Ash: A Secret History (156 page)

The hissing slash of water against stone increased. Ash pressed up closer to the slit window, hands braced against the cold stone either side. Across the empty air, she realised she was seeing only a few yards of broken earth.

She shifted as far to one side as she could, to let Robert cram in beside her. He hawked, spat: white mucus spraying the stone sill.

“At least this shitting weather gets in their powder, and stretches the siege-machine ropes…”

Promptly as he spoke, a shrill whistle and roar sounded; each man in the tower room flinching, automatically. Ash jumped down from the window embrasure and clattered to where she could see out of the door. A faint thump, and a glow through the rain, down in the ruined part of the city, made her skin shiver by what it implied.

“Rain’s not going to stop the golem-machines,” she said. “Or the Greek Fire.”

Robert Anselm did not move from the window. After a moment, she strode back and stepped up to rejoin him.

He grunted. “They got Charlie’s funeral going yet?”

“Fuck, who’s going to tell
us
anything!”

“You heard anything from the doc?”

Ash took her gaze away from the shrouded grey lumps on the puddled earth beyond the moat – discarded ladders, dead and bloated horses, one or two corpses of men. Slaves, probably; not thought worth the recovery. All a uniform mud-grey; all motionless.

“Roberto – whatever it means – she
is
Duchess.”

“And I’m the fucking King of Carthage!”

“I’ve heard the Wild Machines,” Ash said, her gaze steady on him. “In my soul. And I’ve seen them – I’ve stood there while they shook the earth under my feet. And I saw Florian’s face, and I
heard
them, Robert – they tried to make their devil’s miracle, and they were stopped. Cold. Because of her; because of our Florian. Because she made Burgundy’s Heraldic Beast into … meat.”

On his face, what there is visible of it under sallet-visor and sopping wet hood, she sees an expression of cynical disbelief.

“What that means to the Burgundians, I don’t know yet. But… You weren’t there, Robert.”

Anselm’s head turned. She saw him only in profile now, looking out from the window slit. His voice gravel, he protested, “I know I fucking
wasn’t there!
I
prayed
for you! Me and the lads; Paston and Faversham, up on the wall—”

Push it or not? she wondered, diverted. Yes. I need to know how bad it is: I’m going to depend on this man.

“If you’d come on the assault, you might have seen what happened on the hunt. You bottled out.”

Jerking round, his face red, he jabbed a finger two inches from her breastplate. “
You don’t fucking say that!
”

She was aware that the escort and banner men-at-arms by the tower door looked over; signalled them with a gesture to stay where they were.

“Robert, what’s the problem?” She loosened and removed one gauntlet, and raised her bare hand to wipe at her wet face. “Apart from the obvious! We’ve seen shittier sieges. Neuss. Admitted it’s better being on the
outside…
”

His confidence was not to be got by humour. His expression closed up. This close, she could see the hazel-green colour of his eyes, the thread-veins on his nose and cheekbones; sallet and shadow making his face unreadable.

Ash waited.

A renewed wind took the rain in great gusts, beating against the walls like surf. Ash is momentarily reminded of the sea beating against the cliffs of Carthage harbour, below the stone window-slits of House Leofric; is conscious of a similar great void, the other side of this wall; vast empty air, filled with freezing grey torrents. Faint spray dampened her cheeks. She reached up, with a left-hand gauntlet that – despite being scoured in sand and rubbed with goose-grease – was already orange-spotted with rust, and tilted her visor down.

“What is it, Roberto?”

The man’s body beside her crushed her further into the window embrasure as he heaved a great sigh. He looked out at the ever-moving rain. He spoke, at last, with an apparent acceptance of her right to make demands of him:

“I didn’t know if you were alive or dead after Auxonne. No one could get any news of your body being picked up off the field. I expected to see your head on a spear. Because if you
were
dead, the Goths were going to show your body off, damn fucking sure!”

His voice became quieter, barely audible to her, never mind to the men-at-arms by the door.

“If you were a prisoner, they’d’ve shown you in chains… You could have been off in the woods, wounded. You could have crawled off to die. No one would have found you.”

