Ash: A Secret History (158 page)

“Fucking Green Christ!”

Even at Neuss, there were men who could slip the siege lines in either direction; gather information, desert, spread treachery and rumour, raid the besiegers’ supplies, attempt assassination. There always are. Always.

This isn’t a normal siege.

Nothing about this has ever been normal!

“We’re going to have hell’s own job getting anybody past that,” Ash said. “Never mind sallying out for any kind of attack.”

She turned away from the battlements.

“I’m going back to the palace. You, you and you: with me. Roberto – we
have
to speak to Florian.”

III

As the rain eased off, a chain of men-at-arms passed rock-damaged beams and rafters up the steps from the city below, jamming the makeshift wooden struts in wherever hoardings could be reinforced. Antonio Angelotti, apparently oblivious to the stone splinters now spraying off the outside walls, and the thud and boom of Visigoth cannon-fire, lifted his hand in greeting, standing back from his crews running cannon up the steps to the parapet.

“I wish I were an
amir
’s
ingeniator
again, madonna!” He wiped dripping yellow-and-blue dyed plumes away from his archer’s sallet, out of his eyes, smiling at her. “Have you seen what they’ve done out there? The skill—”

“Fuck your professional appreciation!”

The broad excitement in his smile did not alter as another chunk of limestone slammed into the wall ten feet below the battlements, shaking the parapet under their feet.

“Make us up more mangonels and arbalests!”
⁶
Ash raised her voice over the noise of the men. “Get Dickon – no – whoever’s taken over as master smith—”

“Jean Bertran.”

“—Bertran. I want bolts and rock-chuckers. I don’t want us to run out of powder before we have to.”

“I’ll see to it, madonna.”

“You’re coming with me.” She squinted a glance at the clearing afternoon sky; judged how fast the temperature fell now that the sky was clearing. “Rochester, take over here – unless it’s a Visigoth attack, I don’t want to hear about it! You keep Jussey under control, Tom.”

“Yes, boss!”

A continuous shattering bombardment began to split and crack the air – great jagged rocks the size of a horse’s carcass; iron shot that fissured the merlons of the battlements. Ash braced herself and walked down the dripping steps from the wall to street-level, Robert Anselm, Angelotti, and her banner-bearer behind her. She hesitated for a moment before mounting up, gaze sweeping the demolished open space immediately behind the walls.

“Feels more dangerous than the fucking
battlements!
”

Angelotti inclined his head, while settling his sallet more firmly on his damp yellow ringlets. “Their gunners have got the elevation for this area.”

“Oh, joy…”

She touched a spur to the bay, which skittered sideways on the wet cobbles before she hauled its head around, and pointed it towards the distant, intact roof-lines of the city. Giovanni Petro and ten archers – all drawn from men who had not been to Carthage – fell in around her, bow-strings under their hats in this wet, hands close to falchions and bucklers, wincing away from the sky as they strode though the rubble. The leashed mastiffs Brifault and Bonniau whined, almost under the bay’s hooves.

Robert Anselm rode in silence over the sopping ground. He might have been another anonymous armoured man, one of de la Marche’s remaining Burgundians, but for his livery. She could read nothing of what she could see of his expression. Angelotti glanced up continually as he rode, letting his scrawny mount put her hooves where she might – calculating the ability of enemy gunners? The sky began to turn white, wet, clear; with a tinge of yellow on the south-west horizon. Perhaps two hours of light left now, before autumn’s early sunset.

Florian. The Faris. Godfrey. John Price. Shit: why don’t I know what’s happening with anybody!

Inquiries have brought her no information, either, about a white-haired hackbutter of middle age, in borrowed Lion Azure livery. If Guillaume Arnisout came into Dijon in yesterday’s mad rush, he’s keeping quiet about it.

What did I expect? Loyalty? He knew me when I was a child-whore. That isn’t enough to bring anybody over to
this
side of these walls!

“Will we get in to see the doc?” Anselm pondered.

“Oh, yeah. You watch me.”

The wreckage of homes and shops behind the gate is deserted – ‘work-teams of citizens and Burgundian military have cleared paths through the burned and battered buildings, pulling them down completely where necessary. Making a maze of deserted ruins. There is no wall left standing higher than a man’s height.

