Ash: A Secret History (149 page)

“Wait here.” She shouldered the gelding forward with only Thomas Rochester and a lance escort. The Duke’s deputy had dismounted. He stood, surrounded by a dozen men with silent square-muzzled lymers.

“Bloody Burgundians. Ought to have my old granddad here,” Thomas Rochester muttered. “Used to reckon, boss, if you showed him a fumay, he could tell you if the beast was an old or a young one, a male or a female. Just from a turd. ‘A fat long and black ’un’s a hart often.’ That’s what he used to say.”

Fifty men’s nowhere near enough. But the foot troops couldn’t keep up. Fifty cavalry, medium and heavy; we need to smash our way into the camp – I need to know how she’s deployed her troops; where she
is
—

She bit down on her lip, within a split second of automatically speaking aloud to the
machina rei militaris.

No! Not to the Stone Golem, not to Godfrey: because the Wild Machines are there, I can
feel
them—

A swelling pressure in her soul.

The Faris won’t have reported through the Stone Golem anyway.

“Is that the word of you all?” Olivier de la Marche asked. The bluff armoured man had the look of someone who would far rather be organising a tournament or a war. Ash wondered briefly if the Duke’s deputy would be a Duke who could keep control of an invaded country: war here, war in Lorraine, war in Flanders…

The white-bearded lymerer looked around for confirmation at his fellows. “True, my lord. We’ve been out on foot since before dawn. Downriver, to the plains, and east and west to the hills. West and north, to the forests. All the hollows are cold. All the fumays are old. There are no beasts.”

“Oh,
what!
” Ash exclaimed under her breath. She risked a glance back. No more than quarter of a mile outside the Visigoth camp: too soon to break off.

But if there’s not going to be a hunt—

Olivier de la Marche stomped around and held up both hands, in an unnecessary demand for silence. He bellowed: “The quest has found no beasts! The land is empty!”

“’Course it’s bloody empty!” Thomas Rochester snorted with self-disgust. “Shit, boss, think about it! They’ve got a bloody army camped here. The rag-heads probably ate everything in sight months ago! Boss, you can forget this, it ain’t gonna happen.”

From the men and women around them, like the mumbled response of a mass, many voices echoed: “The land is empty.”

Olivier de la Marche swung himself back up into his saddle in a clatter of armour. Ash heard him order the huntsmen.

“Send the lymers back. We will have no scent to follow. Bring the running-hounds. Send the greyhound relays to the north.” He raised his voice: “North, to the wildwood!”

A swirl of people went past Ash. The pale bay gelding whickered, half kicking out; and she brought him back under control in time to see all the men, women and children on foot streaming past, in the wake of the mounted Burgundian nobles. The black standard of the Visigoth company bobbed at their rear. She saw a number of cavalry with the spearmen: mounted archers.

Archers.
Shit.

“Let’s go!” She raised her arm and jerked it forward. The bay wheeled, and she brought it up with the mounted men-at-arms and archers of the Lion, falling in beside her banner and Euen Huw.

“Go where, boss?” Thomas Rochester demanded.

Ash rapped out crisp orders. “North. Ride for the trees. Once in cover, break off; then rendezvous at the ford on the west river.”

Verhaecht’s Flemings pushed ahead, so that she rode towards the rear of the company, among faces she knew. A thin youth turned his head away: she recognised Rickard, forbidden to ride on this assault, and said nothing – too late, now.

“This is stupid!” Rochester fumed, riding by her side. “How can he send the hounds out, when he doesn’t know which way the beast is likely to run? And there isn’t a beast! How can they hunt when there isn’t a quarry, boss?”

With automatic cheerfulness, Ash said, “That’s Burgundians for you.”

A low chuckle went around the riders. She sensed their apprehension, the immediate excitement of daring oozing away. She glanced up at her banner.
There’s a reasonable chance they won’t follow me for this. It’s murder. Can I get to the Faris on my own? Ride back, give myself up, smuggle a dagger in – no. No. She knows she’s the target.

Pushing the gelding across, she rode out to the edge of her company, to where ladies in padded headdresses and veils rode sidesaddle on underfed palfreys. Floria’s big-boned scrawny grey stood out like a mercenary in church. The surgeon spurred across to her from Jeanne Châlon’s side.

“What are we doing?” Ash called.

