Ash: A Secret History (159 page)

Ash swatted at the crow. It bounced back, in a flutter, and landed on the churned-up cobbles; stalking from side to side, one black eye watching her.

“In the end, it is,” she said, and saw the woman gape at her. “Pick the head up and bring it.
Everybody’s
scared. Everybody in Dijon. We’re just safer in here – your shopkeepers and farmers and priests, too.”

“For how long!”

Ten minutes? Ten days? Ten months?

Ash said carefully, “We have food enough for weeks.”

As the woman hung her head, Ash thought quite suddenly, She’s right. I’d say this to her – or to Rickard, if he was frightened. But I wouldn’t say it to either of them if they couldn’t use a sword or crossbow. I wouldn’t bother. What does that make me?

“No one
wants
to fight.” Ash attempted to see the kneeling woman’s face. “It’s just better to be attacking someone with a close-combat weapon than it is being blown off the wall by cannon.” And as Margaret Schmidt’s head came up, Ash added, “Okay: not
much
better.”

The woman coughed, making a sound that could have been both a laugh and a sob. She got up off her knees, and picked up John Price’s severed head, scooping it up in her ragged knee-length kittle.

“This is better than fucking men for money.” Margaret Schmidt looked up from what she held in her skirts, and kicked a piece of broken brick at the crow. It hopped a few paces away. “But not
much
better. I’m sorry, lady. Captain Ash. Do you think I should leave your company?”

Dismay went through her.
Here’s another one who thinks I have the answers!

But then, why shouldn’t she think that? I go to some lengths to sound as though I do. All the time.

“I’ll … talk to Petro. If he says you’re up to standard, you can stay.”

Ash watched the woman hold her bunched skirt squeamishly, and turn her head to look at the lance and its sergeant.

What should I tell you? You’re safer with us than as a civilian, if the Goths overrun Dijon? You could just be killed, not raped and killed? Yeah, that’s a
much
better option.

Why aren’t you with Florian? What damn idiot ever convinced you that you wanted to be a mercenary soldier?

“Give that to Petro,” Ash said. “He’s not angry with you. He’s angry because John Price was a mate of his.”

By the time they got within three streets of the ducal palace, evening dimmed the sky. They could not move for people. The gables of the houses – still dripping – were hung with great swathes of black velvet. The insignia of the Golden Fleece
⁷
hung from every building. Anselm and Angelotti, in mutual and unspoken habit, rode ahead of her banner; pushing a way through the people as a man breasts the waves of the sea.

A drenched tail-end of cloth, easily eight ells long, trailed across her and dripped water down her harness as she rode under it. Velvet that might – she thought – have been warm, worn against the cold.
Shit, what a waste! What do they think we’re going to do this winter?

If the Goths come over the walls today or tomorrow, there
isn’t
a ‘this winter’ as far as these people are concerned.

The pressure of bodies pushed Petro, Schmidt, and the rest of the escort against the bay’s flanks: she quietened it, moving on. Her gaze, went over the mass of hats and shoulders as she passed through the people jammed between buildings here. Ahead, a flurry of men in black – dozens of them! – read from lists and shoved people bodily this way and that.

Anselm leaned down from the saddle to accost one. The man pushed past him, stared up at the Lion Affronté, made a mark on his scroll, and called up to Ash: “After the Sieur de la Marche! Remember that, demoiselle!”

“Bloody cheek.” Robert Anselm let Orgueil drop back a stride, to ride beside her. “What now? We can’t get through this.”

Torch-fire flickered, growing stronger as the wet light failed. Down in the street, it was already dark; only the sky above the tilting rooftops held some pale brightness. Approaching the edge of the crowd at the road junction, Ash saw black-robed torchbearers – holding people back.

She squinted into the dusk. “We need to see Florian. More than these damn Burgundians do!”

Between the lines of fire, chaplains and equerries, in black cloth, cleared a way from the direction of the ducal palace, holding the centre of the road clear. Tears streamed down the faces of people close by. Ash glanced the other way down the street –
to the cathedral?
she thought, trying dimly to call back memories of the summer, and riding there with John de Vere, and Godfrey.

