Ash: A Secret History (128 page)

About to ask
What strength are the forces in the north?,
Ash found herself interrupted.

Olivier de la Marche, briskly now, said, “Demoiselle-Captain. You and your men have more recently seen what lies beyond these walls.”

“In Carthage?”

De la Marche’s weather-beaten face twisted, as if with some pain. “In what you have seen south of Burgundy first, demoiselle. We know little of the lands outside our borders, these past two months. Except that there are refugees every day on the roads outside the city.”

“Yes, messire.” Ash got to her feet, and realised that was out of pure habit, to let them see that she was a woman wearing a sword, even if it was without armour and thus not a customary thing to do.
¹⁸
I’m not used to being a hero of anywhere…

“We came in through the French King’s territories, under the Darkness,” she began. “They say there that the dark extends north to the Loire – at least, they were saying that two or three weeks ago. We didn’t see any fighting—” She grinned, toothily. “Not against the
Visigoths,
anyway. So I suppose the peace treaty is holding.”

“Motherfuckers!” de la Marche spat, explosively. Some of the merchant princes looked startled at his language, but not, Ash thought, as if they disagreed with the sentiment. There was a rumble from the few refugee French knights present.

Ash shrugged. “That’s the Universal Spider
¹⁹
for you.”

“God rot him,” de la Marche observed, in his battle-loud voice. Merchants and noblemen who would have winced at the champion’s loudness in peace now looked, Ash thought, as if the big Burgundian were their last hope.

“God rot him,
and
German Frederick!” de la Marche finished.

She has a brief memory of some of these noble German and French refugees when they stood in the cathedral at Cologne, at her marriage to Fernando del Guiz: all of them in bright liveries, then, and with well-fed faces. Not now.

“Messire—”

Getting a second wind, de la Marche thumped the long table. “Why should their lands be spared, treacherous sons of bitches? Just because the grovelling little shits signed ‘treaties’ with these Visigoth bastards!”

“Not all of us are traitors!” A knight in Gothic armour sprang to his feet, crashing his plate gauntlet down on the table. “And at least
we
do not wish to continue to cringe behind these walls, Duke’s man!”

De la Marche ignored him. “What else, Demoiselle-Captain?”

“Their lands aren’t being ‘spared’ much of anything. Whoever wins this war – there’s going to be major famine.” Ash looked around the table, at jowled faces somewhat bitten by short rations.

What had been prosperous townships, on the rivers of southern Burgundy; what had been rich abbeys; all of these are in her memory, under weak autumn sunlight. Burnt-out, deserted.

“I don’t know what stores are like here in Dijon. There’s nothing going to come in to you, even if the Visigoth army didn’t have this place sewn up tight. I’ve seen so many deserted farms and villages on the way north that I can’t count them, messires. There aren’t any people left. Cold’s ruined the harvest. The fields are rotten. There are no cattle or swine left: they’ve been eaten. On the march, we saw babies left out, exposed. There isn’t a surviving township between Dijon and the sea”

“This isn’t war, this is obscenity!” one of the merchants snarled.

“It’s bad war,” Ash corrected him. “You don’t wipe out what makes a land productive if you’re trying to conquer it. There’s nothing left for the winner. My lord, I’d guess your refugees out there are turning for Savoy, or southern France, or even the Cantons. But it’s no better there – and they’ll be under the Darkness. There’s still sun over south Burgundy. But outside, it’s already winter. Has been since Auxonne, as far as I can see. And it’s staying that way.”

“Winter like in the Rus lands.”

Ash turned her head, recognising Ludmilla Rostovnaya’s voice from where the crossbow-woman stood with Thomas Rochester. She signalled her to continue.

Ludmilla Rostovnaya’s red hose and russet doublet were thick with candle-grease, under her cloak. She shifted from foot to foot, conscious of eyes on her, and spoke more to Ash than to the assembled nobles.

“Far north, the winter comes with ice,” she said. “Great sheets of it, eight months of the year. There are men in my village who can remember Czar Peter’s port
²⁰
freezing one June, ships cracking like eggs.
That’s
winter. That’s what it’s like at Marseilles, when we landed.”

