Ash: A Secret History (201 page)

The pale stonework of the Byward Tower jutted above her head, perspective diminishing into an eggshell-blue sky. A few dead vines clung to the masonry, and a swallow’s nest or two, under the machicolations. Jonvelle’s men guarded the door, bills in their hands, the red Burgundian cross on their jacks. They stood watching their Duchess and their Captain-General, outside in the cold, as if the two women had taken leave of any senses they might ever have possessed.

Ash jerked her head clumsily. Florian walked with her, back out on to the wall, behind the merlons. She squinted out at the Visigoth lines, five hundred yards away.

“No one can get – within yards of us,” Ash said. “The siege-engines are shooting at the main gate. Not here. We’ll see if they move. This is bare wall – no one can sneak up – without being seen. I want nobody to overhear us talk.”

“About Burgundy’s surrender,” Florian said, breathing into her cupped mittened hands. Her tone was one of muffled scepticism.

“You don’t believe me.”

“Ash.” Florian raised her head. The wind had reddened her unhealthily yellow cheeks. Her nose ran clear drops. “I
know
you. I know exactly what you do – in a given situation. When we’ve been in – some utterly hopeless position – outnumbered – out-gunned – with no chance whatsoever – you
attack.
”

“Oh, fuck. You do know me,” Ash said, not displeased.

A clatter of armour, boots, and scabbards came from behind them. Ash turned. John de Vere and a dozen of his men were mounting the steps from Dijon’s streets. As she watched, the English Earl ordered his men-at-arms to the Byward Tower, and ran out on to the wall without breaking step.

“Madam Duchess. My lord de la Marche will attend on you shortly.” The Earl of Oxford clapped the palms of his gauntlets together. “He’s much concerned. The river at the east of your city walls is iced over.”

Florian, with a quick perception Ash appreciated, demanded, “Will it bear a man’s weight?”

“Not yet. But it grows colder.”

“Too fucking right it does,” Ash winced.

Even with the visor up, there was little of de Vere’s face to be seen within the opening of his armet. He had left his red, yellow and white livery with his men; stood as an anonymous knight in steel plate, faded blue eyes staring out at the surrounding river valley and the encamped legions. Ash, herself in armour, was as anonymous. She looked at Florian, cloaked and hooded, swathed in wolf-furs.

“We shouldn’t risk her out here,” she said to de Vere, as if the surgeon did not exist. “But it’s possible the Visigoths have got spies into the city. I don’t want servants or soldiers overhearing us. No one. Not a beggar; not a madman;
nothing.
”

“Then you’re safe enough, madam. Nothing in its right mind would be up on these walls today!”

“For the love of Christ!” Florian hugged her arms and her wolf-fur cloak around herself, teeth chattering. “Get this – over with. Quick!”

“Let’s walk.” Ash started down the walkway behind the battlements, in the shelter of the brattices, towards the White Tower. A shout from behind made her turn. The Burgundian guards stepped back to allow two more cloak-muffled figures up on to the wall.

One – she recognised his old candle-wax-covered blue woollen cloak – was Robert Anselm. The other, his bearded face pale in the cold, proved to be Bajezet of the Janissaries. Impassive despite the cold, he bowed to the Duchess, murmuring something quietly courteous.

“Colonel,” Florian gasped. She glared at Ash. “You want to wait for de la Marche – or can I get on with it now?”

“Wait.” As they turned to walk along the wall, gasping, Ash fell in beside Robert Anselm, and nodded at the Janissary commander. “Roberto, ask him what shape his horses are in.”

Anselm frowned momentarily, then addressed the Turkish commander.

The Turk came to a dead halt on the icy flagstones, waved his arms, and shouted an explosive negative. He continued to shout, red-faced.

“Plainly Turkish for ‘not
my
fucking horses’!” Florian grinned and turned, putting her back to the wind, and began to walk backwards in front of Ash. “He thinks we want to eat them.”

“I
wish.
Robert, tell him it’s a serious question.”

Bajezet ceased to shout. Explanations in halting Turkish took them to the end of the walkway, and the men guarding the White Tower. The brattices cut some of the force from the wind.

Beyond the White Tower, the wall was shored up with forty-foot planks; half-burned hoardings hanging off the battlements.
Weak spot,
Ash thought.