He turned to look at her. The rain made him squint, under his raised visor, flesh creasing around his eyes.

“That was how it was, girl.
I
thought you’d been shovelled into a grave-trench, without being recognised. Those fire-throwers… A lot of the men came back saying bodies were burned black. Tony said you might have been taken prisoner at Auxonne and carted off to North Africa, because of how interested they were at Basle in getting hold of you. But they wouldn’t care if they’d had to take a
dead
body. Scientist-magi give me the willies,” Anselm added, with an unselfconscious shudder.

She waited, listening to the slash of rain on flint, not prompting him.

“Three months, and then—” His gaze fixed on her. “You
had
to be dead, there was no other way to behave – and then, out of nowhere, three days ago, a message on a crossbow bolt—”

“You’d got used to leading the company.”

His hands slammed into the wall either side of her, pinning her into the window embrasure. She glanced down at the steel of his arms; then up into his face.

Spittle sprayed from his mouth, dotting the front of her livery tabard. “
I wanted to come to Africa!
I
didn’t
want to stay in Dijon! Sweet Green Christ – What do you
think
happened, girl? I had John de fucking Vere saying, the Duke’s sending half the company to Carthage, I need a man I can leave in command
here
—”

The men at the tower door stirred uneasily. He broke off, deliberately lowering his voice again.

“If you were anywhere, dead or alive, it had to be Carthage! Only I didn’t have a fucking choice! I got ordered to stay here! And now I find out you
were
there,
alive
—”

Ash reached up and put her hands on his wrists, and gently tugged them down. The steel of his vambrace was slick with rain, cold against her one bare palm.

“I can see Oxford doing it that way. He’d need to take Angeli, for the guns. You’d been my second-in-command, you
were
in command, there wasn’t anyone else he could leave behind with safety. Robert, I could have been dead. Or if not dead, then anywhere. You were right to stay here.”

“I should have gone with him! I was sure you were dead. I was wrong!” Robert Anselm punched his fist hard into the flint lining of the window embrasure. He looked down at his scratched, dented gauntlet, and absently flexed his fingers. “If I’d pulled the company out with me, Dijon wouldn’t be standing siege now, but I’m telling you, girl, I should have come to Carthage. For you.”

“If you had,” Ash said, measuring the thoughts out in her mind, “we might have taken House Leofric. With that many more men and guns. We might have destroyed the Stone Golem; we might have broken the only connection the Wild Machines have with the world – the only way they can do their miracle.”

His eyes flicked towards her, small behind the incongruously long lashes.

“But then.” Ash shrugged. “If you hadn’t been here, Dijon might have fallen before you’d got as far as the coast – then the Duke would have been executed, and we’d know by now what it is the Wild Machines are going to use the Faris for. Because they’d have done it, three months ago!”

“And maybe not,” Anselm rumbled.

“We’re
here, now.
What does it matter what you didn’t do? Robert, none of what you’re telling me explains why you didn’t come on the attack against the Faris today. None of it tells me why you’ve lost your bottle. And I need to know that, because I depend on you, and so do a lot of other people here.”

She was frank, forcing herself to mention fear aloud. What she saw on his face as he turned his head away was not shame.

He muttered, “You went out expecting to be killed.”

“Yes. If I had, but if I’d killed her—”

So quietly she almost missed it, Robert Anselm interrupted. “I couldn’t ride out with you today. I couldn’t see you get killed in front of me.”

Ash stared at him.

“Not after three months,” he said painfully. “I held masses for you, girl. I grieved. I carried on without you. Then you came back.
Then
you ask me to ride out and watch you get killed. That’s too much to ask.”

The slash of rain against flint-embedded walls grew heavier. Streamlets of water dribbled down between the planks of the roof above, splattering them and the floorboards irrespectively.

I know what to say, Ash thought. Why can’t I say it?

“So,” he said harshly, “this is where you relieve me of my rank, ain’t it? You know you can’t trust me in combat any more. You think I’ll be watching your back, not doing my job.”

Some tension in her reached crisis. She snapped, “What do you want me to tell you, Robert? The same old stuff? ‘We can
all
get killed, here and now, any time, better get used to it’? ‘That’s what we do for a living, war gets you killed’? I can sing that song! Six months ago, I’d have said it to you! Not now!”

