Ash: A Secret History (204 page)

On the one hand, Richard Follo’s a self-aggrandising, pompous troublemaker. On the other hand, he’s mayor; he’s a civilian, with a family still living; we shouldn’t lose any of our people, no matter how much of a pain they are…

Don’t be too anxious to save him just because you don’t like him.

“Of people of that rank,” Ash said, “I suppose he’s the least likely to be able to tell Gelimer anything useful. Olivier, will you have one of your heralds set up a meeting between Follo and – Sancho Lebrija, I expect it’ll be, on their side?”

De la Marche nodded, stood, and walked towards the door.

“Where…” Ash tapped her fingers restlessly, and resumed pacing, always pacing; ignoring the three men in the room. “Where?
Where
is Gelimer?”

“You got him,” Ash said.

She did not need the Welshman to say anything. Euen Huw wearing his smug expression told it all. The two Tydder brothers with him – Simon and Thomas in dirty Visigoth tunics, mail shirts underneath – looked equally pleased with themselves.

“You had their patrol rota down pat, boss. And who notices one more spearman? Living in real comfort, he is,” Euen Huw remarked. “Better than you, boss. Got all these slaves, hasn’t he? And stone men, and I don’t know what. And braziers, too. Hot enough to melt the skin off your face. First time I been warm since we got here.”

Ash pinched the bridge of her nose, and looked at him.

“We’d’ve had him if we could.” The Welshman’s frustration was clear. “Talk about high security. I reckon he has twelve men with him when he goes to do a shit! Took us long enough to get close enough to work out it was
him.
”

“Bow? Crossbow? Arquebus?”

“Nah. Can see why the guys we sent out couldn’t get to him. That unit he’s got round him are
sharp.
Daren’t touch a weapon anywhere near ’em.”

“Which is where?” Ash demanded.

“Here,” Euen Huw said, hastily feeling in his leather pouch.

Not to the south,
she prayed.
Don’t let me have to attack him across a river. Even iced-over.

Euen’s dirt-black hands spread a paper in front of her. The Tydders crowded at his shoulder. He ran his finger across the charcoal lines that mapped the city, and the rivers to east and west, and the open valley to the north. The lines of the Visigoth camps were sketched in, now blackly definite. Euen Huw tapped his finger on the paper.

“He’s
there,
boss. About a half mile north of the north-west gate. Up-stream of us, on this side of the river. There’s a bridge there, behind their lines. They haven’t thrown it down. I reckon he’s sitting there so he can be over it and away, if there’s trouble.”

“Yeah, he’s got roads going south or west, if he crosses the bridge…”

“Not that we’re going to let him.”

Ash let herself smile at the Welshman. “We’re going to have to move fucking fast to stop him. Well done, Euen; guys. Okay. I need more people to go out and keep an eye on him – be careful, his ’
arifs
have had enough time to re-do guard duties. I
must
know if King-Caliph Gelimer moves his household.”

The day of the twenty-seventh of December passed. A dozen times in an hour, she missed the presence of John de Vere; his advice, his even temper, and his confidence.

The absence of Floria del Guiz worried at her like a missing tooth.

“Activity in the enemy camp. They’re shifting men,” Robert Anselm reported.

“Have they answered our herald yet?”

“Follo’s still out there talking.” Anselm said evenly, “The longer we leave it, the more weaknesses the King-Caliph can cover.”

“I know. But we knew this would take time to set up. We
have
to take them by surprise: get out there and punch through them to Gelimer. Anything less than that is useless.”

She covered the distance wall-to-wall inside Dijon twenty times in the day, hearing reports, giving orders, liaising with de la Marche and Jonvelle. When she did rest, for an hour after noon, she started up again, head swimming in noise.

‘
FEEL IT GROW COLD
,
LITTLE SHADOW
,
FEEL HOW WE DRAW DOWN THE SUN
.’

In the brief twilight towards the end of the twenty-seventh of December, the appointed Burgundian herald trudged back across the iron-hard mud between Dijon and the Visigoth camp.

Richard Follo came at last to Ash, where she and Olivier de la Marche waited in the palace presence chamber, surrounded by the silent merchants and tradesmen of Dijon. The veiled Duchess sat silent upon the great oak throne of the Valois princes.