“He says his men’s horses are not in good condition, because they’re not being well fed.” Robert Anselm, with no change of tone, added, “They could get fed. To us.”

“Does he think he can gallop them?”

“No.”

Ash nodded thoughtfully. “Well. We won’t be out-running anyone on them, then…”

Curious eyes watched them from both ends of the walls, now. Ash smiled to herself. If I was a grunt, and the city commanders were holding a private council of war up on the wall,
I’d be
looking at them… I always used to think the bosses must be cooking up something remarkably stupid, when I watched something like this.

Now I just wish that someone else was taking the decisions.

“Shall I send another man for my lord de la Marche?” Anselm gritted.

“Not yet. He’ll be on his way.”

The Turkish commander pointed over the walls and said something. Ash looked as they passed between two brattices; saw no particular movement in the enemy camp. “What’s his problem, Robert?”

“He says it’s cold.” Anselm hunched his shoulders, as if in emphatic agreement. “He says it’s cold other places, and it’s dark.”

“What?”

Florian, walking shoulder to shoulder between Ash and de Vere, looked across at the Janissary. “Ask Colonel Bajezet what he means. And just tell me what he
says,
Roberto, okay?”

Ash caught sight of red-and-blue liveries below. She interrupted, “Here’s de la Marche, at last.”

Olivier de la Marche strode up on to the battlements, signalling his men away. He crossed the icy flagstones with deliberate haste, and bowed to Florian del Guiz.

Bajezet, with Robert Anselm murmuring in his ear, said through that interpreter: “There is nowhere, Woman Bey, for any of us to go.”

“What do you mean, Colonel?” Florian spoke directly to the Turkish commander, and not to Anselm. When she listened to the answer, it was Bajezet’s face that she watched.

“The Colonel says he saw ‘terrible things’, on his way here. The Danube frozen. Fields of ice. People frozen in the fields, left to lie there. Nothing but dark.” Robert Anselm stumbled in his speech; checked something with the Janissary, and finished: “There are deserted villages from here to Dalmatia. People living in caves, burning the woods for fire. Some cities have been razed through trying to keep fires – bonfires – burning twenty-four hours a day.”

“There is still no sun?” Florian asked Bajezet.

“He says, no. He says, he saw frozen lakes. Beasts and birds dead in the ice. Only the wolves grow fat. And ravens and crows. In some places, they had to detour around—” Robert Anselm frowned. “No. Don’t get that one.”

“It is possible he speaks of the processions,” John de Vere said. “A thousand strong, madam. Some of them were burning Jews. Some were saving them. Many were in pilgrimage to the Empty Chair.
³
By far the most part of them, madam, were following rumour: coming towards the borders of Burgundy.”

The Janissary Colonel added something. Robert Anselm translated: “They will find themselves competing for food with many more refugees.”

Ash glanced behind her, up at the sky. It was an instinctive movement. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Florian do the same.

A haze began to film the icy blue. The sun dazzled out of the south-east, blinding her to the roofs and towers of the city. The icy wind drew tears from her eyes. Ash began to move again. The men moved with her. The tall woman remained standing on the spot.

Following her gaze, Ash saw that she was staring at the ranks of tents and earth-walled barracks, stretching neatly out along the roads of the Visigoth camp; at the stacked rocks for the trebuchets, the horses neighing from each legion’s horse lines, and the thousands of armed men, gathering now at their bake-houses and camp-ordinaries for morning rations.

“They’re expecting Fernando back. We have fewer and fewer choices,” Florian said. “And no time to make them.”

John de Vere came to a halt, rubbing his hands together with a click of metal. “Madam,” he announced, “you are cold.”

Not waiting for an answer, he raised his voice in a flat English bellow. Before a minute passed, two of his men-at-arms came out on to the battlements. They carried between them, on poles, an iron brazier; and trotted to set it down before the Earl of Oxford. One of the men fed it: flickering heat passed over the glowing red surface of the coals.

“This talk will take time,” John de Vere said. “Security is essential, madam, but do not freeze your high command to death.”