A priest at the far end of the table, between two Burgundian knights, spoke up. “You see, my lord de la Marche? This is what I have said. In France and the Germanies, Italy and eastern Iberia, they no longer see the sun – and yet he has not entirely forsaken us, here. Some of his heat must touch our earth, still. We are not yet Under the Penance.”

Ash opened her mouth to say
Penance be damned, it’s the Wild Machines!
, and shut it again. She looked to her officers. Robert Anselm, lips pushed together, shook his head.

Antonio Angelotti first glanced at her for permission, then spoke aloud. “Messires, I am a master gunner. I’ve fought in the lands Under the Penitence, with Lord-
Amir
Childeric. There was
warmth
there, then. As of a warm night. Not enough for seed, but still, not winter.”

Ash nodded thanks to the crossbow-woman and the gunner.

“Angelotti’s right. I’ll tell you what I saw, not two months ago, my lords –
it isn’t warm in Carthage any more.
There’s ice on the desert. Snow. And it was still getting colder when I left.”

“Is it a greater Penance?” The priest – another abbot, by his pectoral Briar Cross – leaned forward. “Are they the more damned, now that they take their guidance from demons? Will this greater punishment spread with their conquests?”

De la Marche met Ash’s gaze, his eyes shrewd. “The last news I have is that impenetrable darkness covers France as far north as Tours and Orleans, now; covers half the Black Forest; stretches as far east as Vienna, and Cyprus. Only our middle lands, as far as Flanders, still witness the sun.”
²¹

Aw,
shit!
“Burgundy is the only land—?”

“I know nothing of the lands of the Turk. But as for what I do know – yes, Demoiselle-Captain. Daily, the dark spreads north. The sun is seen over Burgundy alone, now.” Olivier de la Marche grunted. “As well as what you see fleeing away, we have hordes of refugees travelling
into
our lands, Demoiselle-Captain. Because of the sun.”

“We cannot feed them!” the Viscount-Mayor protested; stung, as if this were part of a long debate.

“Use them!” the German knight who had spoken before snarled. “War will cease over winter. We might win free of this poxy town, as soon as spring comes, and fight a decisive battle. Take them in as levies and train them! We have the Duke’s army, we have the hero of Carthage here, Demoiselle Ash; in God’s name let us
fight!
”

Ash winced, imperceptibly, both at the mention of her name, and at Robert Anselm’s snort. She waited for the Duke’s deputy to build on it; propose some heroic and doubtless foolhardy exploit for the hero of Carthage to perform to help raise the siege.

We ain’t going to fight a
hopeless
war. There ain’t enough money to pay us for that.

What
are
we going to do?

Olivier de la Marche, as if the German knight had not spoken, demanded abruptly, “Demoiselle-Captain Ash, will the Visigoth army stay in the field now? How much of Carthage is destroyed?”

The white masonry of the ogee windows glittered, sun flickering between clouds. Frost starred the stone. A scent of something burning drifted in on the chill air, over and above the great fire that the servants kept burning in the hearth. Ash tasted coldness on her lips.

“Nothing like as much as rumour says, my lord. An earthquake threw down the Citadel. I believe the new King-Caliph, Gelimer, to be alive.” She repeated, for emphasis: “My lord, it’s snowing on the coast of Africa – and they didn’t expect it any more than we did. The
amirs
I met are shit-scared. They started this war on the word of their King-Caliph, and now the countries they’ve conquered are under the Darkness, and back home in Carthage they’re freezing their asses off. They know Iberia’s the grain-basket of Carthage – and they know that, if the sun doesn’t come back, they won’t have a harvest next year.
We
won’t have a harvest. The longer this goes on – the worse things will be in six months’ time.”

Near a hundred faces stared back at her: civilians and soldiers; some of the nobles’ escorts probably, inevitably, in the pay of men outside the walls of Dijon.

“Anything else,” she said flatly, “isn’t for open council; it’s for your Duke.”

At her dismissal, a hubbub of noise filled the room, particularly from the foreign knights and nobles. Olivier de la Marche spoke over it effortlessly:

“This cold, does it come from the demons your men speak of? These ‘Wild Machines’?”

Exchanging glances with Robert Anselm, Ash thought, Damn. My lads have got big mouths. I bet there’s half a hundred garbled stories going the rounds.

“I’m trying to stop rumour. The rest’s for your Duke,” she repeated doggedly.
I’m not going to be palmed off with underlings!

