Ash: A Secret History (135 page)

“We’re holding!” Ash yelled at Anselm.

“Only just!” Ordering the sergeants back to the wall, Robert Anselm broke off to add: “They got the ram going against the main gate!
This
is just a diversion!”

“Yeah, I could’ve guessed that!” Ash wiped her mouth, took her hand away bloody. “Are they holding the gate?”

“Up till now!”

Breathless, Ash could only nod.

“Motherfuckers!” Robert Anselm narrowed his eyes against the light. “’Ere they come again. Auxiliaries and mercenaries again. Wait till they fucking
mean
it.”

Aware now that her chest was heaving to gain air, Ash snatched a second to look out at the distant enemy camp. Three or four hundred men, massing in preparation for the assault’s success. “No eagles!”

Robert Anselm tilted his sallet down, against the sun that showed the dirt and stubble on his face. “Not yet!”

Another stone machine edged forward out of the makeshift vast city that is the Visigoth camp. Ash watched. The cups were loaded: fragile clay pots with fuses already lit, shimmering with heat.

“Look at that! They’re not supporting that engine. Robert, send to de la Marche, tell him to sally out and take out those bloody engines! Tell him if he won’t, we’ll be happy to!”

As Anselm signalled a runner, Ash narrowed her eyes in the sunlight. Below, the ground before the walls was strewn with the dead, already; in what must be the first fifteen minutes of fighting. The moat was full of bodies, moving feebly, or still and broken, bleeding on to the faggots and mud and shattered rock.

Two or three riderless horses wandered aimlessly. Carts with pavises mounted on them, slave-hauled, began to recover enemy wounded.

And this wasn’t even an attack. A feint. Just so they can get the ram or the saps up to the north-west gate.

It isn’t what we can see. It’s what we can’t see.

With that thought, and almost as she thought it, a great section of the city wall five hundred yards to her right, past the White Tower to the east, first rose up slightly – mortar puffing out between the»masonry – and then slumped by ten or eleven inches.

A hot wind blasted her: a thunderous muffled roar shook the paving stones under her feet.

“Fucking saps!” Thomas Rochester thrust through the command group, joining her. His scream was almost hysterical. “They had
another
fucking sap!”

The high-pitched painful ringing in her ears began to deaden a little.

Euen Huw yelled, “I thought we were supposed to be counter-mining!”

Now a vast number of men came running forward from the Visigoth lines, obviously at this signal; dozens of scaling ladders carried aloft over their heads. Ash heard Ludmilla Rostovnaya’s lance-mate, Katherine Hammell, yell a shrill “Nock! Loose!” and hundreds of shafts whirred blackly into the middle air from the Lion archers, twelve per minute; vanishing into the mass of men, impossible to see any single strike.

“They’ve fucked it!” Ash slapped her palm down hard on Rochester’s shoulder, grinned at Euen Huw. “They didn’t bring the fucking wall
down.
You must be right about the counter-mine!”

She stared at the point where the wall now dipped, and the unsafe battlements along it. Hoardings smouldered. Burgundian men with red St Andrew’s crosses on their padded jacks were moving slowly out of the wreckage, a few men being carried.

They may not have brought the wall down. But that’s going to be a hell of a weak spot from now on.

“We’ll have to hold the wall for them while they sort it! Every second man! Robert, Euen, Rochester: on me!”

Reckless of the likelihood of collapsing masonry, she ran lightly down on to the broken section of wall, the company swarming through the White Tower after her. Rapidly hammering out orders, Ash saw the tops of scaling ladders appear; and hand-to-hand fighting start all along the wall. Four hundred men, a line three and four deep in places; war-hats bright in the light, the spiked blades of bills throwing up a fine red mist. Behind, on the parapet, the Burgundian troops regrouped.

“They blew it!” Ash yelled to Robert Anselm, over the shrieks, the harsh bellowing of “A Lion! A Lion!”, and the bang of swivel guns brought down from the far end of the wall. She saw men-at-arms, sunlight glinting off their war-hats, passing up hooked poles, shoving scaling ladders off the walls; and more than one lance were picking up the shattered fragments of trebuchet and mangonel missiles, and dropping chunks of masonry back down off the battlements.