“I want some of the lads down here. Make this lot into barricades. If the rag-heads take the north-west gate, we might hold them if we’ve got something to anchor a line-fight on.”

“Right.” Anselm nodded.

She rode at a walk, not risking laming the gelding.
If they get us, they get us.
The slam and shatter of rock two hundred yards off made her flinch. Another dark object flashed through the air: high, close. She tensed, expecting a crash. No noise came.

Giovanni Petro’s sharp face creased. “Fucking
hell,
boss!”

“Yeah. I know.”

The escort straggled out in front and behind, automatically spacing themselves. She nodded to herself. A cold wind blew in her face. Rain still ran off the wreckage of masonry and oak beams. Shifting her weight to bring the pale gelding around the corner of a half-house, she saw four of the archers clustered around something – no,
two
things, she corrected herself – on the earth. Petro straightened up as she rode forward, hauling the mastiffs back by their studded collars.

“Must have been that trebuchet strike, boss,” the Italian grunted brusquely. “No missile. A man’s body; come down in two places. The head’s over here.”

Ash said steadily, “One of ours.”

Or else you wouldn’t be giving it a second look.

“I think it’s John Price, boss.”

Signalling Anselm and Angelotti to stay on their horses. Ash swung herself out of the war saddle and down. She side-stepped around the men picking up a severed torso and legs from shattered cobbles.

As she passed the two crossbowmen, Guilhelm and Michael, their grip slipped. A mass of reddish-blue intestines plopped out of the body’s cavity, into puddles. Fluid leaked away into the water.

Without looking at her, Guilhelm mumbled, “We ain’t found his arms yet, boss. Might have come down someplace else.”

“It’s all right. Father Faversham will still give him Christian burial.”

Beyond them, a woman in a hacked-off kittle and hose knelt in the mud, her steel war-hat tilted back, crying. Her face shone red and blubbered with weeping. As she looked up at Ash’s approaching clatter, Ash recognised Margaret Schmidt.

Margaret Schmidt held a severed head between her hands. It was recognisable. John Price.

“Look on the bright side,” Ash said, more for Giovanni Petro’s ears than those of the gunner. “At least he was dead
before
they shot him over the walls.”

Petro gave a snort. “There’s that. Okay, Schmidt – put the head in the blanket with the rest of him.”

The young woman lifted her head. Her eyes filled again with tears. “
No!
”

“You fucking little cunt, don’t you talk to
me
like—!”

“Okay.” Ash signalled Petro, jerking her head. He moved reluctantly back to the work-detail shifting Price’s body. She was aware of her mounted officers watching. She saw how the woman’s fingers were pressing into the flesh of the severed head. Dried blood patched her skin and kirtle-front.

Not dead
that
long before they shot him over, then.

She called back to Anselm, “Need to check if he’s been tortured.”
Could he have told them anything worth hearing?
Then, more gently, turning back to Margaret Schmidt: “Put him down.”

The woman’s gaze went flat and cold. Anger, or fear, sharpened her features. “This is somebody’s
head,
for Christ’s sake!”

“I know what it is.”

Full Milanese armour does not easily allow squatting. Ash went down on one knee beside the woman.

“Don’t make an issue out of this. Don’t make Petro have to hand you over to the provosts. Do it now.”

“No—” Margaret Schmidt looked down into features beaten purple and bloody, but still recognisable as the Englishman John Price. She sounded on the verge of throwing up. “No, you don’t understand. I’m holding somebody’s
head.
I saw it come over us… I thought it was a rock…”

The last time Ash looked at John Price’s face with any attention, a half-moon whitened it on the bluff above the Auxonne road. Weathered, drink-reddened, and full of a cheerful confidence. Nothing like this butcher’s shop reject in the woman’s hands.

Forcing a sardonic humour into her tone, Ash said, “If you don’t like this, you’ll like Geraint ab Morgan’s disciplinary measures a lot less.”

Tears ran over the rims of the young woman’s eyes; seeped down into the dirt on her face. “What are we
doing
here? It’s mad! All of you, walking around up there on the walls, just waiting for them to come again so you can fight – and now they’ve got us
trapped
in here—!” She met Ash’s gaze. “You want to fight. I’ve seen it. You actually
want
to. I’m— this is somebody’s head, this is a
person!
”

Ash slowly got to her feet. Behind her, Petro and the other archers had unwrapped somebody’s bedroll; held it between four of them, now, with a burden dragging it down. The bottom of it was already stained and dripping.

