Ash: A Secret History (147 page)

This is a dead end, Pierce. He doesn’t remember editing the second edition of ASH. He doesn’t remember being an academic. When he talks to William, he thinks they are still fifteen and living with their parents in Wiltshire. He doesn’t understand why William is ‘old’. His own face in a mirror distresses him. William just pats his brother’s hand, and tells him he’ll be all right now. It made me cry to listen to him.

Sometimes I don’t like myself much. I don’t like myself because he’s a real person, who has suffered appallingly; and his brother is a sweet old man who I’m fond of.

FFS, Pierce, why aren’t you checking your mail!

– Anna

  Message: #322 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash

Date:    14/12/00 at 10.51 p.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna –

I can’t leave here now. I can’t take the time away from this translation! You will see why. Am sending the next section.

Talk to Vaughan Davies again, for me. _Please._ If he is *at all* coherent, ask him: what was his theory about a ‘connection’ between the ASH documents and the history – our history – that superseded it? Ask him what it was that he was going to publish after his second edition!

– Pierce

  Message: #196 (Pierce Ratcliff)

Subject: Ash

Date:    14/12/00 at 11.03 p.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

ARE YOU MAD?

– Anna

  Message: #333(Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash

Date:    14/12/00 at 11.32 p.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna –

No, I’m not mad.

It’s late, here. Too late to do any more translation tonight, and besides, I am too tired to think in English, never mind in dog-Latin. I’m sending you what I have complete. Dawn tomorrow I’ll carry on, but for now, I owe you an explanation of why I’m not flying back to Gatwick, and here it is.

I have at last been shown the Admiralty charts of this area of the Mediterranean. As you might expect, given the sheer amount of submarine activity during the last war, their charts of the seabed are extensively detailed, and accurate.

None of them show any kind of a ‘trench’ on the sea-floor in this location.

– Pierce

PART TWELVE

16 November AD 1476

The Hunting of the Hart
¹

I

“There’s a fucking
army
outside the walls,” Ash yelled, “and you think you’re just going to go out and hunt some
animal?
”

Olivier de la Marche brought his big chestnut stallion around, avoiding rubble, and answered her question between orders to the throng of huntsmen. “Demoiselle-Captain, we ride
now.
We must have a Duke.”

Ash, looking at his weather-beaten features under his visor, recognised a capable man with much to organise, and also something else; some quality of abstraction that she realised to be present now everywhere in these ravaged streets.

The blitzed great square behind Dijon’s north wall must have three thousand people in it now, to her quick calculation: and more coming in every minute. Knights mounted on horseback, archers running with messages, huntsmen and their varlets, and couple upon couple of running-hounds. But most – she squinted her eyes against the morning sun falling between the burnt-out timbers of buildings – wet, and blackened from fire – mostly women and men in drab clothes. Shopkeepers. Apprentices. Farming families: peasants taking refuge from the devastated countryside. Wine-makers and cheese-sellers, shepherds and small girl-children. All of them bundled up in their layers of neatly mended, muddy woollen tunics, gowns, and cloaks; faces bitten red and white by the wind. Most of them solemn, or abstracted. For the first time in months, not flinching in anticipation of falling stone or iron.

And quiet. The noise of her own men walking and riding back in was the loudest noise, audible over the whining of the hounds. Her rough voice, and the single passing-bell, were all else that broke the almost complete silence.

“If there are Burgundians among your mercenaries,” Olivier de la Marche concluded, “they may hunt with us.”

Ash shook her head. The pale bay gelding, abruptly alert to her movement, skittered a step sideways in the mud and broken cobbles. She brought him under control. “But
who
inherits the Dukedom?”

“One of the royal ducal bloodline.”

“
Which one?
”

“We will not know, until they are chosen by means of the hunting of the Hart. Demoiselle-Captain, come if you will; if not, keep the walls and watch the truce!”

Ash exchanged glances with Antonio Angelotti as the Duke’s deputy rode off towards the houndsmen. “‘The hunting of the hart’… Am I crazy, or are they?”

Before Angelotti could answer, a tall scarecrow figure approached, pushing its hood back. Floria del Guiz beat her sheepskin mittens together against the bitter wind.

“Ash!” she called cheerfully. “Robert has a dozen men who need to speak to you about the hunt. Should he bring them from the tower, or will you go to him?”

“Here.” Ash dismounted, the steel and leather war saddle creaking. The tension of the Faris’s camp released itself, momentarily, in aching muscles, under her armour.

Down at ground-level, she became more aware of the men and women packing into the square. They walked quietly, most not speaking; a few with expressions of grief. Where they were forced by the devastation of the narrow winding streets to crowd together, she saw how they courteously stepped aside, or gave a nod of apology. The Burgundian men-at-arms, that she expected to see using their bills to hold the crowd back under control, were standing in small clusters watching the flood of humanity go past them. Some of them exchanged brief comments with the peasants.