De la Marche looked bluntly unwilling to let it go at that. Tension painfully tightened her shoulders. Ash rubbed at the muscles of her neck, under the back of the demi-gown’s collar. It did not ease the ache. Regarding their white faces, all turned to her in the morning light, she felt a pulse of fear in her bowels. Memory chills her: voices that say,
WE HAVE DRAWN DOWN THE SUN
.

“Fucking mercenary
whore!
” someone shouted, in German.

There was no hearing anything for the next few minutes, the council and the foreign knights raising their voices in ferocious, excited discussion and argument. Ash put her hands on the table and leaned her weight on them, momentarily. Anselm put his elbow on the back of her chair, leaning behind her to talk to Angelotti.

I should sit down, she thought, let them get on with it. This lot are hopeless!

“My lord de la Marche.” She waited until the Duke’s deputy turned his attention to her again.

“Demoiselle-Captain?”

“
I
have a question, my lord.”

If I hadn’t, I might not have bothered with this damn stupid council!

She took a breath. “If I were the King-Caliph, I wouldn’t have started a crusade here without taking out the Turks first. And if I
had
done it, I’d be looking to make peace about now – the Visigoths have got most of Christendom to hold down. But the Goths aren’t stopping. You say they’re fighting in Ghent and Bruges in the north, they’re trashing Lorraine. They’re here at Dijon. My lord, you tell me – what’s so important?
Why Burgundy?
”

A woman’s voice spoke before the Duke’s deputy could, and spoke in the tone of one citing a proverb: “Upon Burgundy’s health depends the health of the world.”

“What?”

The voice tugged at Ash’s memory.

She leaned further forward across the table, and found herself looking into the pinched white face of Jeanne Châlon.

She was, for once, glad Floria del Guiz was not present.

Abruptly, she flinched from the memory of August in Dijon, and the death that had followed the disclosure of Floria del Guiz as a woman.
But why?
There have been deaths since that one. The man I killed might well have died in battle by now.

“Mademoiselle.” Ash stared at the surgeon’s aunt. “With respect – I don’t want superstitious twaddle: I want an answer!”

The Burgundian woman’s eyes widened, her face full of shock. She stumbled back from the table, pushing her way through the confused crowd and the servants and fled.

“You always have that effect on people?” Anselm rumbled.

“I think she just remembered, we’ve met.” An ironic smile twisted Ash’s lips, fading quickly. “‘Upon Burgundy’s health—’”

A knight in French livery completed: “—depends the health of the world.’ It is an old proverb, and a meretricious one; nothing more than self-justification by the Valois Dukes.”

Ash glanced around. No Burgundian appeared willing to speak.

The French knight added, “Demoiselle-Captain, let us have no more nonsense of demons. We do not doubt the Visigoth army has many engines and devices. We have only to look out from the walls here to see that! I do not doubt they have more engines in their cities in the south, perhaps greater ones than they have here. You say you have seen them. Yes. But what of this? We must fight the Visigoth crusade
here!
”

A buzz of approval sounded around the chamber. Ash noted it came mainly from the foreign knights. The Burgundians – de la Marche in particular – merely looked grim.

“We know better,” Antonio Angelotti murmured under his breath.

Ash waved him to silence.

“Suppose, messire—?” Ash waited until the French knight responded:

“Armand de Lannoy.”

“—Suppose, Messire de Lannoy, that the Visigoths are not fighting this war with their engines. Suppose it is the ‘engines’ which fight, using the Visigoths.”

Armand de Lannoy slammed his palms flat on the table. “This is nonsense, and an ugly girl’s nonsense at that!”

The breath went out of her. Ash sat down, amid a babble of French and German.

Shit, she thought bleakly. Had to happen. I don’t have how I look to count on any more. To use. Shit.
Shit.

Beside her, there was a low, unconscious, ratcheting growl from Robert Anselm; almost entirely identical to the sound that the mastiffs Brifault or Bonniau might make.

She grabbed his arm. “Let – it – go.”

Olivier de la Marche’s voice rose, a bellow that ripped the air in the hall apart, brought adrenalin into Ash’s body even if it were not directed at her. He and the French knight, de Lannoy, both stood and shouted into each other’s faces across the table.