Ash: A Secret History (34 page)

Ash saw his forehead gleaming in the candlelight: shiny with sweat.

Not a sign of strength of character. Not at all.

“
Fuck!
” Ash shouted.

“‘And the king shall be’—” A white-haired man, in a murrey-coloured woollen pleated gown, with a silver-linked chain around his neck, looked up from tracing a hand-written document with his be-ringed finger. “Your pardon, Frau?”

“
Fuck!
” Ash sprang up and leaned forward, her gauntleted hands resting on the table. Fernando del Guiz: stone-green eyes. Fernando del Guiz, in a mail hauberk, and a white tunic under it; the badge of a
qa’id
laced to his shoulder, and his mouth now white around the lips. He met her eyes and she felt it, felt the eye-contact as a literal jolt under her ribs.

“
You
are
a fucking traitor!
”

The hilt of her sword is solid in her grip, the razor-sharp blade drawn two inches from the scabbard before she even thinks about it, every trained muscle beginning to move. She feels in her body the anticipated jolt of the sword-point stabbing through his bare, unprotected face. Smashing cheekbone, eye, brain. Brute force solves so many things in life not worth wasting time thinking about; this is what she does for a living, after all.

In the split second before she drew, Agnus Dei – now visible, sitting in his Milanese armour and white surcoat beyond the
amir
– gave a shrug that said plainly,
Women!,
and said loudly, “Keep your private business for another time, madonna!”

Ash flicked a glance back to ascertain where her six men-at-arms were positioned, behind her. Impassive faces. Ready for back-up. Except for Rickard. The boy bit on his bare hand, appalled at the silence.

It reached her.

Fernando del Guiz watched, no expression on his face. Safe behind the walls of public protection.

“I will,” Ash said, sitting down. Around the low-beamed room, suddenly tense men wearing swords relaxed. She added, “I’ll keep my business with Lamb for another time, too.”

“Perhaps mercenaries do not need to attend on this meeting, condottieri,” the lord-
amir
offered drily.

“Guess not.” Ash braced her hands against the edge of the oak table. “I really need to speak with your Faris.”

“She is in the town’s great hall.”

It was clearly the placation of a quarrelsome mercenary. Ash appreciated it. She pushed herself to her feet, and concealed a smile at Agnus Dei having also to gather his men, make his farewells, and leave the meeting and the house.

She glanced back as Lamb and his men stepped carefully out on to the cobbles after her. She tugged her cloak around her against the sleet. “All mercenaries out on the street together…”

That would either make him fight or laugh.

The creases deepened in his brown face, under his barbute with its sodden plumes. “What’s she paying you, madonna?”

“More than you. Whatever it is, I bet it’s more than you.”

“You have the more lances,” he said mildly, pulling on his heavy gauntlets.

Confused by the evaporation of her anger, Ash put on her helm and reached out as Rickard brought Godluc, and mounted quickly and easily. Not that a war-horse’s shod hooves were any more certain on the cobbles than her own slick-soled boots.

Lamb called, “Did your Antonio Angelotti tell you? They’ve burned Milano, too. Down to the dirt.”

A smell of wet horse permeated the chill air.

“You were from Milan, weren’t you, Lamb?”

“No mercenary is from anywhere, madonna, you know that.”

“Some of us try.” That brought Guizburg to mind, fifty miles away: shattered town walls and unbreached keep; and another jolt left her breathless:
He is upstairs in that little room and I wish he was dead!

“Which one of you was it?” she demanded. “Who let ‘twins’ meet, without warning either of us?”

Lamb chuckled harshly. “If the Faris believed it was my fault, madonna, would I be here?”

“But Fernando’s still here, too.”

The Italian mercenary gave her a look that said
you are a child
and had nothing to do with her age.

Ash said recklessly, “What about if I paid you to kill my husband?”

“I’m a soldier, not an assassin!”

“Lamb, I always knew you had principles, if I could only find them!” She made a joke of it, laughing it away; uncomfortably aware from the look on the Italian’s face that he knew it was not a joke.

“Besides, he’s the coming man with the Faris-General.” Agnus Dei touched his white surcoat, his expression changing. “God judges him, madonna. Do you think you’re the only enemy he has, having done this? God’s judgement comes on him.”