Nothing but a mass of packed heads, hats pulled off to show respect; a crowd everywhere so thick that she abandoned any idea of riding through it to the palace now, or sending a messenger on foot.

“It’s the funeral!” she realised. “This is Charles’s funeral, now. They’re burying the Duke.”

Anselm appeared singularly unimpressed. “So – what next?”

“Where have they given us precedence?” She tapped her gauntlet on the pommel of the saddle. “After de la Marche – he was Charles’s champion. After the noblemen; before the rest of the men-at-arms. Does that sound good to you, Robert?”

“Oh yeah. Sounds like they might
not
do what the Faris did to her Frankish mercenaries – stick ‘em out in front, get ’em chewed up.
If we’re
still signed up with Burgundy.”

Antonio Angelotti shifted his chestnut mount back, flicking his head as water dripped down from the gabled roofs above him. The torchlight made chiaroscuro of his icon-face under the sallet’s silver brilliance.

“Our surgeon will be at the funeral if she’s Duchess now, madonna.”

“Oh, you worked that one out, too?” Ash smiled, shakily. “Enough messing about, right? They want to bury Charles – fine. I’m sure he’d rather they were keeping Dijon out of Visigoth hands. They want to crown
Florian,
for fuck’s sake? Also fine – but they’d better bloody get on with it. We have to plan now. Plan what we can do.”

“If there is to be a coronation, following this…” Angelotti shrugged.

“We need,” Ash said, “to know who’s really in charge, now. Because we’ve got decisions to take. This siege only needs the lightest shove, and it’s all over. And … whatever else happens, Florian has to stay alive.”

The last light faded, down in the narrow streets. Clergy and citizens, court servants and doctors and secretaries and sergeants-at-arms came past; and Charles’s sovereign-bailiffs and
maîtres de requêtes
and
procureurs-générals,
their liveries and black garments illuminated by torchlight. The remaining noblemen – those few who are not with the army in the north, or rotting outside Auxonne – walked in long black robes, bearing a pall of gold. It became dark, and the pitch-torches made the street pungent. Too many torches surrounded it: Ash could not look into the flames and see the coffin when it passed. Dazzled, she recognised one of the abbots walking in its wake, and two of Charles’s bastard brothers; and then glimpsed, at the back of their personal attendants, red-and-blue livery – de la Marche, he and all his noble companions riding horses in black cloth caparisons.

Ash spurred the gelding and rode, determinedly, in de la Marche’s wake, as the funeral procession moved through the streets of Dijon; followed the black-draped, lead coffin into the cathedral.
⁸
She took up a place standing by a pillar, not far behind the Burgundian nobility. Every few minutes, as unobtrusively as possible, de la Marche’s military aides approached and whispered to him: messages, she guessed, from the wall. Petro, stationed by the door, filtered news from her own runners: the north-west, at least, still unassaulted.

She sweated through chants and anthems. The coffin stood with embalmed heart, and embalmed entrails, each in their own lead caskets, on top of it; on a bier draped to the ground in black velvet, with four great candles at the corners.

The chants lasted past Vespers, past Compline. She sweated through the requiem mass, that began at midnight in the nave that was hung with black cloth. Fourteen hundred candles burned, their beeswax sweetness stifling in the enclosed air – at the sides of the nave, men were using bollock-dagger hilts to punch holes in the glass of the ogee windows, and let out the unbearable heat.

Twice, she slept kneeling. Once, Anselm’s tactful hand on her pauldron shook her awake, and she nodded at him, and swallowed with a stale mouth, helped when Angelotti covertly passed her a costrel of wine. The second time, as another mass began, she felt herself slide off into unconsciousness, without any ability to stop herself.

She woke, leaning against Angelotti, still strapped into metal plates, with every muscle and bone in her body hurting.

“Green Christ!” she muttered under her breath.

That was drowned by the swelling anthem from the choir that had woken her, sound shredding the last remnants of sleep and the candle-hot air. Robed men moved in ritual patterns. Beside her, Anselm got to his feet in respect, and reached down and hauled her upright. Numbness in her knees and legs gave way to searing pain.

