Ash: A Secret History (206 page)

“That.” The Faris pointed a slender, dirty finger at Ash. “That. That’s it.”

“What’s it?”

“How you do it,” the woman said. “Yes, I knew – but I didn’t
know.
You might have been used, not killed. That’s how you have to do it in battle – your men might live, they might not be killed. Some of them
will
live. It’s a matter of not letting yourself know.”

“But I do know!” Ash’s fist hit the palliasse beside her. “I do, now. I can’t get rid of it – that knowing.”

A knot in the burning wood cracked, making her jolt, and the Faris too. A gold ember fell out of the fire-irons, turning swiftly grey, then black, on the edge of Ash’s demi-gown. She flicked it off, brushing at the cloth. She gazed up at the blackened brick lining the chimney behind the fire, feeling the draught of the air, and smelling the scorched velvet.

“Let’s say,” Ash said, “that there is going to be a fight. Let’s say I’ve been driven out of Genoa, and Basle, and Carthage itself by you guys, and halfway across southern France, and let’s say I’m finally going to turn around, here, at Dijon.”

The Faris held out her wooden cup. Ash automatically poured more of the stale water into it. The Faris looked down at her chained wrists, which she could not move very far apart. Lifting the cup between her hands, she sipped at it.

“I see how it is. Tomorrow, you will fight to get yourself killed,” she said coolly, with something of the authority she had had in Visigoth war-gear among her armies. “That will deprive the
Ferae Natura Machinae
of their victory. Even if you fight for some other objective, I’ve learned enough of you to know that you’re aware of who the true enemy is.”

Ash stood, flexing pain out of her leg muscles. The warmth of the fire faded, the wood being consumed. She wondered idly,
Should I feed the fire again or leave it to the morning?
and then, her mind correcting her,
No need to ration it out, now; either way.

“Faris…”

Cold air chilled her fingers, her ears, her scar-marked cheeks. Another stretch, this time rolling her head to get the stiffness out her neck. The trestle table stood mostly in the shadows, the one taper not sufficient to illuminate the stacked papers, muster-rolls, sketched maps and plans at the far end of it. Someone – Anselm, possibly – had been using a burnt stick from the fire: the tabletop was scratched in charcoal with lines delineating the north-west and north-east gates of Dijon, and the streets of the Visigoth camp beyond them.

“You’re the one who’s keen on suicidal actions; getting the enemy to execute you. If I thought it necessary, I wouldn’t be handing myself over to Gelimer, I’d be walking off the top of this tower – four storeys straight
down.
” Ash gestured emphatically.

“There’s something you’re planning. Isn’t there? Ash – sister – tell me what it is. I was their commander. I can help.”

Everybody wants me to do this. Even her!

“I will help you, if it leads to destroying the Wild Machines.” The Faris knelt up, her unlined face seeming young. Excitedly, she said, “The King-Caliph Gelimer will not command as I would. Rather: not as I would if I had the
machina rei militaris
—”

“He’s got fifteen thousand troops out there, he doesn’t have to!”

“But – you could put me on the field: not as a commander, as your battle double—”

“I don’t need your help. We’ve already wrung you dry. You’re missing the
point,
Faris.”

“The point?”

Ash moved forward. She sat down on the edge of the war-chest. Well within range, if the woman now sitting at her feet should choose to strike at her with hands assisted by iron chains.

Her eyes stung. She knuckled at them, smelling charcoal on her fingers. Water, hot and heavy, gathered on her lower lids, and ran over and down her cheeks.

“The point is, who else can I tell that I’m afraid? Who else can I tell that I don’t want to get my friends killed? Even if by some remote chance we
win,
most of my friends are going to end up dead!”

Her voice never shook, but the tears carried on, unstoppably. The other woman looked up, seeing, in the fire’s light, Ash’s face red and shining with water and snot.

“But you know—”

“I
know,
and I’m sick of it!” Ash put her face into her hands. In the wet, sweaty darkness, she whispered, “I – don’t – want – them – to – die. I can’t make it any fucking plainer! Either we go out there tomorrow, and they die, or we stay in here tomorrow, and we die. Christ, what don’t you understand!”

