Ash: A Secret History (30 page)

“You’re mad.
They’re
mad. I want to talk to you!” Floria scowled at the noise from the anvils and pointed, silently, at the street. Ash shook hands, thumped shoulders, left with her escort. Angelotti stayed, discussing metallurgy.

Ash caught up with the surgeon a few yards away, staring up from the cobbled street that ran up the hill, to the shadowy machicolations and timber-works of the castle crowning the heights.

Floria walked fast, a few paces ahead of the men-at-arms and hounds. “Are you really going to try that?”

“We did it before. Two years back, in – where was it?” Ash thought. “Somewhere in southern France?”

“That
is
my brother in there.” The woman’s voice came masculine out of the dusk, a breathy drop into lower registers that never relaxed, whether the command escort could hear her or not. “Granted I haven’t seen him since he was ten. Granted he was a brat. And now he’s a shit. But blood’s blood. He
is
family.”

“Family. Yeah. Tell me how much
I
care about family.”

Floria began, “What—?”

“What? Will I give orders for him to be taken prisoner, not killed? Will I let him run, go off and raise men somewhere else to come back and fight me? Will I have him killed? What?”

“All of those.”

“It seems unreal.” Unreal, when I have had his body inside me, to believe that he could die with an arrow through the throat, a billhook slashing his gut; that someone with a bollock dagger and my express order could make him
not be.

“Damn it, you can’t go on ignoring this, girl! You fucked him. You married him. He’s your flesh in the sight of God.”

“That’s a dumb thing to say. You don’t believe in God.” Ash could, in the torchlit streets, make out the sudden strain etching itself into the woman’s face. “Florian, I’m not likely to go around denouncing you to the local bishop, am I! Soldiers either believe completely, or not at all, and I’ve got both sorts in the company.”

The tall woman continued walking down the cobblestones beside her, all her balance in her shoulders: gangling and masculine. She made an irritated motion that might have been a shrug or a flinch as Angelotti’s siege cannon crashed out smoke and flame, two streets away. “You’re
married!.
”

“Time enough to decide what to do about Fernando when I’ve got him and his garrison out of that castle.” Ash shook her head as if she could clear it, somehow; clear the oppressive, unnatural darkness out of her skull.

She called the commander of the escort to her as she reached the commandeered town house again, ordering a brazier and food for his men in the street; and then clumped back up the stairs, Floria at her shoulder, only to walk into what seemed an entire company of people crammed between narrow white walls, helmet-plumes rubbing the candle-stained ceiling, voices raised.

“
Quiet!
”

That got silence.

She gazed around.

Joscelyn van Mander, his red-cheeked intense face framed by the brilliance of his steel sallet; two of his men; then Robert Anselm; Godfrey rising from his knees and disrupted prayer; Daniel de Quesada in his badly fitting European clothes – and a new man in white tunic and trousers and riveted mail hauberk, no weapons.

A Visigoth, with leather rank badges laced to his mail shoulders.
Qa’id,
she dredged up out of her memory of campaigns in Iberia: an officer set over a thousand. Roughly the equivalent of her own command.

“Well?” she said, reclaiming her place behind the table, and sitting. Rickard appeared and poured heavily watered wine for her. She dropped without thought into the dialect she had learned around Tunisian soldiers; something as automatic to her as calling a hackbutter an arquebusier in the French king’s lands, or a poleaxe
der Axst here
and
l’azza
to Angelotti. “What’s your business,
Qa’id?
”

“Captain.” The Visigoth soldier touched his fingers to his forehead. “I met my countryman de Quesada and your escort, on the road. He decided to return here with me, to speak to you. I bring news to you.”

The Visigoth soldier was small, fair-skinned, hardly taller than Rickard; with the palest blue eyes, and something about him that was undeniably familiar. Ash said, “Is your family name Lebrija?”

He seemed startled. “Yes.”

“Continue. What news?”

“There will be other messengers, of your own people—”

Ash’s gaze flicked to Anselm, who nodded, confirming: “Yes. I met them. I was on my way here when Joscelyn came in.”

