Ash: A Secret History (211 page)

The thump of a shod horse’s hooves made itself felt through the ground. A Visigoth archer on a chestnut Barb wheeled, a few yards from her. “My lord Leofric has all ready for you.”

The man sounded not just respectful, but frightened.

“Tell him… I’ll be there.”

She stood long enough for the sergeants to bring her the count. Olivier de la Marche moved to her side, on the frozen earth, his great red-and-blue standard behind him; and a few of the
centeniers
– Lacombe; three more. Saint-Seigne. Carency. Marie.
All there are left?

“Demoiselle-Captain?” De la Marche sounded numb.

“Three hundred and twelve Burgundians killed. Two hundred and eighty-seven wounded. There are—”

Rickard, Vitteleschi, and Giovanni Petro looked at her.

“There are ninety-two of us not killed or wounded. A hundred and eight dead.”

The Italian captain of archers said, “Shit.” Rickard burst out crying.

“And another hundred wounded: about two-thirds of them walking wounded. The Lion’s come out of this with less than two hundred of us, and that only if we’re lucky.”

The bright wind blew cold. Awkwardly, she picked open the buckle of her right gauntlet’s fingerplates, took hold of the wet glove that contained it, dragged her broken ring-finger back into place, and yanked the strap tight again over it, to hold it.

“Let’s go,” she said.

V

A cloth of gold carpet covered twenty square yards of the earth below the Byward Tower. An awning covered that. Under it, banners surrounded men at a long table; and she felt the heat of bonfires, walking towards them, kindled for their heat.

Past the tongues of flame, she looked out from ground level at the wintry sky and the immense siege camp.

“Mad.”

De la Marche nodded agreement, with a smile that has already begun to discount the dead and wounded. “But you did it, Demoiselle-Captain! Maid of Dijon! You did it!”

All she could see as they walked across the earth were mantlets and pavises, and the first peaked roofs of barrack-tents.
Nazirs
and ’
arifs
bawled orders, in the trenches and among the tents. It didn’t stop men coming up to stare out at the huge gap in Dijon’s walls. Thousands.

She shook, suddenly, in her stifling armour; stopped; and could only just manage to signal Rickard to give the banner to Giovanni Petro, and come and unbuckle her bevor. She choked a breath of air in. She felt Rickard ease her helmet off –
this is either peace or it isn’t, and I can’t be fucked to bother about assassins now!

I don’t care.

The cold air hit her scalp. She scratched left-handed at her hair, ignoring the blood on her gauntlet; and caught sight of her face reflected in the sallet as Rickard held it. A strip of scalded flesh crossed her face, just at the level of her cheekbones, over her scars. Her lower eyelids were swelling. The strip of flesh across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose showed bright pink.

I’m one of the ninety-two: and it’s little more than luck.

Robert Anselm strode up, Richard Follo a few steps behind. The dusty Viscount-Mayor seemed dazed. He laughed, low and under his breath, sounding as if it were from pure joy.

She knows the words that go with that laughter.
We’re alive.

The golden cloth snagged under her sabatons as she strode across it. Six or seven men sat at the long table: Leofric in the centre, Frederick of Hapsburg on his right hand; the French envoys and de Commines on his left; Lebrija, and another
qa’id.
Other men stood behind them, in coats of plate; one – youngish – with House Leofric’s features.

She let her gaze go across them all – the Hapsburg Emperor smiling, slightly – and brought it back to the Carthaginian
amir
Leofric.

“Not that crazy, are you?” she said in a philosophical tone. “I didn’t think so. Not after I talked to your daughter. Still, kept you alive, I suppose.”

Now she is grinning, with shock and with exaltation.
I should have got someone to sluice my armour down.
Drying blood and tissue still cling to it, a stockyard-stink impregnating her clothes. Here she stands, strapped into metal plates: a woman with short, silver, blood-stained hair; ripped Lion livery; sword banging at her hip; carrying a weight in one hand.

She lifted the weighty object up and slammed it down on the table. Gelimer’s head. Drying liquid made the palm of her gauntlet sticky. The clotted hair pulled, adhering to her glove, yanking at her broken ring-finger. She swore.