“Fuck knows!” Coming closer, ignoring the appalled stares of the crowd on foot, Floria lowered her voice. “Don’t ask me, ask de la Marche, he’s Master of Game for this one! Girl, it’s November. We won’t find so much as a wren out here. This is mad!”

“Where’s he taking us?”

“North-east, upriver. Into the wildwood.” Floria pointed from the saddle. “Up ahead, there.”

The head of the column was already in the edge of it, Ash saw. Riding among leafless trees, brown branches stark against the pale sky. She slowed the gelding’s pace as they began to come among tree-stumps. Chopped bark displayed weeping pale wood. The scent of wood-smoke went up from a number of campfires; one stump had a rusting axe left sticking in it. Of the wood-gatherers and charcoal burners and swine-herds she would have expected to see, in peacetime, there was no sign. Gone, weeks before, as refugees.

“There,” Floria said, as if she realised what Ash had been looking for.

Where she pointed, men in black coifs and sodden wool tunics and bare legs walked with the hunters, talking animatedly to the men with their leashed couples of hounds. One elderly, stout man carried a taper, its flame all but invisible in the sunlight.

This cultivated edge of the forest was all hornbeam, coppiced down to thin thumb-width growth; and ash, for staves, and hazel, for nuts in season. All the winter-dark branches stood equally bare. The last chestnuts and leaves hung from bigger trees. Ash glanced down to bring the gelding around a stump, lifted her gaze, and found that she had lost the walkers and riders at the edges of the cavalcade in the multiple thin thickets. The horses’ hooves sounded softer on leaf-mulch and muddy moss.

Ahead, with de la Marche’s banner, the bearded huntsman lifted his horn to his lips. A shattering call split the silent, crowded wood. Handlers bent down to the leashes of the running-hounds, uncoupled them; and a bellow went up: “Ho moy, ho moy!”

Another handler shouted at his hounds by name: “Marteau! Clerre! Ribanie! Bauderon!”

The Soeur-Maîtresse of the
filles de pénitence
dug her heels into her palfrey and shot past Ash. “
Cy va! Cy va!
”

“Ho moy!” Jeanne Châlon wheezed. Her little wheat-coloured mare dug in its heels, among the fallen sticks under the chestnut trees and oaks. She gestured energetically at Floria. “Ride for us! Be my witness!”

“Yes, Tante!”

A surge of men running pushed them apart from the women riders, Ash with Floria’s rangy beast shoving close to her gelding’s rump. Heart thumping, she all but gave in and spurred over the cut trees and rough ground in the wake of the Burgundians, caught up in the chase. She leaned her weight in, turning back towards Thomas Rochester and Willem Verhaecht and the men.

“Get in among the trees!” she yelled. A glance back south showed her more riders, more men running on foot, and the Visigoth banner just entering the line of the wood.

Floria yelped, “Ho moy!” at the hounds, streaming away through bush and briar, and reluctantly reined in back beside Ash, cheeks flushed. Bare branches rubbed together over their heads, creaking, audible over the clink of tack and the rapid footsteps. The hounds’ shrill baying ran ahead. The press of men and women running up from behind forced Ash into a trot, ducking low branches, careful on the broken earth.

Floria, behind her, called, “What the hell do they think they’ve found?”

“This late in the day?” Ash jerked her thumb at the sun, low through the trees behind them, close on mid-morning. “Nothing! There isn’t a bloody rabbit left between here and Bruges. Get up ahead with your aunt.”

“I’ll ride with you – go ahead in a minute—”

“Thomas.” Ash signalled. “Start sending them off. Lance at a time. North first, then west through the woods.”

The man-at-arms nodded, turning his mount awkwardly among wilted banks of briar and dead goldenrod; and spurred back into the company cavalry. She watched the few seconds necessary to see him approach the lance-leaders.

“Florian.” She checked position of her banner, the tag-end of the running crowd among holly, hornbeam, and oak wood; the standard of the Visigoths – out of sight, somewhere back at the edge of the wood. “Get your ass up there with the hunters. When you get back to the city, have everything ready for wounded.”

The surgeon ignored her. “They’re coming back!”

A throng of men on foot and on horse went past, couples of hounds tugging away from their handlers, moving too fast for the rough ground underfoot. Swept back towards a holly thicket, Ash shifted her weight forward and hauled on the rein.