Something touched her wrist. By reflex, she clenched her fist and knocked it away, hard. One knuckle struck iron. She swore, snatched her other hand from her face – vision dazzled by wetness – and made out the other woman holding up her cuffed wrists in a gesture of non-aggression.

Distressed, the woman said, “I’m not your confessor!”

“You understand this! You’ve done this – you
know
what—”

The Faris reached out, pulling at Ash’s belt and demi-gown with her hands that were trapped close together. All in a second, Ash stopped resisting. She slid down the side of the wooden chest, hitting the stones hard, crammed in beside the Faris’s warm body.

“I don’t—”

Chains shifted, tangling in cloth. Ash felt the Faris attempting to put her arms around her shoulders – failing – and then her left hand was gripped tight between both of the Faris’s own hands.

“I know. I know!” The Faris wrapped her arms around Ash’s arm; Ash felt the woman’s hard, hugging pressure.

“—don’t want them killed!” Hiccoughing sobs stopped her speaking.

Ash clamped her eyes shut, tears pushing out between the hot lids. The Faris murmured something, not in any language that she knew.

Ash dipped her head, abruptly, and muffled the noise against the filth-stained wool of the Faris’s gown. She sobbed out loud, body clenched, crying against her sister’s shoulder until she wept herself dry.

There were no remaining city clocks to chime the hour. Ash blinked awake in darkness, with sore, swollen eyes, and stared into the greying embers of the fire.

Utterly relaxed against her, the Visigoth woman with her face, her hair, her body, slept on.

Ash did not move. She said nothing. She sat, awake, alone.

The page Jean entered the room.

“Time, boss,” he said.

On the third day after Christ’s Mass and the return of the Unconquered Sun, in the dark an hour before Terce:

“Go in peace!” Father Richard Faversham proclaimed, “and the grace of God be upon us all this day!”

He and Digorie Paston bowed to the altar. Both men wore mail, and helmets.

The stones of the abbey, hard under Ash’s armoured knees, forced the metal back into the protective padding. She crossed herself and stood up, heart thumping, hardly feeling herself cold to the bone. Rickard got to his feet beside her: a young man in mail and the Lion Azure livery, his face pale. He said something to Robert Anselm; she heard Anselm chuckle.

“Angeli!” She grabbed Angelotti’s arm as the company began to file out of the church. “Are we set?”

“All set to go.” His face was barely visible as they came out of the great church door into the St Stephen’s abbey grounds. Then a lone torch caught his gilt curls, showed her his teeth in a wild, wide grin. “You are mad, madonna, but we have done it!”

“Have you warned everybody off?”

Robert Anselm, beside her, said, “I’ve had runners from all our lance-leaders; they’re in place on the ground and on the walls.”

“We’re almost – fully deployed,” the
centenier
Lacombe grunted.

“Then get fucking moving!”

The faintest grey of dawn lightened the sky. Ash strode through the icy streets, head buzzing with information, talking to two and three people at a time; sending men here and there, conscious of her mind moving like an engine, smoothly, without feeling. A message of readiness came in from Olivier de la Marche as she reached the cleared desolation back of Dijon’s north-west gate.

She passed her helmet to Rickard to carry. Walking bareheaded, the bitter cold numbed her face immediately, made her eyes run, and she blinked back tears. A word here, a touch on the shoulder there: she went through her men, and the Burgundian units, towards the foot of the wall.

Torches threw golden swathes of light on the lower reaches of the wall, invisible outside. Men passed cannon-shot hastily from hand to hand up the steps to the battlements. She stepped back as a Burgundian gun-crew trundled an organ-gun across the frost-rimed cobbles, that they could barely see. Rags muffled its steel-shod wooden wheels, covered the metal of its eight barrels.

At the foot of the steps they barely halted, tripping the organ-gun up so that they held the trolley, and carrying it bodily between them up to the battlements. A throng of gun-crew trod after them, and men hauling three timber frames – mangonels.

Her numb skin cringed at every sound. Muffled footfalls, an oath; sweating grunts of effort as another light gun went up to the walls –
will they hear us? Sound carries, it’s frosty, it’s too still!

“Tell them to keep it down!” She sent a runner – Simon Tydder – off towards the walls; turned on her heel, and set off at a fast walk with her HQ staff, parallel to the wall between the White Tower and the Byward Tower, fifty yards back.