The lead coffin of the Grand Duke of the West passed down the nave: Charles called the Bold, Philip’s son, John’s grandson; heir of Burgundy and Aries; being conveyed down into the crypt by four green-robed bishops and twenty-two abbots.

A pale light shone at the windows that was not candlelight. Dawn: pale, clear, and the bells for Prime ringing out of double spires across the city, as the choir in the great cathedral fell into final silence.

Ash covertly flexed her bad knee, shifted her leg, thought
Green Christ, never sleep in armour in church!
and glanced behind to see where her page with her helmet was.

“Madonna!” Angelotti pointed down the nave. She turned her head, staring.

Beside her, Anselm frowned, looking around uncertainly.

In the dimness of dawn and the few unextinguished candles, a tall, slender woman came down between the high, soaring multiple pillars of the cathedral. Throngs of officials and courtiers trod at her heels. She was not young – not far from her thirtieth year, perhaps – but still beautiful in the way that court women are. The black brocade and velvet of her robes brightened the green of her eyes, the gold of her hair. Looking at the fair-skinned face under the finest of linen veils – a little freckled across the cheekbones, but clean – Ash thought
Doesn’t that woman there look like my husband Fernando?
before she hitched air halfway through a breath, stared, heard Anselm swear, and realised
That’s Floria!

Her feet were moving her before she properly realised it. Neither awake nor alert yet, Ash stepped out in front of the procession.
I planned this last night. What the fuck did I think I was going to say?

“Florian! Never mind all this.” Ash gestured, cannon and couter scraping as she waved her arm to take in all the cathedral, the court. “I’m calling an officer meeting.
Now.
We can’t wait any longer!”

Green eyes and stark fair brows stared out at her from under a padded headdress and translucent veil. A momentary, unexpected embarrassment made her stop speaking. So difficult, looking at this woman, to picture the long-legged, dirty-faced surgeon who gets drunk with the baggage-train women, and who squints through a hangover to sew up wounds with threaded gut and reasonably steady hand.

In a voice equally awkward, Floria del Guiz muttered, “Yes. You’re right…” and stared around at the grief-stricken crowds, as if at a loss.

Behind her, a green-robed abbot murmured, “Your Grace, not here!”

The noise of footsteps made the nave loud and murmurous. Automatically, in the presence of so many clergy, and still not recovered from sleeplessness or exertion, Ash touched her breastplate over her heart.

“So.” She stared at Florian. “Are you Duchess? Is it anything more than being the nobles’ puppet? We need to talk about keeping you alive!”

Florian, in woman’s clothing, stared back, saying nothing.

Quiet in Ash’s mind as snowfall, Godfrey Maximillian’s voice whispered, perfectly clearly:

–
Child?

IV

Ash caught at Robert Anselm’s shoulder. Morning, the eighteenth of November – she is still, at some deep level, in shock. Ignoring Florian’s rapid words to the nobles around her, she is conscious only of a memory of influence, pressure, force.

“
Godfrey!
”

Some official leaned over Florian’s shoulder, whispering urgently.

“Perimeter defence!” Ash was briefly aware of Petro and his archers surrounding her, facing outwards, not drawing weapons in a holy place, but ready. She put her hands over her face and whispered into her cold, steel gauntlets:

“Godfrey – is that really you?”

–
Ash, little one…

This is nothing like the previous strength of his voice in her mind. This is as quiet as wind through bare branches, as soft as snow falling on to other snow. Momentarily, a scent comes to her – resinous pine needles; the raw, rich, dungy smell of boar. She sees no vision in her mind.

What’s happened to you!

With that same internal sense that she is performing some action, she
listens.
As she has always listened, when she has called the voice of the Lion, the Stone Golem, the
machina rei militaris.

–
Ash.

“Godfrey?” She hesitated; asked again. “Godfrey?”

–
Weak beyond measuring, and a little broken, child, but, yes. Me.

“Green Christ, Godfrey, I thought I’d lost you!”

–
You heard silence, not absence.

“That’s… I couldn’t tell!” She shook her head, aware that men surrounded her, her own and others; and that Florian was giving loud, clear instructions. She did not know what the woman said.

–
Now, you hear me… And you fear, too, that you will hear the voices of God’s Fallen.