Ash: A Secret History (14 page)

“Ash. I may be a woman. I’ve still known you for five years. You have to talk to them because you rely on them –
and?
”

“And… I’m the reason they don’t go back to being tanners or shepherds or clerks or goodwives. So I’d better see they don’t starve.”

Florian del Guiz chuckled. “That’s my girl!”

At the tent-flap, leaving, Ash said, “Florian, it’s the
Emperor’s
marriage – I’m finished if I don’t go through with it. And damned if I do.”

III

A brisk stride took Ash into the central clear ground under the Blue Lion standard. She vaulted up on to the back of an open cart and gazed round at the men variously sitting on barrels and straw bales and wet ground, and standing with their arms folded, faces upturned grimly to hers.

“Let me recap.” Her voice was not strained; she spoke distinctly and clearly, could see no one having trouble hearing her. “Two days ago we fought a skirmish with the Duke’s men. This wasn’t under orders from our employer. It was my call. It was rash, but we’re soldiers, we have to be rash. Sometimes.”

She dropped her voice on the last word, and got chuckles from a group of men-at-arms by the beer barrels: Jan-Jacob, Gustav, and Pieter; Flemish men from Paul di Conti’s lance.

“Our employer had two choices then. He could break our contract. In that case we’d go straight across to the other side and sign up with Charles of Burgundy.”

Thomas Rochester shouted up, “Maybe we should ask Duke Charles for a contract now, if it’s peace here. He’s always off fighting somewhere.”

“Maybe not
quite
yet.” Ash paused. “Maybe we’d better wait a day or two, until he forgets we almost killed him!”

Another laugh, louder; and van Mander’s boys joined in; crucial because they were known as hard and consequently respected.

“We’ll sort that out later.” Ash went on briskly. “We don’t care who’s bishop in Neuss, so Frederick knew we’d go if he said the word. That was his first choice, and he didn’t take it. Second – he could have paid us money.”

“Yeah!” Two female archers (who were known as ‘Geraint’s women’ only when they weren’t around to hear about it) raised a cheer.

Ash’s heart beat faster. She rested her left hand down on her sword-hilt, thumb stroking the ripped leather binding.

“Well, as you all know by now, we didn’t get money either.”

There were catcalls. The back of the crowd closed in; archers and crossbowmen, billmen and hackbutters; all shoulder to shoulder now and putting their attention on her.

“For those of you who were with me in the skirmish, by the way, well done. It was fucking amazing. Amazing.” Deliberate pause. “I’ve never seen an encounter won by anybody who did so many things wrong!”

Loud laughter. She spoke over it, picking out individual men. “Euen Huw, you do
not
get off to loot the bodies. Paul di Conti, you do not start a charge from so far away that your horse is on crutches by the time you finally get to the enemy! I’m surprised you didn’t get down and walk. And as for watching your commander for orders!” She let the comments die down. “I should add some remark about keeping your eye on the fucking standard at all times…” She cleared her throat.

Robert Anselm deliberately, and helpfully, made himself heard above the racket of several hundred voices. “Yes,
you
should!”

There was laughter and she knew the immediate crisis was over. Or holding, at any rate.

“So we’ll
all
be putting in lots of skirmish practice.” Ash looked out from the back of the cart. “What you guys did
was
fucking amazing. Tell your grandchildren. It wasn’t war. You just don’t see knight charging knight on the battlefields, because there’s all you nasty little fuckers with bows out there! Oh yeah –
and
the hackbutters.” A grin at what sounded like cheerful discontent from the gun-crews. “I wouldn’t recognise a battle without the happy sound of back-firing arquebuses!”

The redheaded man-at-arms from Aston’s lance yelled, “Get a fucking axe!” and the footmen took up the chant. The gunners responded variously and profanely. Ash nodded at Antonio Angelotti to quieten them down.

“Whatever it was, it was magnificent. Sadly, it hasn’t earned us anything. So the next time we get a chance to stick a lance up Charles of Burgundy’s ass, I’ll come back and ask if you’re going to be
paid
first.”

A voice at the back found a moment of silence to call, “
Fuck
Frederick of Hapsburg!”