On to the men below.

“The wall didn’t come down in front of ’em!” Robert Anselm bellowed. “They ain’t got
nowhere
to go!”

Antonio Angelotti, arriving with more swivel guns, showed eyes that were the only white thing in his black face. He yelled to her, “We
must
have countermined some of their mines! Else this whole section would be down!”

“At least we’re doing something right – let’s hope de la Marche can hold the fucking
gate!
”

It seemed long
-
was probably not, probably only another fifteen minutes – before the only things visible on the walls were the backs of her own men, ignoring any wounds, still high on adrenalin, leaning over the battlements and shouting their raw, violent contempt down at the dying men below. One billman stood up on top of the battlement, his cod-flap unlaced, urinating off the wall. Two of his mates grabbed dead stripped Visigoths by wrists and ankles, and slung them out through the embrasures.

She did not draw breath again until the Burgundian combat engineers had shored up the fallen section of wall with forty-foot planks as thick as a man’s arm, supported by wooden buttresses; and the attack on the north-west gate had petered out into a rout, under missile fire, men running back behind the wooden palisades of the Visigoth camp; the golem-ram abandoned, sunk over the axles in mud.

“
Shit
…”

Standing with her command group, she made an assessment of the sagging wall in front of her, almost without thinking of it. Merlons broken, like jagged teeth. Men-at-arms moving back from the walls as the sergeants stood them down, leaving anything else to the missile troops.

When they come again, this is where they’ll come.

“Can we stand them
all
down?” Angelotti demanded. He appeared oblivious to the blood dripping on to the stone from the fingers of his left hand. “My boys too?”

“Yeah. Pointless wasting ammunition.”

Her gaze went up and down the parapet. One crossbowman had his foot planted firmly in the stirrup of his crossbow, winding the winch, but with little urgency now. A hand-gunner in breastplate and war-hat was kneeling, leaning over, hook-gun braced against the edge of the crenellation. As Ash watched, her lance-mate touched a slow-match to the touch-hole; then stuck it back in a sand-barrel, unconcerned by the noise of the shot.

The gunner, as she bent her head to re-load and her face became visible, was Margaret Schmidt.

“Stop wasting your fucking ammunition!” Angelotti’s sergeant, Giovanni Petro, bawled, as Ash opened her mouth to give the order. “Don’t shoot while they’re running away. Wait till the bastard Flemings come back – with all their little Visigoth friends!”

There was a mutter of laughter along the wall. Ash, approaching the edge, and leaning out, caught glances from her men: most of them in the exultation that comes immediately after an action, which is nothing more than the joy of having survived it. One or two of the billmen were prodding corpses in obviously European livery, their expressions hard.

Conscious of a wired rapture that is her own response to survival – a hard joy that wishes every man in the Visigoth camp maimed and bleeding – she leaned over and looked down at the innocent earth in front of the city. Studied it again for disturbance: saw nothing.

“They must have been counter-mined; if they’d managed to set off
all
their petards, they’d have breached this wall.”

Not particularly aware of her pronouns, she thought,
We nearly lost Dijon in
one attack!

The noon sun winked back in sparks from the ground. She realised after a second that she was seeing the caltrops
⁵
that had been thrown down by the defenders.

“Greek Fire, too. Think they’re fucking ’ard,” Anselm grunted cynically. “What’s the
rush?
”

Ash gave him a breathless, diamond-hard grin.

“Don’t be in such a hurry, Roberto. They’ll be back.”

“You reckon?”

“She wants in here fast. I don’t know why. All she has to
do is
sit out there and let starvation do it for her. Christ, she even fired on her own men!” Her facial muscles ached, and she realised the grin had gone. Almost inconsequentially, she added, “Dickon’s dead – Dickon Stour.”

His gaze was not unaware of other casualties; nonetheless, there was a deep disgust in his voice. “Ah, fuck it. Poor fucking shite.”

Ash busied herself in the business of clearing up, seeing her men reassembled, and on their way back to their quarters. Groups of men carried heavy, red-soaked blankets between them: Dickon Stour, his two mates, and seven others dead. And Ludmilla not the only screaming survivor of Greek Fire, but what the wounded list was, she would not, she supposed, hear from Florian until later.

