Ash: A Secret History (44 page)

He gave a curt nod and stood up. As his weight left the mattress, she felt suddenly bereft.

Her head pulsed with pain. “We’ve just run like fuck. We don’t have a contract here in the Duchy. Do this wrong, and my lads’ll be deserting in droves by tomorrow… If you fuck up my company, I’ll have your bollocks,” she snapped weakly.

Robert Anselm looked down at her. “It’ll be under control. Next time,” he crossed to the cell door, “wear a bloody helmet, woman!”

Ash made an Italian gesture. “Next time,
bring
me one!”

Robert Anselm stopped, on the threshold. “What did the Faris say to you?”

Fear punched in under her breastbone, flooding her body. Ash smiled, felt the falsity of it, let her face find its own expression of distress, and croaked, “Not now! Later. Get that asshole Godfrey up here, I want to talk to him!”

What had been background pain flared, throbbing, until water began to run out of her eyes. She took little notice of what was said or done then, except for someone putting a bowl to her lips, and since she smelled wine and some herb she swallowed it in great gulps, and then lay praying until – not soon enough – she fell into a drugged sleep.

Her sleep became troubled less than an hour later.

Pain seared into her head. She froze, lying as still as possible, swearing at Floria whenever the surgeon came near her; her body broken out in a cold sweat. When the light dimmed, she felt it to be from the pain in her head. A male voice told her repeatedly that it was only evening, was sunset, was night, was the dark of the moon; but she shifted on the hot bolster, fangs of pain biting into her head, jamming her mouth shut with her fist, her own teeth breaking the skin of her knuckles. When she did give way and scream, when the pain became too bad, the movement blasted her into some region that she recognised: a place of blazing physical sensation, complete helplessness, complete inescapability. She had it one heartbeat, forgot it by the next; knew it for a memory, but not now what it was a memory of.

“
Lion
—” Her pleading voice choked in her throat; barely above a whisper: “By Saint Gawaine— by the Chapel—”

Nothing.

“Hush, baby.” A soft voice, man or woman’s, she couldn’t tell which. “Hush, hush.”

Still in a frozen whisper, she snarled: “Are you a fucking
machine!
Answer me! Golem—”

‘
No suitable problem proposed. No available solution.
’

The voice in her secret soul is unemphatic, as it has always been. Nothing of the predator in it; nothing of the saint?

Pain swarmed over every cell of her body; she whispered, despairingly, “Oh
shit—
!”

Another voice, Robert Anselm’s, said, “Give her more of that stuff. She won’t die of it. For bloody Christ’s sake, man!”

Sharp and rapid, Floria rapped out, “You can do this? Then you do this!”

“
No;
I didn’t mean—”

“Then
shut up.
I’m not losing her now!”

III

She must have slept, but didn’t realise it except in retrospect.

Pre-dawn light made a grey square of the window before her eyes. Ash groaned. Her palms were cold with sweat. The bed-linen smelled stale. As she moved her shoulder, she felt wool against her cheek, and realised that she was still fully dressed. Someone had undone her points, loosening her clothing. Stabs of pain entered her skull with every breath she took in, with every tiny movement of her body.

“I must be getting better, it hurts.”

“What?” A shadow rose and bent over her. The chill dawn illuminated Floria del Guiz. “Did you say something?”

“I said, I must be getting better, it’s starting to hurt.” Ash found herself sounding breathless. Floria put the familiar bowl to her mouth. She drank, spilling half on the yellow bed-linen.

An odd sound became, as she recognised it, someone scratching at the sickroom door. Before Floria could rise from beside her, the door opened and someone came in, carrying a pierced iron lantern. Ash turned her head away from the stabbing light. She bit down on a breath, as the movement jolted her head. Carefully, she slitted her eyes and peered at the doorway.

“Oh, it’s you,” Ash muttered as she recognised the newcomer. “I don’t know what the Soeur was complaining about – this fucking convent’s
full
of men.”

“I am a priest, child,” Godfrey Maximillian protested mildly.

“Good God, am I that ill?”

“Not now.” Floria’s hand pressed down on her shoulder. Ash kept herself from crying out. The surgeon added, “You did too much yesterday. That won’t happen today. This is the long boring bit. The bit you never like. The bit where boss tries to get up before she should. Remember?”