He was escorted in through the refugees crowding the streets outside. There were few of them now – white around the eyes, gaunt with hunger, out at the further edge of desperation – who did not carry a bill or a pitchfork or, if nothing else, an iron-shod staff.

“Well?” de la Marche demanded, as if at his Duchess’s behest.

Richard Follo took a moment to arrange his vice-mayoral chain over his demi-gown, and catch his breath. “It is arranged, my lord. We will surrender, tomorrow, to the lord commander
qa’id
Lebrija. He will have all the lords and magnates of the city come out first, without weapons, on to the empty ground before the north-east gate. Then the fighting men, unarmed, in groups of twenty at a time, to be taken into Visigoth imprisonment.”

Ash heard de la Marche asking, “Does he guarantee our safety?” but she was no longer listening. She looked to Robert Anselm, Angelotti, Geraint ab Morgan, Ludmilla Rostovnaya; to the Burgundian
centeniers.
All of them had the look of those receiving expected, if unwelcome, news; there was even a slight appearance of relief.

“The surrender is set for the fourth hour of the morning, tomorrow,” Follo concluded, his eye-sockets dark with shadow and strain. “At ten of the clock. Do we agree to this, my lords? Is there
no
other way?”

Ash, face impassive, ignored the last bickering; could only think,
Okay. This is it.

“Angeli,” she said. “Find Jussey. Now we know when we start.”

By Compline, it became too cold for snow. Ash, plodding over frost-sparkling flagstones and frozen mud, came back into the company tower’s courtyard, and found herself among men packed in tight for the pre-battle kit-check.

Wall-torches burned smokily in the freezing air. She beat her hands together, numb in their metal plates. For a moment, the crowds of tall, bulkily armoured men and women intimidated her. She took a cold breath, pushed into the yard, and began to greet them.

Knots and clumps of men stood here, a buzz of conversation going up into the night air. Lance-leaders checked the troops they were responsible for raising – Ash spoke to foot-knights, archers, sergeants, men-at-arms and squires, knowing at least their first names; and stood aside for the sergeants, forming up larger groups of men towards the back of the courtyard – all the billmen together, all the archers and hackbutters together. Shouts and bawled orders echoed off the vast expanse of stonework of the tower.

She walked among them, banner and escort meaning that a way always cleared in front of her, and talked to the billmen and the missile troops.

What am I missing?
she thought suddenly. And then:
horses!

There is no sound of hooves on the cobblestones. No ringing steel, from the caparisoned war-horses; no pack-horses, even; no mules. All gone into the company kitchens, now; from where a thin thread of scent trails – last rations before the morning.

“Henri Brant saved a couple of barrels of the wine,” she announced, voice cracking at the coldness of the air in her throat. “You’ll all get some at dawn.”

A cheer went up from those near enough to hear.

Coming to the entrance to the armoury, Ash raised her voice. “Jean.”

“Nearly done, boss!” Jean Bertran grinned in the red forge-light. Behind him, a last frantic burst of activity bounced hammer-noise off the shadowy walls, hung with tools. Two apprentices sat turning out arrow-heads at production-line velocity.

Deafened by the hammering, she stood with the welcome warmth on her face for a moment. At an anvil, one of the armourers beat out a dented breastplate, bright flakes spraying from the glowing metal. His bare arm with its prominent muscles flexed, shining with sweat and dirt, bringing the hammer down with accurate skill and power. She has a brief anticipation of that muscular arm and shoulder flexing, lifting, banging down weapons on some Visigoth soldier’s face.
Maybe, in a few hours’ time.

At the tower door, she dismissed her escort of archers to the comparative warmth of the company tower’s guardroom, and padded clumsily down the stone steps to the ground floor.

A stench of shit made her blink, take off her gauntlets, and wipe at her eyes. Blanche came forward through the taper-lit gloom. A pack of children flanked her skirts. Ash, making a rough head-count, thought
Most of the baggage-train kids,
and nodded at them.

“I’ve got them bandaging,” Blanche wheezed thinly. Like the men outside, her face was hollow under the cheekbones, and the sockets of her eyes dark. “Every man who can walk is out of here, even if it means with a strapped-up wrist or shoulder. I can’t do anything for the others. The well’s freezing; I don’t even have water for them.”

The line of straw-beds extended off into the gloom.
More than twenty-four now?
Ash tried to count the dysentery cases, at least.
Thirty, thirty-one?