“There’s your fucking ex-Caliph!”

His head seemed shrunken now: blood drying red-black, white knobs of bone visible in the trailing remnant of spine, a crescent of white under his half-shut lids.

There was a silence as they looked at it.

“I must sign the treaty of peace with the Duchess herself.” Leofric frowned. “Will you bring her out of the city?”

“When we’ve—”

A deep voice said, “Address the King-Caliph with respect,
jund,
” and she looked and saw Alderic behind his master; the ’
arif
not wounded, grinning through his now oiled and braided beard.

She grinned back at him.

“When we’ve talked, ‘my lord King-Caliph’,” she said. “When this peace is solid. The most important thing first. You know the Wild Machines. You know what they’re trying to do. I’m going to tell you why they haven’t done it, my lord … my lord Father. I’m going to tell you why the Duchess of Burgundy has to stay alive.”

Between stopping the fights and fires, and bringing in supplies, almost four days passed. Ash sent riders to the east and the north. After that, she found herself and de la Marche and Lacombe dealing not just with negotiations for food and firewood, but attempting to fill trenches with the dead and the abbey with the casualties of the fighting.

The ground, iron-hard, would not be dug for graves; Visigoth serfs piled the dead in great red-and-white heaps. If not for Visigoth army doctors, wounds and cold would have made the death total even higher.

She visited her own injured men; wept with them.

Simon Tydder she found with the dead, his helmet missing and his head cut open from skull to lower jaw. The third of the brothers, Thomas, knelt by his body in the abbey chapel and would not be comforted.

Euen Huw lived sixteen hours.

She sat with him three times, an hour each, leaving Anselm or de la Marche in charge; sat in the grey-lit upper chamber of the abbey hospice, warmed by braziers and the hearth-fire, and felt his hand that she held grow colder and colder. Examined, they found both his legs were lacerated, one shin cut to the bone; but the wound from the spear thrust up by a fallen man into his groin finally killed him. He died, body shaken by his death-rattle, in the early hours of the twenty-ninth day of December. The twin passing-bells rang.

“
Amir
Lion!” Leofric’s woman physician said, catching her at the door, “let me salve your eyes.”

Not all of the blurriness of her sight is from tears. A sudden fear pulsed through her gut:
to be blind and helpless
—!

She sat by a window, and submitted to the administration of a soothing herb; the very smell of the woman’s robes bringing back House Leofric’s observatory and a pain low in her belly.

“Bandage over them at night,” the woman added. “In four days, you should improve.”

“You might as well see to this, then.” Ash held out her hand. The woman pulled the ring-finger of her right hand about, snake-hissed under her breath at Frankish butchers, set the bone, and bound it to her middle finger.

“You should rest it for ten days.”

Like I have ten days to rest…

“Thank you,” she said, surprised to hear herself speak.

Coming down the stone stairs from the hospice, she heard voices below, and came out on to the landing to be faced by Fernando del Guiz and the Faris.

Neither of them spoke. The identical brightness of their faces told her what she needed to know. A genuine numbness dulled her reaction. She smiled, faintly, and made to move on past them.

“We wanted you to know,” Fernando said.

For a second, she is caught between seeing him very young and vulnerable, and the knowledge of how many similar young men are dead outside Dijon.

The Faris said, “Will your priest marry us?”

Ash couldn’t tell if her own expression were a smile, or something closer to weeping.

“Digorie Paston’s dead,” she said, “a golem killed him; but I expect Father Faversham will do it. He’s upstairs.”

The woman and the man turned, eagerly; she could feel herself slip from their attention. Wrapped up in each other, insulated from the death and grief…

“Ah, why not?” she said, aloud, softly. “Do it while you can.”

‘
STILL IT GROWS COLD
,
LITTLE THING OF EARTH
—’

‘—
COLD
—’

‘—
WE
WILL
PREVAIL
!’

The voices of the Wild Machines in her head whisper their own panicky confusion. In fierce satisfaction, she thinks,
No Faris, no Stone Golem, not even out-of-date second-hand reports. You’re fucked. You don’t know a damn thing, do you!

