Ash: A Secret History (26 page)

“Well, hey,” Ash said, as casual as it is possible to be with eight hundred armed men at one’s disposal. “Make me an offer and I’ll put it before the men. But I think the Company of the Lion can get work anywhere we want, now. And at a good price.”

Anselm, very quietly, groaned, “Shi-it…”

It is a piece of unwise bravado and she knows it. Political trickery, hard riding and bad food, and the unnecessary fighting; the unnecessary deaths; none of the last month can be paid for by talking back like an unmannerly servant. But some tension leaves her, all the same, with the malice in her tone.

Antonio Angelotti chuckled. Van Mander slapped her backplate. She ignored the two men, her attention on Frederick, relishing how taken aback he looked. She heard Godfrey Maximillian sigh. Jubilant, she smiled at the Emperor. She did not quite dare to say
You forget – we’re not yours. We’re mercenaries,
but she let her expression say it for her.

“Green Christ!” Godfrey muttered. “It’s not enough for you to have Sigismund of the Tyrol as an enemy, you want the Holy Emperor, too!”

Ash moved her hands to cup her elbows: the palms of her gauntlets feeling the cold steel of elbow-couters. “We weren’t getting another German contract, whichever way you look at it. I’ve told Geraint to get the camp dismount started. We’ll go into France, maybe. We’re not going to be short of business now.”

Casual, ruthless; there is a brutal tone to her voice. Some of it is rough grief for men she knows who are killed or maimed now. Most of it is gut-deep, savage joy that she is still alive.

Ash looked up into Godfrey’s bearded face, and linked her armoured arm with his. “Come on, Godfrey. This is what we do, remember?”

“This is what we do if you’re not in a dungeon in Cologne—” Godfrey Maximillian abruptly stopped talking.

A cluster of priests pushed through the crowd. Among the brown cowls, Ash glimpsed one bare head. Something wrong about it…

Men jostled, Frederick’s Captain of the Guard shouting a challenge; then a space cleared before the stands, and six priests from the St Bernard hospice knelt before the Emperor.

It was a moment before Ash recognised the bruised, dishevelled man with them.

“That’s de Quesada.” She frowned. “Our Visigoth ambassador. Daniel de Quesada.”

Godfrey sounded unusually perturbed. “What’s he doing back here?”

“Christ knows. If he’s here, where’s Fernando? What’s Fernando been playing at? Daniel de Quesada… There’s a man whose head is going home from here in a basket.” Automatically, she checked the position of her men: Anselm, van Mander and Angelotti armed and in armour; Rickard with the banner; Floria and Godfrey unarmed. “He’s in shit shape … what the hell’s happened to him?”

Daniel de Quesada’s shaven scalp shone, bloody. Old brown blood clotted his cheeks. His beard had been ripped out by the roots. He knelt, barefoot, his head up, facing Frederick of Hapsburg and the German princes. His gaze skated across Ash as if he didn’t recognise the silver-haired woman in armour.

Some disquiet tugged at her.
Not ordinary war, not even bad war
— What? she thought, frustrated. Why am I worried now? I’ve got out of this political chicanery. We’re mauled, but the Company’s been hurt before; we’ll get over it. I’ve won. It’s business as usual; what’s the
problem?

Ash stood outside the shade of the tourney stand, in the blazing summer sun. The clash of breaking lances and cheers echoed across from the green grass. A fresh wind brought her a scent of coming rain.

The Visigoth turned his head, surveying the court. Ash saw sweat bead on his forehead. He spoke with a febrile excitement she had seen before, in men who expected to die within the next few minutes.

“Kill me!” de Quesada invited the Hapsburg Emperor. “Why not? I’ve done what I came to do.”

He spoke in fluent German.

“We were a lie, to keep you occupied. My lord the King-Caliph Theodoric sent other ambassadors also, to the courts of Savoy and Genoa, Florence, Venice, Basle and Paris, with similar instructions.”