“Szechy died,” the woman added.

Ash followed her gaze. Over by the wall, another dark, wiry man was wrapping the little Hungarian in something – ragged sacking, she saw, as an improvised winding-sheet.

“Out to the muster, when you’ve finished there,” she said. “You’ll get your chance tomorrow.”

The man knotted cloth, rested the body down, and stood. Tears marked what was visible of his face between long hair and moustache. He said something – only
kill fucking Visigoths!
was comprehensible among his words – and staggered off towards the steps.

“Keep them as comfortable as you can. We need the water for those who’re fighting, though.” Ash watched the supine bodies of the fever cases. “If any of them suddenly ‘recover’, send them outside.”

Blanche, half smiling, shook her head. “I wish these
were
malingerers.”

Coming back up to the entrance hall, she found it crowded: Euen Huw, Rochester, Campin, Verhaecht, Mowlett, and a dozen others.

“See Anselm and Angeli; they’ll sort it!” She shoved her way past the familiar faces, up the narrow stone stairwell, to the top floor. One of the guards there pushed aside the leather curtain. The brush-haired page came to take her cloak, her hood, her huke, and her sword.

“Armour off, boss?” he demanded.

“Yeah. Rickard will do it. I’ll want arming up again before Lauds.” She hesitated, looking down at the boy – about ten, she supposed. “What’s your name again?”

“Jean.”

“Okay, Jean. You wake me about half a candle-mark before Lauds. Bring the other pages, and food, and lights.”

He gazed up at her over the bundle of damp, mud-stained wool, sheepskin, and weapons in his arms. “Yes, boss!”

She closed her eyes briefly, as he left, hearing his footsteps on the stone stairs, and some half-audible comment by the guards. For a second she sees, clearly, how his face will look cut across with the hand’s-breadth blade of a bill.

“Boss.” Rickard came away from the upper floor’s hearth, where the fire lay banked down to red embers, with a pitiful amount of rescued beams and timber stacked beside it to dry out.

He cut the waxed points holding her pauldrons, and she shut her eyes again, this time for weariness; feeling his hands unbuckle and lift off the weight of thin steel plates, as if he lifted boulders off her flesh. As he removed cuisses and greaves and sabatons, she stretched her legs; and with the removal of her cuirass and arm-defences, she reached out as if to crack every muscle in her body, before slumping back into a flat-footed stance.

“That’ll need a clean,” she said, as Rickard began to hang it up on the body-form. “Do it downstairs.”

“Too noisy to sleep if I do it up here, boss?”

He stood taller than her, now, Ash realised; by half a hand-span. She found herself looking slightly up to look into his eyes.

“Get Jean to start on the armour. You go over to St Stephen’s for me.”

Instructions came automatically, now; she didn’t listen to herself telling him what she wanted. The great yellow-and-red chevrons painted on the walls loomed, obscurely, through the gloom; and the smoke of tapers caught at the back of her throat.

“See I’m not disturbed,” she added, and noted that he gave her an immense, excited grin in the dim light, as he turned to carry the Milanese harness down to a corner of the main hall.

He’s too young for this. Too young for tomorrow. Hell, we’re
all
too young for tomorrow.

She did not bother to change out of her arming doublet and hose, careless of the points dangling from its mail inserts. Hauling the oldest of her fur-lined demi-gowns over the top of it, she moved the tapers in their iron stand closer to the hearth, and squatted down, prodding with a piece of firewood at the embers, until a warmer flame woke.

The smell of old sweat from her own body made itself apparent to her, as she grew less cold. She scratched at flea-bites under her doublet. Cessation of movement made her drowsy,
I’ve talked myself dizzy,
she thought; feeling as if her feet in their low boots still thumped continually against flagstones, stone steps, cobblestones. With a grunt, she sat down on the palliasse one of the pages had dragged close to the fire, and dug still-numb fingers into the stiff, cold leather of her boots, easing them off one by one. Her hose, black to the knee, stank of dung.

And all of it can be gone, in an instant – every smell, every sensation; the
me
that thinks this—

She reached out for the pottery cup, left covered by the fire, and sniffed at the contents. Stale water. Perhaps with a very slight tinge of wine. Realising, now, how dry her mouth was, she drained it, and dragged her doublet-sleeve across her mouth.