The pale gelding turned. Ash shifted her weight back, tassets sliding over cuisses, and brought the horse around. Apart from Rochester’s sergeant with her banner, a yard or two off her flank, all the riders and people on foot around her now were strangers. She risked a glance off to the far right – to see the backs of men in Lion livery riding out into thicker woods that way – and another look behind her.

Two heavy cataphracts in scale armour, that flashed in the slanting light under the trees, were riding up close behind; the Visigoth company standard caught up somewhere in branches behind them, and fifty or more serf-troops with spears running on foot with the riders.

“It is not their business to be here!” a tight-lipped voice said, at her right side. Ash, turning in her saddle, found herself right beside Jeanne Châlon’s palfrey.

“It is not yours, either!” the woman added, her tone not hostile, but disapproving.

Ash could not now see Soeur-Maîtresse Simeon, or Floria, in the mob. She kept the gelding tightly reined in as he rolled his eye, shifting his hooves on the bank that sloped down ahead of them.

“Better hope the chase doesn’t come back this way!” Ash grinned at Mistress Châlon, and jerked her thumb at the serf-troops running past them through briar and tree-stumps. “What happens to Burgundy if a Visigoth kills the hart?”

Jeanne Châlon’s pursed mouth closed even tighter. “They are not eligible. Nor you, you have not a drop of Burgundian blood in your veins! It would mean nothing: no Duke!”

Ash halted the pale gelding. Water ran black under the leafless trees. A pale sun, above, put white light down through the tall branches. Ahead, men with hose muddy to the thigh, and women with their kittles kilted up and black at the hem, waited patiently to cross a small stream. Ash thumbed the visor of her sallet further up.

A strong smell hit her. Made up of horse – the gelding sweating, as it fretted in the moving crowds of peasants – and of wood-smoke, from distant bonfires, and of the smell of people who do not bathe often and who work out in the air: a ripe and unobjectionable sweat. Tears stung her eyes, and she shook her head, her vision blurring, thinking,
Why? What does
—

What does this remind me of?

The picture in her head is of old wood, that has been faded to silver and cracked dry by summer upon summer in the field. A wooden rail, by a step.

One of the big roofed wagons, with steps set down into grass; the earth trodden flat in front of it, and grass growing up between the spokes of the wheels.

A camp, somewhere. Ash has a brief associational flavour in her mouth: fermented dandelion, elderflower; watered down to infinitesimal strength, but enough to make the water safe for a child to drink. She remembered sitting on the wagon steps, Big Isobel – who could only have been a child herself, but an older child – holding her on her knee; and the child Ash wriggling to be set down, to run with the wind that ruffled the grasses between lines of tents.

The smell of cooking, from campfires; the smell of men sweating from weapons practice; the smell that wool and linen get when they have been beaten at a river bank and hung out to dry in the open air.

Let me go back to that, she thought. I don’t want to be in charge of it; I just want to live like that again. Waiting for the day when the practice becomes real war, and all fear vanishes.

“
Cy va!
”

Hounds gave tongue, somewhere far ahead in the wood. The crowd at the stream surged forward, water spraying up. Both her sergeant and banner were gone. Ash swore, unbuckled the strap under her chin, and wrenched her sallet off. She pushed the cropped hair back from her ears, tilted her head, and listened.

A confused noise of hounds echoed between the trees.

“
That’s
not a scent – or they’ve lost it again.” Ash found that she was speaking to the empty air: the Châlon woman vanished into the throng.

Visigoth serf-troops pounded past on foot, either side of her; most of them with nothing but a helmet and a dark linen tunic, running bloody and barefoot on the forest floor. Skin prickled down the whole length of her spine. She dared not put her hand to her riding sword. She sat poised, bareheaded, waiting, ears alert in the cold wind for the sound of a bow—

“Green Christ!” a voice said at her stirrup.

Ash looked down. A Visigoth in a round steel helm with a nasal bar, arquebus clutched loosely in a dirty hand, had stopped and was staring up at her. Boots, and a mail shirt, marked him out as a freeman; what she could see of his face was weather-beaten, middle-aged, and thin.

“Ash,” he said. “Christ, girlie, they did mean you.”

In the rush of people, the two of them went unnoticed; Ash’s gelding sidling back into the shelter of a beech tree with a few last brown leaves still curled like chrysalides on its twigs; the Visigoth’s mounted officer too busy yelling his men back into some kind of order and off the trail of the hounds.