Ash, in her workaday Carthaginian, asked, “What’s happened to my husband? Where did you part company with Fernando del Guiz?”

Exactly how much of an unpardonable, irrelevant interruption it was as far as Frederick of Hapsburg was concerned, Ash could see in his face. She held herself in an alert tension, waiting either for his anger, or Daniel de Quesada to reply.

Offhandedly, de Quesada said, “Master del Guiz freed me when he decided to swear loyalty to our King-Caliph Theodoric.”

“
Fernando?
Swear
loyalty
to—?” Ash stared. “To the
Visigoth Caliph?
”

Behind Ash, Robert Anselm gave a great barking laugh. Ash was unsure whether she wanted to laugh or cry.

De Quesada spoke with a gaze fixed on the face of the Emperor, driving home each word with malice, and visible instability. “We – the young man you sent as my escort – met with another division of our army south of the Gotthard Pass. He was twelve men against twelve hundred. Del Guiz was allowed, on condition of his swearing fealty, to live, and keep his estate.”

“He wouldn’t do that!” Ash protested. She stuttered, “I mean, he wouldn’t – he just
wouldn’t.
He’s a
knight.
This is just misinformation. Rumour. Some enemy’s lies.”

Neither the ambassador nor the Emperor heeded her.

“His estate is not yours to give, Visigoth! It’s mine!” Frederick of Hapsburg twisted around in the ornamented chair, snarling at his chancellor and legal staff. “Put the young gentleman and his family and estates under an act of attainder. For treason.”

One of the fathers from the St Bernard hospice cleared his throat. “We found this man Quesada wandering lost in the snow, Your Imperial Highness. He knew no name but yours. We thought it charity to bring him here. Forgive us if we have done wrong.”

Ash muttered to Godfrey, “If they’d met up with Visigoth forces, what was he doing wandering around in the snow?”

Godfrey spread his broad-fingered hands and just shrugged. “My child, only God knows that at the moment!”

“Well, when He tells you, you tell me!”

The little man on the Hapsburg throne wrinkled his lip at Daniel de Quesada, in a quite unconscious disgust. “He is mad, obviously. What can he know of del Guiz? We were hasty – cancel the attainder. What he says is nonsense; convenient lies. Fathers, have him confined in your house in the city. Beat the demon out of him. Let us see how this war goes; he shall be our prisoner, not their ambassador.”

“It is no
war!
” Daniel de Quesada shouted. “If you
knew,
you would surrender now, before you take more than a skirmish’s casualties! The Italian cities are learning that lesson now—”

One of the Imperial men-at-arms moved to stand behind Quesada where the ambassador knelt, and pricked his throat with a dagger, the thick steel blade old and nicked but perfectly serviceable.

The Visigoth gabbled, “Do you know what you’re facing? Twenty years! Twenty years of ship-building, and making weapons, and training men!”

The Emperor Frederick chuckled. “Well, well, we have no quarrel with you. Your battles with mercenaries are no longer my concern.” A dry little smile at Ash, all her earlier malice repaid with interest.

“You call yourself a ‘Holy Roman Empire’,” de Quesada said. “You are not even the shadow of the Empty Chair.
⁹
As for the Italian cities – we find them worth it for their gold, but for nothing else. As for a rabble of fanners on horseback from Basle and Cologne and Paris and Granada – why should we want
them?
If we wanted to take fools for slaves, the Turkish fleet would be burning now at Cyprus.”

Frederick of Hapsburg waved his nobles down. “You are among strangers, if not enemies. Are you a madman, to behave like this?”

“We don’t want your Holy Empire.” De Quesada, still on his knees, shrugged. “But we’ll take it. We’ll take everything that lies between us and the richest of all.”

His brown eyes went to the Burgundian guests in the court. Ash guessed them there still celebrating the peace of Neuss. Quesada fixed his gaze on a face she recognised from other campaigning seasons – Duke Charles of Burgundy’s Captain of the Guard, Olivier de la Marche.