A rider came back from the east, on the thirtieth, accompanied by Bajezet’s second-in-command. Robert Anselm reported, “He says, yes. Florian’s coming back. She’ll sign a treaty, if de la Marche okays it.”

“What do you think?” Ash asked the Burgundian.

Olivier de la Marche blew on his cold hands, and glanced from the fallen city wall to the Visigoth camp. “No doubt there are men over there who still think the Lord Leofric mad. There are enough who do not think him mad, and enough who follow whichever way power flows, that he will hold the Caliphate. In my judgement, at least until he returns to Carthage and
amirs
who will challenge this. I say, it is time for the treaty to be signed.”

She watched the golems harrowing the ground in the cathedral yard. Their stone hands dug graves. Human bodies lay piled for burial on the human-impenetrable ice.

The memory comes to her, with a sting of adrenalin: the first corpse she had ever seen. Not as decorous as these washed white bodies under the motionless grey sky. She had run through all the sweet moving air of summer, in a forest where sun shone down through green leaves, and rounding a spur of rock – large to
her
– had all but stepped on the body of a man killed in the prior day’s skirmish.

It was a glittering, green-black hummock, unrecognisable as a dead body until the flies that covered it completely rose up in high-pitched flight.

Like walking into a wall, the way I stopped! But I was different then.

She came back to the scentless cathedral yard and Abbot Muthari and Abbot Stephen, voices chanting, and Leofric standing beside her. His robes were musty, the embroidery stiff; he blinked at the implacable open air. Small clouds of white breathed from his lips.

Visigoths inside Dijon.
Peace treaty or no, it jumped and curdled in her gut.

“But why isn’t it dark here?” the Visigoth lord said, apropos of nothing. She followed his gaze; couldn’t see even a ghost-disc of sun.

“About the peace treaty.” Dank, cold air chilled the flesh of her face. “I’ve been thinking, lord Father. I think we need to sign a treaty of alliance.”

“What the
Ferae Natura Machinae,
the Wild Machines, do, is undoubtedly material.” Leofric began to sniff a little, the circles of his nostrils reddening. His voice thickened with his cold. “If Burgundy preserves the real, as you say, should it not be sunless here, too?”

“An alliance of equals,” Ash pressed on.

“The original is better, don’t the Franks say? For we poor inheritors of the Romans, the past is always better than this degenerate present.”

His look might have meant to draw her in, she couldn’t tell.

“And Burgundy clings to the past?” Ash muttered sardonically.

Deliberately, it seemed, mistaking her meaning, Leofric gave her a quick, friendly, older man’s smile. “Not always. Peace with Carthage—”

“Alliance. We won’t be the only people after the Wild Machines – but we might be the only people who want to actually destroy them. We do,” Ash said, “want to destroy them.”

To the implied absence of a question in her tone, Leofric added a shudder. “Oh yes; destroy them. It’s evident the fire is no blessing.
Amir
Gelimer’s dead; God shows His will in battle. Around the pyramids themselves, the stone is fusing – to plants, to small beasts, to the melted bodies of men and horses. We must hold off; use your master gunners’ cannon to destroy them.”

Gratefully at home in military speculation again, Ash said, “When it stops being quite so hairy close up, we could think about planting some petards?”

“
If it
stops.” Leofric huddled his long, furred cloak over his shoulders with a shrug. Waved away, his staff of Caliph’s advisers hung back. “An alliance. That would say much of how we regard Burgundy.”

“Wouldn’t it, though.”

The
chunk-chunk
of dropped earth – too cold to split into clods – beat rhythmically back from the front face of the cathedral. Paired mass funeral services sounded from the abbots’ lips, each heretical to the other.

Ash frowned, replaying memory. “What did you mean, ‘the original’?”

“Who tells their story
first?
” Leofric demanded. “Whoever it is, theirs becomes the yardstick – others are judged by how close or far they are from the original details. The first telling has an authority all its own.”

He brought his gaze back to Ash’s face. She saw plain excitement: the vision of a man working on theory, without caring whom the truth might benefit: him or another. All his experiments up to now have benefited the Caliphs, not him. Is
that
Leofric? Truly King-Caliph by accident?

This is the man who would have cut me up and killed me.
Happily
have done it.