It was a stranger who found her as she was coming down off the wall at last: a Burgundian knight who rode up to her and her command group in the street, intercepting her as she stepped across the central gutter; still, even in this bitter weather, semi-liquid with excrement.

“Demoiselle-Captain—”

“Just ‘Captain’!”

“—the Duke sends word.”

Ash, every muscle aching, and wanting little more than to find Floria’s salve for bruises, dark beer, and pottage – in that order – eyed him wearily. “I’m at the Duke’s command.”

“He told me that you have a more urgent task than the defence of the walls,” the knight said, “and he asks you, when will you begin it?”

II

The November day died in grey twilight, an hour or more before Vespers. Of the wounded, all survived that long. Those inns within a quarter-mile radius of the company tower became packed with mercenary men-at-arms getting loudly drunk. Riding back through the streets, Ash thought it wise not to see, officially, what might be going on in the way of brawls and sexual encounters in the street; wise to leave ab Morgan to keep it from becoming murder and rape.

The top floor of the company’s tower having been reorganised to contain the armoury, the war-chests, and Ash’s own belongings, they were now stacked more or less in order on the open, rush-strewn floor. Ash strode past the armed men at the door, nodding her acknowledgement.

She threw a handful of sketches down on the trestle table in front of Robert Anselm. “There.”

“You’ve been all round the walls.”

“Twice.” Ash moved over to a brazier, unbuckling and stripping off her gauntlets. A page – one of half a dozen recruited new from the baggage train – ran to take them from her. She huffed, grinned, beating her cold hands together. “Euen Huw’s whingeing on again. He said,
You’ll wear the lads out
before the rag-heads even get
in
here
—”

Her accurate mimicry made Robert Anselm laugh.

“I must have passed six of the Duke’s messengers on up to the walls since Nones
⁶
,” he added, reading the rough charcoal lines and dots that represented enemy dispositions outside the walls, and not her face. “Did any of them happen to find the bit of it you were on?”

“Green Christ! We only got into this fucking town this morning!
And
we’ve had to fight. Can’t the man give me a few
hours?
I’ll do it, when I’m ready—” Ash straightened, hearing footsteps and guards’ muffled voices. No challenge. The door opened.

Floria del Guiz stepped inside, flushed, her hair dishevelled. She shed her cloak as she strode to join Ash at the brazier.

“Damn, but I love a good row!” Her eyes sparkled; her expression hard. “Free and frank exchange of professional views, I
should
say.”

Robert Anselm put the maps down. “Been talking to doctors up at the palace, have you?”

“Half-witted leech-ticklers!”

Ash, her fingers and cheeks prickling with returning warmth, demanded, “So.
Tell me.
How’s the Duke?”

Floria’s expression lost its anger. She signalled the serving page to add more water to the offered wine-cup. “You trust that man. I can see it. That’s a new one, for you.”

“Do I?” Ash broke off to tell another of the pages, at the hearth, that she should mull the rest of the wine. “Yeah. He’s promised me another try at Carthage. That’s what I trust. He’s in this for survival; and the man knows what to do with an army. So: what’s the prognosis? When will he be on his feet again?
Is
it the wound he took at Auxonne?”

“That’s what I’ve been discussing. Ha! Ash, do you know? It was the name of this company that got me through to him. A ‘woman-doctor’.” Floria walked across to the window embrasure, peered out into the gloom, and hitched her hip up on to the window ledge. Her hands described the shapes of bodies in the air. “His surgeons finally let me see it – he’s taken a wound in the middle of his back. Lance, I’d say.”

“Shit!”

Floria’s green gaze flickered at the empathic flinch that came from Ash. She pointed at Anselm. “Stand up!”

As the big man stood, she crossed the chamber and seized his left arm, holding it up from his body. Robert Anselm looked gravely at her. The surgeon tapped his armour, under his left arm.

“As far as I can see, a lance strike here – from the front or the side, into the left side of the Duke’s body.”

“It should have glanced off. That’s what the deflective surfaces of armour are for.” Ash went to where Anselm stood thoughtfully motionless. She put her fingers on the join of breast- and back-plate. “Unless the lance hit one of the hinges, here. That would let it bite.”