Robert Anselm reached up and unbuckled his helmet, dipping his head to remove it. The helmet-lining and his body-heat had left his stubbled head slick with sweat. He breathed out, hard.

“And now?”

“It hurts,” Ash said. She pressed her bare knuckle against the wall, grinding skin against stone, as if the physical pain could give her release. “You don’t want to see me hacked up?
I
don’t want to send you and Angeli and the others up on the walls. I brought these guys back through country like nothing on earth! I don’t want them getting cut up raiding the Visigoths’ camp, or whatever idea de la Marche is going to come up with when I see him. I want to hold us back, go sit in the tower, out of the bombardment –
I’m starting to be
afraid of people getting hurt.
”

There was a long pause. The rain grew louder.

Robert Anselm gave a small, suppressed snuffle. “Looks like we’re both in the shit, then!”

As she stared at him, startled, he burst into a full guffaw.

“Jesus, Roberto—!”

The snuffle caught her by surprise. An emptiness in her chest made her choke, spurt out a giggle; laugh, finally, out loud. It would not be denied: a bubbling thing that made her sputter, wet-eyed, unable to get a coherent word out.

Shuddering to a rumbling halt, Robert Anselm reached across, putting his arm around her shoulders and shaking her.

“
We’re
fucked,” he said cheerfully.

“It’s nothing to laugh about!”

“Pair of fucking
idiots,
” he added. His arm fell away as he straightened himself up, plate sliding over steel plate. His eyes still bright; his expression sobered. “Both of us should get out of this game. Don’t think the rag-heads are going to give us the option, though.”

“Fuck, no…” She sucked at her knuckle, and a trickle of blood. “Robert, I can’t
do
this if I’m afraid of people getting hurt.”

He looked down at her, from where he stood on the flint steps. “Now we find out, don’t we? Whether we’re good at this when it’s
really
hard? When you
have
to not care?”

Her nostrils are full of the smell of wet steel, his male sweat, sodden wool, the city’s midden heaps far below. Rain spattered in, spraying her cheeks with a fine, freezing dew. As the wind gusted sharply, she and Anselm turned simultaneously towards the arrow-slit again.

“There’s nobody in charge in here. They must know that!
Why
isn’t she attacking now!”

She sent a stream of messengers to the ducal palace in the next hour, who came back one after another with word of not being able to get through to the new Duchess, to the Sieur de la Marche, to Chamberlain-Counsellor Ternant; with news of the palace being a chaotic horde of courtiers, undertakers, celebrants, priests and noblemen; simultaneously torn between arranging a crowning and a funeral.

“Captain Jonvelle told me something!” Rickard added, panting, soaked to the skin in the cold wall-tower’s room.

Ash considered asking why he had stopped to gossip with de la Marche’s Burgundian captains; saw his bright face, and decided against it.

“Saps. The rag-heads are still mining. His men can
hear
them! They’re
still
digging!”

“Hope they
drown,
” Ash growled under her breath.

She spent her time pacing the crowded floors of the Byward Tower, among men armed and ready to go out if the walls were threatened; a lance here and there being sent out to watch, to listen, for anything that might be seen or heard in devastating rain.

Forty miles south, down that road – cold darkness, twenty-four hours a day. Given what surrounds Burgundy’s borders… Is it any wonder we’re getting shit weather here?

“Boss…” Thomas Tydder, elbowed forward by his brother Simon, looked at her from under streaming dark hair. When he spoke, a drop of water hanging off the end of his nose wobbled. “Boss, is it true? Has Saint Godfrey deserted us?”

Ash signalled Tydder’s lance-leader to leave him be.

“Not deserted,” she said firmly. “He speaks for us now in the Communion of Saints, you know that, don’t you?”

Relieved and embarrassed, the boy ducked his head in a nod.

Past him, Ash caught sight of Robert Anselm; Roberto’s features utterly impassive. Automatically, she prodded at her soul, as a man may prod in his mouth for a tooth that has been drawn, and that has left only a tender, unfilled gap.