Many of the women held lit tapers carefully between their cupped hands.

“This silence… I’ve never heard anything like it.”

There were two women behind Floria, Ash now saw; one in the green robes of a soeur, and one in a stained, grubby white hennin. As the press lessened around her and the bay gelding, she could see their faces. Soeur-Maîtresse Simeon, and Jeanne Châlon.

“Florian…” Bewildered, she turned back to her surgeon.

Floria looked up from sending a baggage-train child back with a message. “Robert says the dozen or so Flemings who stayed with us after the split, they want permission to ride in the hunt. I’m riding too.”

Ash said sceptically, “And when was the last time you thought of yourself as Burgundian?”

“This does not matter.” The Soeur-Maîtresse’s fat white face did not look disapprovingly at Ash; rather, sadly, and with no condemnation. “Your doctor has been ill-treated by her homeland; but this draws all of us together.”

Ash caught Jeanne Châlon looking at her without bitterness. Tears had reddened the rims of her eyes. That or the cold wind kept her sniffling. Amazingly, she had her arm linked in Floria’s.

“I can’t believe he’s dying,” she croaked. Ash felt her throat tighten in involuntary sympathy with the woman’s plain grief. Jeanne Châlon added, “He was our heart. God lays His sternest burdens on His most faithful servant… God in His mercy knows how we shall miss him!”

Apart from the Soeur-Maîtresse, Ash suddenly realised, she was seeing no priests out on the streets. The single bell continued to toll. Every ordained priest must be in the palace, with the dying Charles; and she felt a curious impulse to ride there, and wait for the news of his final passing.

“I was born here,” Floria said. “Yes, I’ve lived away. Yes, I’m outcast. All the same, Ash, I want to see the new Duke chosen. I wasn’t in Burgundy; I was abroad when Philip died and Charles hunted. I’m going to do it now, whether—” and her eyes became small with the constriction of reckless, bitter humour on her face: “—whether I think it’s rubbish, or not. I’m still going!”

Ash felt the cold wind redden her nose. A drop of clear liquid ran down. She unbuckled her purse to take out her kerchief, and, having given herself time to think – time to look at the hunters, the archers in the liveries of Hainault and Picardy mounting up; even the refugee French knight Armand de Lannoy standing ready with grooms and a group of Burgundian nobles – Ash wiped her nose vigorously and said, “I’m coming with you. Robert and Geraint can look after the shop.”

Antonio Angelotti spoke down from the saddle of his scraggy grey. “But if the Visigoths don’t keep the truce, madonna!”

“The Faris has her own reasons for keeping this truce. I’ll brief you after this.” Her tone lightened. “Come on, Angeli. The lads are getting bored. I’m going to show them we don’t have to sit inside Dijon like we’re terrified. Good for morale!”

“Not if they stick your head on a spear, madonna.”

“I don’t suppose that would improve my morale, no…” Ash turned as the child messenger threaded her way back through the polite crowd, Robert Anselm and a number of men-at-arms behind her. “What’s the request here?”

Pieter Tyrrell stood behind Anselm, his maimed hand in its specially sewn leather glove tucked behind his belt. His face under his archer’s sallet looked white. With him, Willem Verhaecht and his lance second, Adriaen Campin, seemed equally stunned.

“We didn’t think he was going to
die,
boss,” Tyrrell said, not needing to explain who he referred to. “We’d like to ride the hunt in memory. I know it’s a siege, but…”

The older Willem Verhaecht said, “A dozen of my men are Burgundian by birth, boss. It’s respect.”

“He was a good employer,” the lance second added.

Ash surveyed the men. A pragmatic part of her mind said,
A dozen men either way won’t save us if the Visigoths turn treacherous,
and the rest of her responded, in the weak morning sunlight, to the effect of the immense press of people and the almost total silence.

“If you put it that way,” she said, “yes, it’s respect. He knew what he was doing. Which is more than you can say for most of the sad bastards who pay us. Okay: permission granted. Captain Anselm, you and Morgan and Angelotti will hold the tower. If there’s treachery, stand ready to have the city gates open – we’ll be coming back in a hurry!”

A quiet appreciative chuckle went round the group. Willem Verhaecht turned to organising his men. Robert Anselm’s mouth shut in a firm line. Ash caught his eye.

“Listen.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“Yes, you do. You hear grief.” Instinctively, Ash kept her voice at a low conversational tone. She pointed to where, among the huntsmen and hounds, Philippe de Poitiers and Ferry de Cuisance stood with Olivier de la Marche; all of them surrounded by their men; all of them bareheaded now in the autumn day. “If this city’s going to stand, they
need
a successor to Charles. If he dies and there’s no one – then this is over: Dijon will fall tomorrow.”