“
You
may have the honour of telling me,” Ash told the Visigoth
qa’id
mildly, hating to hear news unprepared; hating not to have the few minutes’ warning she would have had if Robert had been the one to tell her. Since Joscelyn van Mander seemed intensely worried, she switched back to German. “What’s happened?”

“Frederick of Hapsburg has sued for terms.”

There was a little silence, essentially undisturbed by Floria muttering “Fuck,” and Joscelyn van Mander’s demand: “Captain, what does he mean?”

“I think he means that the territories of the Holy Roman Emperor have surrendered.” Ash linked her hands in front of her. “Master Anselm, is that what our messengers say?”

“Frederick’s surrendered. Everything from the Rhine to the sea is open to the Visigoth armies.” In an equally level tone, Robert Anselm added, “And Venice has been burned to the waterline. Churches, houses, warehouses, ships, canal-bridges, St Mark’s Basilica, the Doge’s palace, everything. A million, million ducats up in smoke.”

The silence became intense: mercenaries stunned at the waste of wealth, the two Visigoth men imbued with a silent confidence, being associated with the power to make such destruction.

Frederick of Hapsburg will have heard about Venice, Ash thought, stunned, hearing in her mind the dry, covetous voice of the Holy Roman Emperor;
he’s decided not to risk the Germanies!
And then, bringing her gaze snap into focus on the Visigoth soldier, brother or cousin of dead Asturio Lebrija, she realised,
The Empire has surrendered and we’re caught on the wrong side.
Every mercenary’s nightmare.

“I assume,” she said, “that a relieving force from the Visigoth army is now on its way here to Fernando?”

Her vision of where they are flips a hundred and eighty degrees. It’s no longer a matter of feeling herself safe behind town walls, soon to be safe behind the castle walls. Now the company’s caught in between the approaching Visigoth men-at-arms in the countryside beyond the town, and Fernando del Guiz’s knights and gunners up in the castle itself.

Daniel de Quesada spoke rustily. “Of course. Our allies must be helped.”

“Of course,” the brother or cousin of Lebrija echoed.

Quesada could not yet have told the
qa’id
of Lebrija’s death, might not know anything, Ash thought, and resolved to keep silent where speech could very likely get her into trouble.

“I’ll be interested to talk to your captain when he arrives,” Ash stated. She watched her own officers out of peripheral vision, seeing them draw strength from her confidence.

“Our commander arrives here by tomorrow,” the Visigoth soldier estimated. “We are most anxious to talk to you. The famous Ash. That’s why our commander is coming here, now.”

Sun gone out or not, Ash thought, I am not going to get the time I want to consider my decisions. Whether I like it or not, it’s happening
now.

And then:

Sun gone out or not, Last Days or not, it is nothing to do with me: if I stand by my company, we’re strong enough to survive this. The metaphysics of it aren’t my problem.

“Right,” she said. “I’d better meet your commander and open negotiations.”

Rickard presented Bertrand, a possible half-brother of Philibert, at thirteen busy growing into a body far too large for him, managing simultaneously to be fat and gangling. They put Ash into her armour and brought Godluc in his best barding; the boys smear-eyed with lack of sleep, at an hour which might have been dawn, if this third day in Guizburg had had one.

“As far as I can tell, their commander’s personal name is actually the name of her rank,” Godfrey Maximillian said. “Faris.
⁷
It means Captain-General, General of all their forces, something like that.”

“Her rank? A woman commander?” Ash remembered, then, Asturio Lebrija saying
I have met women of war,
and his sense of humour, which his cousin Sancho (Godfrey reporting the name and fact) did not possess at all. “And she’s here now? The boss of the whole damn invasion force?”

“Just down the road from Innsbruck.”

“Shit…”

Godfrey went to the door, calling a man in from the main room of the commandeered house. “Carracci, the boss wants to hear it herself.”

A man-at-arms with startling white-blond hair and high colour on his cheeks, who had stripped off all but a minimum of his shabby foot soldier’s kit to travel fast, came in and made a courtesy. “I got right up to their command tent! It’s a woman, boss. A woman leading their army; and you know how they’ve made her good? She’s got one of those Brazen Head machines of theirs, it does her thinking for her in battles – they say she hears its voice! She hears it talk!”

“If it’s a Brazen Head,
⁸
of course she hears it talk!”