They ran into a crowd, Burgundian archers and billmen. Ash craned her neck to look at the rooftops. A rapidly lightening sky was no longer grey – was a hazed white, with a deep red glow to the east.

“How much fucking longer!” Her breath whitened the air. “This lot are late! How many more? Are we in place!”

“We need it light enough to see what we’re doing,” Anselm grunted.

“We don’t need it light enough for
them
to see what we’re doing!”

Thomas Rochester snorted. The dark Englishman carried her personal banner again, a position of prestige for which he has handed his temporary infantry command back to Robert Anselm. He, or someone from the baggage train, has neatly darned a rip in his livery jacket. His sallet is polished until the rivets shine.
Didn’t sleep last night, doing that. All of them: preparing.

“Get your men in place!” she swore at the Burgundians. “Fuck it! I’m going up on the wall. Stay down here!” She pointed at Rochester’s Lion Affronté banner.

Loping up the steps to the battlements, the burn-injury on her thigh hurt with the exertion. She grunted. Once above roof-level, wind whipped out of the east and tore the breath out of her mouth. She slowed her pace, trying to move reasonably quietly in her armour. Stone treads glittered, crusted thickly white with frost, imprinted with the boot-marks of the men who had climbed up minutes before her.

A line of light lay across the battlements.

Brightness striped the merlons and brattices, and the tall curve of the Byward Tower. She turned east. Between one long low cloud and the horizon, the brilliant yellow of the winter sun stabbed out.

We’re not a minute too soon.

Men crouched behind the merlons. Gunners in jacks, their sallets and war-hats held at their feet so they should not catch the betraying sun; counting their shot in silence, their rammers leaning up against stonework. Other crews kept their cannon back from the crenellations, loading powder and ball and old cloth for wadding. Further along the parapet, men worked in rapid, silent teams, hauling back the arms of siege-engines with greased wooden winches.

Beyond the Byward Tower, to her right, the battlements were completely deserted.

“
Okay
…” Breath, warm, was cold against her lips a second after.

A long way to her right, past the Prince’s Tower, thin clumps of men began again on the wall.

Outside, past the bone-scattered ground, the Visigoth encampment lay vast and swollen between the two rivers. Heart in her mouth, she saw that smoke already threaded up from cooking fires. Behind the mantlets and trenches, pennants, banners, and eagles rose; like a forest of dry sticks in the rising sun.

Anyone moving?

For a second, she sees it not as tents and the men of the XIV Utica, VI Leptis Parva, III Caralis; but as a great structure sprawling there in the growing dawn: a pyramid whose foundation is use-and-forget slaves, then the troops with their
nazirs
and ’
arifs
and
qa’ids
, then the lord-
amirs
of the Visigoth Empire, and finally – pinnacle, peak of all – King-Caliph Gelimer. And for that same second she is utterly aware of the support of that structure: the engineers that bring supplies up frozen rivers, the slave-estates in Egypt and Iberia that raise the food, the merchant-princes whose fleets out-run the Turkish navy to sell to a hundred cities around the Mediterranean, and deep into Africa, and out to the Baltic Sea.

And what are we? Barely fifteen hundred people. Standing in front of eight or nine thousand civilians.

She looked away. The western river lay flat and white, frozen hard as rock.
Strong enough? Please God.
She could not see the surviving bridge, hidden by the myriad tents and turf huts of the Visigoth camp. As for the King-Caliph’s household quarters, there was nothing to mark any engineered building out from another except location.

He was sleeping there two hours ago. And if he’s not there now – well. We’re fucked.

A glint of brass caught her eye as the sunlight moved down. Golems, overwatching the gate. With Greek Fire throwers.

The only thing we might have in our favour is that they’re not deployed. Maybe not even armed up – shit, I wish I could see that far!

And they can’t fire into mêlée.

What would have been a smile turned sour. She looked east, into glare: nothing but tents; tents and more tents; men by the hundred, by the thousand – beginning to stir, now.

“Come
on,
Jussey—”

Cold had got into her bones. She moved stiffly, half-running. The stone stairs were slippery with rime. She blinked, moving down into shadow again. Her muscles felt loose, and her bladder urgent; both these things she put out of her mind.