“He was not interrogated,” Angelotti called. “Only killed, madonna. Spear wound to the belly.”

“Ride on!” she called. “Get over in cover!”

Angelotti spurred his horse. Anselm leaned from the saddle, said something to Guilhelm, who took the bay’s reins and stood waiting as the rest of Petro’s squad moved off. Ash turned back to Margaret Schmidt.

Why am I wasting time with her? One half-assed-gunner?

Ah, but she’s still one of us…

Ash spoke over the noise of orders and horses’ hooves. “This isn’t the first time you’ve seen a man die.”

Margaret Schmidt looked up with an expression Ash could not place. An utter contempt, she realised.
An expression I’ve grown used to not seeing – at least: not directed at me.

“I worked in a whorehouse!” the woman said bitterly. “Sometimes I’d step over someone with his throat cut, just to get into the house. That’s thieving, or somebody’s grudge; they didn’t volunteer for it! To kill someone they don’t even
know!
”

Ash felt her shoulders and back tense, steel-hard, under her steel armour, expecting the strike of another missile in these wrecked streets.

Keeping her voice from going thin with an effort, she said, “I’ll take you off the company’s books. But first you’re going to pick up John Price’s head and take it to your sergeant. Then you can do what you want.”

“I’m leaving now!”

“No. You’re not. First you have to do as I say.”

Carefully, Margaret Schmidt put the severed head down on the wet earth in front of her. She kept a proprietary hand on the matted hair. “When I first saw you in Basle, I thought you were a man. You
are
a man. None of this matters to you, does it? You don’t know what it’s like in this city if you’re not a soldier – you don’t know what the women are afraid of – you don’t think about anything except your company; if I wasn’t in the company you wouldn’t waste ten minutes on me, or what I do, or don’t do! That’s all that matters to you! Orders!”

Ash rubbed at her face. Half her attention on the sky, she said quietly, “You’re right. I don’t care what you do. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve seen you up on the walls, fighting in Lion livery, and you’re
new
to this – you’d already be with Messire Morgan, so fast your feet wouldn’t touch the ground. But as it is, you do what I say. Because
if you
don’t, there’s a chance someone else might not.”

“And I thought Mother Astrid was a bitch and a tyrant!”

It was melodramatic, no less genuine for being so; and Ash might have smiled, in another situation. “It’s easy to call someone else a tyrant. It isn’t so easy to keep armed men in order.”

The blonde woman’s breath came raggedly into her throat. “You and your damn
soldiers!
We’re trapped in this city! There are families here. There are women who can’t defend themselves. There are men who’ve spent their life keeping shop:
they
can’t fight either! There are priests!”

Ash blinked.

Margaret Schmidt coughed, wiped her mouth with her hand, and then stared at it, appalled, as the head of John Price rolled over on to its side on the broken cobbles.

A bluish film covered the eyes.

Ash – with a memory of Price’s capable hand steering her down into the moonlit underbrush, pointing out the Visigoth fires – felt her breath suddenly catch.
Robert was right: this is when it’s too hard.

A crow flopped down, all in ruffled black feathers, landed three yards away, and began to hop sideways towards the severed head.

Margaret Schmidt lifted her head and wailed, as unselfconscious as a small child. She might not be more than fifteen or sixteen, Ash suddenly realised.

“I want to get out of here! I wish I’d never come! I wish I’d never left the soeurs.” Tears streamed down Margaret’s face. “I don’t understand! Why couldn’t we leave before? Now we’ll never get out! We’ll
die
here!”

Ash’s throat tightened. She could not speak. For a second, fear shifted in her gut; and her eyes stung. A quick look showed her her banner far towards the undamaged houses; even Guilhelm, holding her horse, was out of earshot.

“We won’t die.”
I hope.

Tears cutting the dirt on her face, Margaret Schmidt reached out towards the severed head. She pulled her red, wet fingers back; shuddering. “You! It’s
your
fault he’s dead!”