mixed with the excremental stink of battle, thought
blood
and opened her eyes.

A baby lay half-under her body. She had rolled over and crushed it. Its tight swaddling-bands were sopping with something dark, seeping down from the head. Its fuzz-haired scalp ran red. White bone glinted, the child’s skull fractured from ear to ear, the back of it crushed where she had rolled over. Her hand rested over its face, her thumb deep in a ruined eye-socket.