Quesada whispered, “Everything that’s between us and the kingdoms and duchies of Burgundy, we will take. Then we will have Burgundy.”

Of all princedoms of Europe, the richest,
Ash remembered someone once saying. She looked from the bloodstained, middle-aged Visigoth man up to the Duke’s representative in the tourney stand, whose lugubrious face she also recognised from the tournament circuit. The big soldier in red and blue livery laughed. Olivier de la Marche had a loud, practised voice from shouting on battlefields; he did not modulate it now. Snickers came from the court hangers-on pressed close around him. Bright surcoats, brilliant armour, the gilded pommels of rich blades, confident clean-shaven faces; all the visible power of knightly chivalry. Ash felt a momentary sympathy for Daniel de Quesada.

“My Duke has recently conquered Lorraine,”
¹⁰
Olivier de la Marche said amiably. “Not to mention his defeats of my lord King of France.” Tactfully, he avoided looking at Frederick of Hapsburg, or mentioning Neuss. “We have an army that is the envy of Christendom. Try us, sir. Try us. I promise you a warm welcome.”

“And I promise you a cold greeting.” Daniel de Quesada’s eyes gleamed. Ash’s hand went to her sword-hilt, without conscious intention. The man’s body movements shouted wrongness, all human caution abandoned. Fanatics fight that way, and assassins. Ash came alive, a snapshot vision took in the men around her, the corner of the tourney stand, the Emperor’s pennant, the guards, her own command group—

Daniel de Quesada shrieked.

Mouth a wide rictus, he moved nothing else, but the cords of his throat jutted out, his scream lifting above the noise of the cheering crowd, until a silence began to spread out from where they stood. Ash felt Godfrey Maximillian beside her grab at his pectoral cross. The hairs at the back of her neck lifted as if cold air blew over them. Quesada knelt and screamed a pure, uncaring rage.

Silence.

The Visigoth ambassador lowered his head, glaring at them all from bloodshot eyes. The torn skin of his cheeks bled freshly.

“We take Christendom,” he whispered, raggedly. “We take your cities. All your cities. And you, Burgundy,
you…
Now we have begun, I am permitted to show you a sign.”

Something made Ash look up.

She realised a second later that she was following the direction of Daniel de Quesada’s bloodshot, ecstatic gaze. Straight up into the blue sky.

Straight into the white-hot blaze of the noon sun.

“Shit!” Tears flooded her eyes. She rubbed her gloved hand across her face. It came away wet.

She saw nothing. She was blind.

“Christ!” She shrieked. Voices howled with her. Close, in the silk-canopied stand; further off, on the tourney field. Screams. She rubbed her hands frantically across her eyes. She could see nothing – nothing—

Ash stood for one second, both linen-covered palms across her eyes. Blackness. Nothing. She pressed hard. She felt, through the thin linen, the balls of her eyes shifting as she looked. She took her hands away. Darkness. Nothing.

Wetness: tears or blood? No pain—

Someone cannoned into her. She grabbed, caught an arm: someone screamed, a whole host of voices screaming, and she couldn’t make out what the words were, then:

“The sun! The
sun!
”

She was crouching without knowing how, her gauntlets stripped off, her bare hands flat on the dry earth. A body pressed into her side. She gripped at its sweaty warmth.

A thin voice that she almost did not recognise as Robert Anselm’s whispered, “The sun’s … gone.”

Ash raised her head.

Prickles of light in her vision resolved into patterns. Faint dots. Not close – far, far away, above the horizons of the world.

She looked down, in faint unnatural light, and made out the shape of her hands. She looked up and saw nothing but a scatter of unfamiliar stars on the horizon.

In the arch of the sky above her was nothing, nothing at all, except darkness.

Ash whispered, “
He put the sun out.
”

  Message: #19 (Pierce Ratcliff)