“In your dreams!”

A roar of laughter.

Ash shifted her weight on to her other hip. The uncertain breeze blew tendrils of hair across her face. She smelled cooking fires, and horse manure, and the stink of eight hundred sweaty bodies packed close in a crowd. They were mostly bareheaded, being in camp and theoretically safe from attack; and their bills and halberds were piled in stacks a dozen to a tent.

Children ran around the edges, not able to pass through the packed mass made up of the men and women who fought. Most of the men and women who didn’t, the whores and cooks and washerwomen, were sitting up on the sides of wagons at the edge of the camp, listening. There were – as there always are – some men still intent on their games of dice, or dead-drunk asleep under wet canvas, or just off somewhere else, but she had the majority of her company in front of her.

Seeing so many faces that she knew, she thought: The best thing I have on my side is that they
want
to hear me. They want me to tell them what to do. Mostly they’re on my side. But they’re all my responsibility.

On the other hand, there are always other companies they can get employment with.

They went quiet, waiting for her. A word here and there, between mates. There was a lot of shifting of boots on wet ground, and people watching her, not commenting.

“A lot of you have been with me since I formed the company three years ago. Some of you were with me before that, when I raised men for the Griffin-in-Gold, and the Company of the Boar. Look around you. You’re a lot of mad bastards, and the chances are you’re standing next to some other mad bastards! You
have
to be mad to follow me – but
if you do,
” she increased voice-projection: “if you do, you’ve always come out of it
alive
– and with a hell of a
reputation
– and
paid.
”

She held up an armoured arm, before the level of talk could rise. “And we will this time. Even if we’re being paid with a marriage! I suppose there’s a first time for everything. Trust Frederick to find it.”

She gazed down at her sub-captains, who stood in a tight little knot, exchanging comments and watching her.

“During the last few days I’ve been taking chances. It’s my job. But it’s your future too. We’ve always discussed in open meeting what contracts we’ll take or not take. So now we’re going to discuss this marriage.”

The words came as fluently as ever. She never had problems talking to them. Behind the fluency, something tightened and thinned her voice. Ash became aware that her bare hands were clenched, knuckles straining.

What can I tell them? That we have to do this, but I can’t do this?

“And after we’ve discussed it,” Ash went on, “then we’re going to
vote
on it.”

“Vote?” Geraint ab Morgan yelled. “You mean a real vote?”

Somebody quite audibly said, “Democracy means doing what boss tells you!”

“Yes, a
real
vote. Because if we take this offer, it’s
company
lands and
company
revenues. And if we don’t take it – about the only excuse the Emperor Frederick is going to accept from me,” Ash said, “is ‘my company won’t let me’!”

She didn’t let them think closely about that, but carried on:

“You’ve been with me, and you’ve been with mercenary companies that don’t hold together through a season, never mind years. I’ve always put you in the way of enough loot to keep armour on your backs.”

The clouds, shifting, let sunlight sweep across the wet earth, and flash from her Milanese plate armour. It was so pat that she spared a suspicious glance for Godfrey, who stood at the foot of the cart with his hands clasped about his Briar Cross.

The bearded man raised his eyes to the heavens and smiled absently; and followed that with a swift, satisfied glance at the picture she made, standing higher than her men, in bright armour, the Lion Azure a blaze across the sky above her. A very minor miracle.

Ash stood without speaking for a moment to let them notice her armour: its expense and therefore its implications.
I can afford this, therefore I’m good. You really want to be employed by me: honest, guv…

Ash spoke. “If I get married to this man, we can have our own land to go back to in the winter. We can have its crops and timber and wool to sell. We can,” she added thinly, “stop taking suicide contracts just to get the money to re-equip ourselves every year.”

A man with lank, dark hair and wearing a green brigandine called out, “And what happens next year if we get offered a contract to fight
against
the Emperor?”

“He knows we’re mercenaries, for fuck’s sake.”

A woman archer got her way to the front of the crowd with her elbows. “But that’s now, when you’re under contract to him. That’s not when you’re married to one of his feudal subjects.” She craned her head back to look up at Ash. “Won’t he expect you to be loyal to the Holy Roman Empire, Captain?”