“Yeah. I remember.” Ash momentarily grinned, catching the tall, golden-haired woman’s smile. “But I’m bored.”

The surgeon narrowed her eyes at Ash. There was a look on her face that Ash suspected meant she would be getting a smart cuff around the ear about now, if not for her state of health.
Maybe I’m not well, at that.

“I’ve brought you a visitor,” Godfrey said. The surgeon glared at him, and he held up one broad-fingered hand reprovingly: “I know what I’m doing. She’s anxious to meet Ash, but she has to travel on from the convent later this morning. I told her she could come and speak with the captain for a few minutes.”

Floria held an expression of scepticism as they talked across Ash’s bed. The growing light brought their faces out of the dimness: the big bearded man, and the laconic man who was a woman. Ash lay and listened.

Godfrey Maximillian said, “It’s still me, too, Fl— my child. You used to believe that I had some skill in my art.”

“Priesting isn’t an art,” the surgeon grumbled, “it’s a fraud practised on the gullible. All right. Bring your visitor in, Godfrey.”

Ash made no attempt to sit up in the bed. Floria put the pierced lantern on the floor, where its light would not be so harsh. A blackbird spoke out of the emptiness beyond the window. Another called, a thrush, a chaffinch; and in a space of three or four heartbeats, a loud noise of birdsong echoed in the dawn. Ash’s head throbbed.

“Fucking twittering
birds!
” she complained.

“Capitano,” a woman’s clear voice said. Ash recognised the sound of someone moving while wearing armour: metal plates rattling and clacking, mail chinging.

Ash raised her eyes and saw a woman of about thirty-five beside the bed. The woman wore Milanese-style white armour, with a wheel-pommelled sword belted at her waist, and an Italian barbute helmet tucked under her arm, and had a considerable air of authority.

“Sit down.” Ash swallowed, clearing her mouth.

“My name is Onorata Rodiani, Capitano.
⁸
Your priest said I must not tire you.” The woman stripped off her gauntlets, to move the back-stool to the other side of the bed. Her little finger and ring-finger of her right hand were crooked, both repeatedly broken and set.

She seated herself on the back-stool and sat carefully erect, dipping her head out of her bevor so that she could turn her chin, and see whether her scabbard was scraping the cell wall behind her. Satisfied that it was not, she turned back, smiling. “I never lose a chance to meet another fighting woman.”

“Rodiani?” Ash squinted past the throbbing in her scalp. “I heard of you. You’re from Castelleone. You used to be a painter, didn’t you?”

The woman rested her hand up beside her face. It took Ash a second to note she was cupping her ear, and to realise that she should speak more loudly. The side of the woman’s face was speckled black with impacted powder. Deaf from gunfire.

“A painter?” Ash repeated.

“Before I became a mercenary.” The woman’s white teeth showed in the dimness as she smiled broadly. “I killed my first man as a painter. In Cremona – I was painting a mural of the Tyrant at the time. An inopportune rapist. After that, I decided I liked fighting better than painting.”

Ash smiled, recognising a public story when she heard it.
It’s not that easy.
The woman’s loose dark hair would show pure black in daylight. The lines of her tanned face promised plumpness in old age.
If she reaches it,
Ash thought, and reached her hands out from under the sheet. “Can I see that?”

“Yes.” Onorata Rodiani handed her barbute over.

Ash took the weight, the pull on her muscles shooting pain through her head, and rested the helmet on the bolster beside her. She poked at strap, rivets and helmet liner with an inquisitive finger; and ran the pad of her finger around its T-shaped opening. “You like barbutes? I can never
see
out of the damn things! I see you’ve gone for rose-head rivets as well.”

The woman’s left thumb stroked the disc pommel of her sword. “I like brass rivets on a helmet. They polish up bright.”

Ash rolled the barbute back towards her. “And Milanese vambraces? I’ve always used German arm defences.”

“You like Gothic armour?”

“I can get more movement out of their vambraces. As for the rest of it, all fluting and edge-work – no. It’s frilly armour.”

There was a snort from the doorway, where Floria and Godfrey stood talking in undertones. Ash glared at them.

“So. You want to see my sword?” Onorata Rodiani offered. “I wish I could show you my war-horse, too, but I have to leave this morning for the war that will come to France. Here.”