“I’d like to get in first.” Ash, grim, watched Agnus Dei and his men mount up. Hooves and voices echoed between high, narrow houses. A bitch of a street to fight along, she thought, and dropped her chin into her mail standard to mutter aloud – purely as a supposition – and for the first time since Genoa: “Six mounted knights against seven; all Carrying war hammers, swords, axes; on very bad ground—”

And stopped. And reached up to jerk the visor of her sallet down, hiding her face. She whirled Godluc, iron shoes striking sparks in the sleet, and slid off at a gallop, men-at-arms following her all anyhow, Lamb’s appalled shout lost in the clatter.

No! I said nothing! I don’t want to hear—!

Nothing rational: a wall of fear rose up in her mind. She would not consider the reasons why.

It’s only the saint I have heard since I was a child: why—

I don’t want to hear my voice.

Eventually she let Godluc slow, on the dangerous cobbles. Torches flared as Ash led her entourage through narrow, pitch-dark streets. A clock distantly struck two of the afternoon.

“I know where we’ll pick up the surgeon on the way,” she told Thomas Rochester, having given up
Floria-Florian
as a name that made her speech stumble. Rochester nodded and directed the manner of their riding: himself and another armoured horseman before her, two more at the rear, and the two mounted crossbowmen in their felt hats to ride beside her. The road underfoot changed from cobbles to frozen mud ruts.

Ash rode between houses with tiny paned windows illuminated by cheap rush-lights. A black dot jerked and darted across her vision. Godluc tossed his head at its angular flight. Bats, she realised: bats flying out from under the house-eaves, in this dark daytime, snatching at insects, or trying to.

Something crunched under the war-horse’s shod hooves.

Stretching across the cold dirt in front of them, insects lay like a crisp frost.

Pismires of the air, all dead from cold: honey-bees, wasps, blow-flies. A hundred thousand of them. Godluc’s feathered hooves came down on the bright, broken wings of butterflies.

“Here,” she directed, at a three-storey house with a stack of overhanging windows. Rochester snuffled. She could see little of the dark-haired Englishman’s face under his visor, but when she studied the house outside which they had halted, she guessed the reason for his humour. A hundred rush-lights shone in the windows, someone was singing, someone was playing a lute surprisingly well, and three or four men were being sick in the gutter in the centre of the alley. Whorehouses always do good business in a crisis.

“You guys wait for me.” Ash swung down from the saddle. Light glinted from her steel armour. “And I mean
here.
I don’t want to find any of you missing when I come back!”

“No, boss.” Rochester grinned.

Thick-necked men in jerkins and hose, backlit, let her pass, seeing armour and livery jacket. Nothing unusual about a boy-voiced knight or man-at-arms in a Basle whorehouse. Two questions got her knowledge of the room occupied by a yellow-haired Burgundian-accented surgeon, two silver coins of indeterminate issue gained silence. She strode up the stairs, knocked once, and went in.

A woman was lying back on a pallet in the corner of the small room, her bodice pulled down and her long veined breasts drooping out. All her chemises and her woollen kirtle were ruffled up about her naked thighs. She might have been anything between sixteen and thirty, Ash couldn’t tell. She had dyed yellow hair, and a small plump chin.

The room smelled of sex.

There was a lute beside the whore, and a candle and some bread on a wooden plate on the floor. Floria del Guiz sat cross-wise on the pallet with her back against the plaster of the wall. She drank from a leather bottle. All her points had been unlaced; one brown nipple was visible where her breast lay out of her open shirt.

As Ash watched, the whore stroked Floria’s neck.

“Is this a sin?” the girl demanded fiercely. “Is it, sir? But fornication is a sin in itself, and I have fornicated with many men. They are bulls in a field, with their great cocks. She is gentle and wild with me.”

“Margaret. Sssh.” Floria leaned forward and kissed the young woman on the mouth. “I am to leave, I see. Shall I come back and visit you?”

“When you have the money.” A glint, under the bravado, of something else. “Mother Astrid won’t let you in if you don’t. And come in your man-shape. I don’t want to make a bonfire for the church.”

Floria met Ash’s black look. The surgeon’s eyes danced. “This is Margaret Schmidt. She’s excellent with her fingers – on the lute.”