“If I wanted to be
told
who to fight for,” a hackbutter shouted, “I’d have joined the feudal levy!”

Geraint ab Morgan growled, “Too late to worry about that, the offer’s been made. I vote we join the property game, and don’t piss off the Emperor.”

Ash looked down from the cart. “I assume we’ll just carry on as we are.”

A rumble of complaint made itself heard across the field. The archer spun round on her heel. “Can’t you motherfuckers give her a chance? Captain Ash, you’ll be
married.
”

Ash recognised her now, the fair-haired woman with an odd name: Ludmilla Rostovnaya. She had the crank of a crossbow hanging from her belt.
Crossbowmen from Genoa,
Ash thought, and put both her hands on the side of the cart, dizzy and sick.

Why am I trying to persuade them we should go through with this?

I can’t do it.

Not for the world, never mind a poxy little Bavarian estate—

Geraint ab Morgan pushed his way to the front. Ash saw her sergeant of archers look at Florian, and at the priest, as if questioning why they didn’t speak.

Geraint yelled, “Boss, it’s fucking obvious someone’s landed this one on us because they don’t like mercenaries. Remember the Italians, after Héricourt?
¹⁹
We can’t afford to have Frederick fucked off with us. You’re going to have to do this, Captain.”

“But she can’t!” Ludmilla Rostovnaya shouted into his face. There was a rising noise of talk, not everyone being able to hear the quarrel at the front of the crowd. Ludmilla’s voice rose clearly over it. “If she marries a man, her property becomes his. Not the other way around! If she marries him, this company’s contract will belong to the del Guiz family! And del Guiz belongs to the Emperor! Frederick just got himself a mercenary company for
nothing!
”

The words went out to the back of the crowd, you could see the intelligence pass.

Ash looked down at the eastern woman, always reassured, even in crisis and panic, to see another fighting woman. This one, in her brown padded jack and red hose, with poleyns strapped on her knees, and a sunburned fair-skinned face, now flung up an arm and pointed it at her. “Tell us you’ve thought about this one, boss!”

Her
property becomes
his
—

Frederick is Fernando’s feudal lord – we become feudal property. Sweet pity of Christ, this just gets worse!

Why didn’t I think of this?

Because you’re still thinking like a man.

Ash couldn’t speak. Armour demands an upright posture or she would have slumped; as it was, she could only look out at the familiar faces.

Their voices died down. Only children, running and screaming at the edge of the crowd, made any noise. Ash swept her gaze over them, seeing one man with a meat-bone paused halfway to his mouth, another with wine running unnoticed from a wineskin to the earth. The sub-captains were being drawn out of their knot, their men crowding close to ask urgent questions.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t think about that.”

Robert Anselm warned, “That boy won’t let you stay in command. You marry Fernando del Guiz, we’ve lost you.”

“Shit!” said a man-at-arms. “She can’t marry him!”

“But you fuck off the Emperor and
we’re
fucked.” Geraint’s bloodshot eyes seemed to vanish into his stubbled cheeks as he squinted up at Ash.

She grabbed at a first thought. “There are other employers.”

“Yeah, and they’re all his second cousins or whatever!” Geraint coughed and spat phlegm. “You know the royal Princes of Christendom. Incest is their middle name. We’ll end up only being hired by arseholes who call themselves ‘noble’ because some lord once fucked their grandmother. We can forget being paid in gold!”

A different man-at-arms said, “We can always split up, hire out to other companies.”

His lance-companion, Pieter Tyrrell, yelled, “Yeah, we can go with some stupid fuck who’ll get us all killed. Ash knows what she’s doing when she fights!”

“Pity she knows fuck-all about anything else!”

Ash turned her head, unobtrusively checking to see where her battle police were, where the gate-guards were, and what the faces of the cooks and the women who washed and mended looked like. A horse neighed. The sky was momentarily full of starlings, moving to another patch of wet, worm-filled earth.

Godfrey Maximillian said quietly, “They don’t want to lose you.”

“That’s because I get them through battles, and I win.” Her mouth dried. “Whatever I do here, now, I lose.”