The woman stood and drew. That sound of sharp steel sliding against the fine wood that lines a sword-scabbard brought Ash up on her elbows. She struggled to get her back up against the bolster, finally sat, and reached her hand out for the hilt. She ignored the pain that made her eyes water.

France? Ash thought. Yes. The Visigoths have more men and supplies than I’ve ever seen; they’re not stopping where they are now. After the Swiss, and the Germanies… France isn’t a bad guess.

The Faris is equipped for a full-scale crusade.

“So how many lances do you have?” Ash flicked the wheel-pommelled sword in her hand. The thirty-six-inch blade, wide at the hilt and tapering to a needle point, slid through the air like oil through water. A living blade: the feel of it worth every pang in her scalp. “Christ, that’s sweet!”

“Twenty lances,” the woman said, and added, “Isn’t it?”

“I see you’ve gone for hollow-grinding on the blade.”

“Yes, and didn’t I have to stand over the blade-smith to make him do it properly!”

“Oh God, never trust an armourer.” Ash lowered the blade and sighted along it, testing its trueness by eye, and found herself focusing on the grinning face of Godfrey Maximillian. “What’s the matter with
you?
”

“Nothing. Nothing at all…”

“Well, get my guest some wine, then! You want her to think we don’t have any courtesy around here?”

Floria del Guiz linked her arm through the priest’s. She murmured, “We’ll get some wine, boss. We’ll be right back. Honest.”

Ash flipped the blade upright in her hand. A sliver of dawn light flashed off the scratched, mirror-bright steel. There was, she noted, a distinct curve to one edge of the blade, near the hilt, where battle nicks had been polished out on a grinder. A man could have shaved with the weapon’s edge.

“Nice work on the grip,” she commented appreciatively. “What is it, brass wire over velvet?”

“Gold wire.”

At the door, leaving, her priest said something to her surgeon that Ash did not quite catch. Floria shook her head, smiling. Ash lowered the sword, scooping up the linen sheet on her left hand, and rested the blade across her muffled finger.

“Balances about four inches down… I like ’em blade-heavy, too. I bet it really cuts.” She raised her head, glaring at Godfrey and Floria. “
What?
”

“We’ll leave you to it, child. Madonna Rodiani,” Godfrey bowed. Behind him, Floria was grinning for some reason that Ash did not understand, but obscurely felt might be best not inquired into. Godfrey smiled blandly at her. He said, “I’ll just tiptoe away now. Florian will tiptoe away.”

Ash heard Floria mutter something that sounded very like: “
Everybody
will tiptoe away! My God, these two could bore for Europe…”

“You,” Ash said with dignity, “are interrupting a professional discussion. Now fuck off out of my cell! And while you’re getting us wine, you can find me breakfast as well. Bloody hell, anybody would think I was an
invalid.
”

It was pure pleasure to forget the armies over the border, forget the nightmare of Basle; for however short a time.

“You can’t be fighting the war in your head every hour of the day; not and win when it does come to a battle.” Ash grinned, all decisions temporarily in abeyance.

“Madonna Onorata, stay for breakfast? While we eat, I want to ask you what you think about something in Vegetius. He says stab with the sword point, because two inches of steel in the gut is invariably fatal – but then, your man may not fall over until he’s had time to kill
you.
I often use the edge, and cut, which is slower, but maybe takes a man’s head clear off, after which I find he generally doesn’t bother me again. What’s
your
preference?”

She was quite genuinely not afraid of injury.

When she had worked out, to her own satisfaction, that she probably would not die on this particular day – this despite having known men who walked around for several days after a blow on the head, only to drop dead for no reason that anyone could see (despite the company surgeon’s covert rummaging in the contents of their brain-pan) – having decided this, and having suffered the extreme unpleasantness of having her two broken back teeth filed down flat, Ash to all intents and purposes forgot her wound. It became one of many.

That left her with nothing to do but think.

Ash leaned her elbows on the nunnery window’s edge, gazing out into the confusion of a wash-day in the enclosed courtyard. The stench of Cuckoo Pint starch filled her nostrils. She smiled, ruefully, at the peaceableness of it.

Behind her, someone entered the cell. She didn’t turn, recognising the tread. Godfrey Maximillian came to stand at the window. She noticed he glanced reflexively up, as Florian and Roberto and little Margaret had, at the sun in the sky. He looked to be burned red across the cheekbones.