“No, boss. She doesn’t have it with her. She hears it in her head, like God speaking to a priest.”

Ash stared at the billman.

“She hears it like a saint’s voice, it tells her how to fight.
That’s
why a woman beat us.” Carracci suddenly stopped talking, lifted a shoulder, and at last gave a hopeful grin. “Oops. Sorry, boss?”

She hears it like a saint’s voice.

A pulse of coldness went through the pit of Ash’s stomach. She was aware that she blinked, stared, said nothing; chill with an as yet unidentifiable shock. She wet her lips.

“Bloody right you’re sorry…”

It was an automatic response. This billman, Carracci, had clearly not heard
Ash hears saints’ voices?
as a company rumour: most – especially those who had been with her for years – would have done.

Does she hear a saint, this Faris? Does she? Or does she only think it’s a useful rumour? Burned as a witch is no way to end…

“Thanks, Carracci,” she added absently. “Join the escort. Tell them we’re riding in five minutes.”

As Carracci left, she turned back to Godfrey. It’s difficult to feel vulnerable, laced and tied into steel. She put the billman’s words out of her mind. Her confidence came back with her stride across the small room, the trestle bare of waiting armour now, to the window, where she stood and looked out at Guizburg’s fires.

“I think you’re right, Godfrey. They’re going to offer us a contract.”

“I’ve talked to travellers from a number of monasteries this side of the mountains. As I said, I can’t get a real idea of their numbers, but there is at least one other Visigoth army fighting in Iberia.”

Ash kept her back to him. “Voices. They say she hears voices.
That’s
odd.”

“As a rumour, it has its uses.”

“Don’t I know it!”

“Saints are one thing,” Godfrey said. “Claiming a miracle voice from an engine, that’s another. She might be thought a demon. She might
be
a demon.”

“Yes.”

“Ash—”

“There isn’t the time to worry about this, okay?” She turned and glared at Godfrey. “
Okay?
”

He watched her, brown eyes calm. He did not nod.

Ash said, “We have to make our minds up fast, if the Visigoths
do
make us an offer. Fernando and his men are just waiting to find us caught between hammer and anvil. Then it’ll be up with his castle drawbridge, and sally out and take us right in the back. Yippee,” she said dourly, and then grinned over her armoured shoulder at the priest. “
Won’t
he be sick if we’re contracted to the same side? We’re mercenaries, but he’s an attainted traitor – I still reckon this castle’s mine.”

“Don’t count your castles before they’re stormed.”

“Should that be a proverb, do you think?” She sobered. “We
are
between hammer and anvil. Let’s hope they need us on their side more than they need to get rid of us. Otherwise I should have decided to move us out, not stay put. And it’s going to be very short and very bloody up here.”

The priest’s broad hand came down on her left pauldron. “It’s bloody where the Visigoths are fighting the Guilds, up near Lake Lucerne. Their commander will probably buy any fighting force they can get, especially one that’s got local knowledge.”

“And then put us in the front line to die, rather than their own men.
I
know how it goes.” She moved cautiously, turning; armour can be considered a weapon in itself, if you are only wearing a brown pleated woollen robe and sandals. Godfrey’s hand slid away from the sharp metal plates. She met his brown-eyed gaze.

“It’s remarkable what you can get used to. A week, ten days… The question no one wants to ask, of course, is – after the sun, what? What
else
can happen?” Ash knelt stiffly. “Bless me before I ride out. I’d like to be in good grace right now.”

His deep, familiar voice sang a blessing.

“Ride with me,” she directed, a heartbeat after he finished, and made for the stairs. Godfrey followed her downstairs and out into the town.

Ash mounted and rode through the streets, with her officers and escort, men-at-arms and dogs. She reined Godluc in when a procession passed, jamming the narrow street, men and women wailing, their woollen doublets and kirtles deliberately slashed, faces streaked with ashes. Merchants and craftsmen. Bare, bloody-footed boys in white carried a Virgin between green wax candles. Town priests whipped them with steel-toothed whips. Ash took off her helmet and waited while the lamenting, praying crowd stumbled past.

When the noise level dropped to the point where she could be heard, she replaced her sallet and called, “On!”