Ash turned her back on the young whore rearranging her clothes; and on Floria, tying her points with a surgeon’s neatness. She walked across the floor. Boards creaked. A deep male voice shouted something from upstairs; there was a series of rising cries, faked, in another upstairs room.

“
I
never whored with women!” Ash turned, stiffly, in metal plates. “I went with men. I never went with animals, or women! How can you
do
that?”

Margaret murmured, shocked, “He’s a woman!”, to which Floria, now tying on her cloak and hood, said, “She is, greatheart. If you fancy life on the road, there are worse camps to join.”

Ash wanted to shout, but kept her mouth shut, halted by the decisions passing across the young woman’s face.

Margaret rubbed her chin. “It’s no life, among soldiers. And listen to him, to her, I couldn’t be with you, could I?”

“I don’t know, sweetness. I’ve never kept a woman before.”

“Come back here before you go. I’ll give you my answer then.” With remarkable self-possession, Margaret Schmidt tidied the lute and the plate on to an oaken stool, in the chiaroscuro of the rush-light. “What are you waiting for? Mother will be sending another one to me. Or she’ll charge you double.”

Ash didn’t wait to see what she thought might be a kiss of parting – except that whores do not kiss, she thought;
I
never—

She turned and stomped down the narrow stairs, between doors sometimes open to men with bottles and dice, sometimes to men fornicating with women; until she stopped and spun around in the hallway, nearly impaling the surgeon on the sharp edge of her steel elbow-couter. “What the
hell
do you think you’re doing? You were supposed to be sounding out other physicians, picking up trade gossip!”

“What makes you think I haven’t been?”

The tall woman checked belt, purse and dagger with an automatic touch of one hand, the other still clasped around the neck of the leather bottle.

“I got the physician to the Caliph’s cousin truly rat-arsed, right here. He tells me in confidence that Caliph Theodoric has a canker, months to live at best.”

Ash only stared, the words going past her.

“Your face!” Floria laughed. She drank from the bottle.

“
Shit, Florian, you’re fucking women!
”

“Florian’s perfectly safe fucking women.” She swept her man-cut hair back into her hood, where it framed her long-boned face. “Now wouldn’t it be inconvenient if I wanted to fuck men?”

“I thought you were just paying for a room, and her time! I thought it was a trick, to keep up your disguise!”

Floria’s expression softened. She patted Ash gently on her scarred cheek, and then dropped the empty bottle, and whipped her mittens on against the chill seeping in from the street. “Sweet Christ. If I can put it the way our excellent Roberto would – don’t be such a humourless hard-ass.”

Ash made a half-noise not speech, all breath. “But you’re a woman! Going with another woman!”

“It doesn’t bother you with Angelotti.”

“But he’s—”

“He’s a man, with another man?” Floria said. Her mouth shook. “Ash, for Christ’s sake!”

An older woman with a tight face under her coif came out from the kitchens. “Are you bravos looking for a woman or wasting my time? Sir knight, I beg your pardon. All our girls are very clean. Aren’t they, Doctor?”

“Excellently.” Floria pushed Ash towards the door. “I’ll bring my lord back, when our business is done with.”

Cold darkness blinded Ash outside the doors; then Thomas Rochester and her men and their pitch-torches dazzled her, so that she hardly saw a boy bring Floria her bay gelding. She mounted and settled herself down in Godluc’s saddle.

She opened her mouth to shout. And then realised that she had no idea what to say. Floria, watching her, looked supremely unapologetic.

“Godfrey will be at the hall by now.” Ash shifted, rousing Godluc to a slow walk. “The Faris will be there. Ride on.”

Floria’s gelding shivered and flicked its head up. The white, soundless swoop of a disorientated barn owl curved past in flight, not a yard from the surgeon’s hat.

“Look.” Floria pointed up.

Ash tilted her head to gaze up at the high gable roofs.

She was not used to noticing the fullness of the summer skies. Now, every gable line and window ledge was thick with roosting birds – with pigeons, rooks, crows and thrushes, fluffing out feathers against the chill. Blackbirds, sparrows, ravens; all, in an uncanny peace, sharing their perches undisturbed with merlin hawks and peregrines and kestrels. A low, discontented mumbling went up from the flocks. White guano streaked the beams and plaster.

Above them, the overcast clouds of the day’s sky stayed invisible, and black.