The morning advanced. Spiced cider was brought out, and dark bread; and they stood huddled around the brazier, mugs clasped between their hands, arguing every possible permutation of a city, between two rivers, surrounded by fifteen thousand foot and horse, and siege-engines. Attack across a frozen river? Break out and run – across a countryside full (de la Marche indicated) of Visigoth outriders, spies, and light cavalry reconnaissance? Spirit away the Burgundian Duchess – and lose any hope of support from Turks, Germans, French, English?

“Edward will not come in,” John de Vere said grimly, at that point. “York thinks himself safe behind the Channel. I am all the Englishmen you will have at your command, madam Duchess.”

“More than enough,” Florian agreed, sipping at the spiced cider. Although she looked decidedly ill, she grinned at him.

By the fourth hour of the morning,
⁴
the sun had risen in the southern sky to a point where it illuminated all the land around Dijon: the freezing rivers, the valley full of tents and marching men, the puffs of smoke from the sakers,
⁵
deliberately breaking the conditions of the truce; the frost-shrouded hills and the wildwood, far to the north.

I’ve heard all these arguments, Ash thought. Most of them twice.

She kept her mind closed, deliberately did not listen in her soul. The white-blue morning sky, and Dijon’s cone-roofed towers, dazzled her vision. Still, even with the blast of the wind behind her – face to the coals, back to the cold – a part of her attention remained directed inwards. At a subliminal level, multiple inhuman voices whispered:

‘
SOON
.
SOON
.
SOON
.’

“I know,” she said aloud. Bajezet and Olivier de la Marche were (with Anselm’s help) arguing; they did not break off for a moment. De Vere looked at her curiously.

Florian said, “I know that look. You’ve got something.”

“Maybe. Let me think.”

Forget the
machina rei militaris.
Forget that not having it at all is different from it being there if my willpower fails. Remember that I’ve been doing this stuff all my life.

It fell together in her head, with all the determinism and progression of a chess game:
if we do this, then that will happen; but if that happens, and we do this, then this other thing
—

She gripped Florian’s arm, burying her hand wrist-deep in soft wolf’s fur. “Yeah. I’ve got something.”

The tall woman beamed down at Ash. With no trace of cynicism, she said, “And without your
machina rei militaris,
too.”

“Yeah. Without that.” A slow beam spread over Ash’s features; she couldn’t stop it. “Yeah…”

Florian said, “So tell me. What have you got?”

“In a second—” Ash put her hand on the merlon and vaulted over into the hoarding. The wooden floor of the brattice echoed hollowly under her feet as she loped up towards the Byward Tower; back down again. The freezing wind cold in her face, she even gripped a beam and put her head down through one of the gaps, scanning the hundred feet of wall below for ropes, for ladders, for any shadow of movement.

Nothing.

“Okay.” She hauled herself back through one of the crenellations. “Let’s take it from the top, shall we?”

The wind left her gasping for breath, and shivering under huke and cloak, but she lost no authority. She paused a tactful second for an acknowledging wave of the hand from Florian.

“Okay,” Ash went on. “We’re here. Outside, there’s the better part of fifteen thousand troops. The Faris’s men. Plus Gelimer’s two new legions. And there’s friction between the two of them.”

De Vere and de la Marche nodded in unison; both men obviously having had the experience of being joined by cocksure fresh troops after three months of occupying muddy trenches and bombarding impregnable walls.

“
Fifteen thousand,
” Florian repeated, through her gloved hands, clasped over her mouth against the bitterness of the cold.

“And we have eighteen hundred men of the Burgundian army; the Lion’s three hundred and eighty, less gunners; and five hundred Janissaries.” Ash could not help laughing at the expression on the tall woman’s face. “We know – about their deployment. Gelimer’s two legions north. Between the rivers. Faris’s men mostly – east and west – on the river banks.”

The men had moved closer together, unconsciously; shoulders blocking the wind, the group in a huddle under a brightening sky. John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, said thoughtfully, “I had considered, madam, that we
can
cross the river to attack. Bajezet’s Janissaries could swim their horses across. This ice, I think, is an end to that plan, unless it will bear the beasts’ weight.”

“And what would they do when they got there?”

“Nothing but cut up his rear echelon, madam.”

Ash nodded impatiently. “I know: that doesn’t win us anything. It fucks Gelimer around, it doesn’t lift the siege, and it gives him all the excuse he needs today to flatten us.”