Ash: A Secret History (65 page)

Unseen, she made a fist, dug her nails into her palms, and showed nothing of what she felt.

“We should talk to our priests.” Ash pointed at the Briar Cross that hung around the Earl’s neck, dark against his surcoat. “I’ve got an idea. Time for God to give us a miracle, your Grace.”

Within two hours of walking the ground, Ash stood beside Godluc’s warm flank, Bertrand holding the war-horse’s reins, and Rickard carrying her helmet and lance. Her thigh armour was borrowed, from a short stocky English knight in de Vere’s train. It did not fit.

Half the sky above her was black.

The east, where the sun should have risen on the massive army, was a towering darkness. Only behind them did an odd half-light stir cocks in the baggage wagons to crow late news of dawn.

Glancing downhill, south, she could no longer see the enemy campfires.

Behind her, that part of the sky that was not black had been covered with a back-shadow of morning light. Now it was becoming rapidly overcast, dark as the east and south. Clouds came together, chalk-yellow and fat-bellied, as tall as castle walls or cathedral spires.

Jesu Christ. Five hundred people
organised.
In place. Where they should be.

“I’m too knackered to fight!” she murmured.

Rickard grinned, palely. Her war-horse’s breath steamed. Ash looked up the slope to the skyline and the multiple forces of the Burgundian army.

She thought, in the idle moment that follows extreme exertion:
The main
view of a field of battle is legs.

Dismounted, she has the impression of the field consisting of nothing but legs – horse’s legs, by the hundred, some masked by livery caparisons hanging limp in the cold wet air, but most bare roan or bay or black: milling as the knights move over the crest of the slope into position. And men’s legs, made slender by silver armour, all of the knights and most of the men-at-arms having steel on their lower limbs, even the archers’ bright hose having steel cops strapped on over vulnerable knees. Hundreds of legs: feet treading down what had been some lord’s wheat and was now churned mud and horse-shit.

Minutes ticking by: past the third hour of the morning, surely?

A flurry of cold, wet air blew into her face. Trumpets shrilled. She had barely time to glance back at Anselm, Angelotti, Geraint ab Morgan; all three of them with their clusters of sergeants, gun-captains and lance-leaders thronging around them, orders urgently, furiously being given.

“Mounting up,” she murmured, and took her sallet from Rickard, manoeuvring it carefully over her braided hair, settling it down on her head. She let the buckle strap swing free for the moment. One foot finding the stirrup, she sprang lightly up into the saddle.

From here, high above ground, her view changed; the field becoming instead all helmets and standards. Silver against black thunderheads, a mass of steel shoulders blocked her view: knights wearing their articulated pauldrons. Riders crowded in knots, shouting to each other, wearing a throng of duck-tailed Italian sallets, and German sallets with long pointed tails, surmounted by heraldic Beasts; dim colours echoed by the sagging wet silk of their banners and standards above.

Robert Anselm slapped his hands together. “Fuck me, it’s
cold!
”

“Everybody clear about what they’re doing?”

“Yeah.” Anselm had his sallet tipped back on his head. He looked out from under it at her. “Sure. All twenty thousand of us…”

“Yeah, right. Never mind. No plan ever survived ten minutes after the fighting started … we’ll wing it.”

Up on the backside of the hill here, Ash could look to left and right and see the Burgundian army riding and walking into place: twenty thousand strong.

“I think that’s Olivier de la Marche’s banner on the right wing,” she pointed out to Rickard. The boy nodded jerkily. “And the mercenaries over on the left, and Charles’s own banner there – the heavy armoured centre. You should study heraldry. We could do with a better herald in the Lion Azure.”

His flaring black eyebrows dipped. “How many of them can fight, boss?”

“Hmm. Yes. That
may
be a better question than who’s a Raven and lion Couchant…” Ash felt her bowels rumble. “About two-thirds of them, I’d say. The rest are peasant levy and town militia.”

She shifted Godluc a few steps, leaning sideways, not able to see Angelotti now with the other master gunners, the Duke having decided to mass his serpentines
¹⁵
in the centre.

“It’s dysentery,” she said firmly. “That’s why I keep wanting to shit myself. It’s dysentery.”

Geraint ab Morgan, moving to stand by her other stirrup, nodded. “That’s right, boss. Lot of it about this morning.”

With a gesture to her officers, Ash rode at a gentle pace up the slope of the hill and over the crest, her personal banner borne behind her by Robert Anselm; to where Euen Huw and his lance guarded the Lion Azure standard, in the centre of five hundred fighting men. The pommel of her sword tapped arrhythmically against her plackart as she rode. A faint moisture began to sting her bare face and uncovered hands.

Where’s the fucking enemy –
ah.
There.

Down at the foot of the deceptively gentle slope –
be a bitch to run up,
her mind commented – groups of darkness moved in darkness. Moving units of men. The glint of a banner-spike. A randy mare whinnying to the Frankish war-horses.

“How many men?” Robert Anselm murmured.

“Haven’t a clue…
Too
many.”

“It’s always ‘too many’,” the older man observed. “Two peasants with a stick is ‘too many’!”

Godfrey’s deacon sprinted out from the mass of armed men. Ash automatically looked for Godfrey Maximillian to be with Richard Faversham – after four days, was still looking. She had stopped asking.

“What did the bishop say?” she demanded.

“He consents!” Richard Faversham spoke softly enough that she had to bend down from the saddle to hear him, awkward in a brigandine which is not designed to do that.

“How many priests have we?”

“With the army, upwards of four hundred. With the company, but two; myself and young Digorie here.”

He’s not mentioning Godfrey either. Are we both assuming he’s left the company? Without a word?

Ash’s bare fist hit the saddle’s pommel. She stared down at her cold skin, and reached out for her gauntlets. Rickard, on toe-tip, put them into her hands. As she buckled the left one on, she continued to look down at Richard Faversham, and the intense, bony, dark young man he had introduced as Digorie.

“Are you ordained?” she asked him.

Digorie reached up a hand that appeared to be all knuckles, and gripped her remaining ungauntleted hand in an extremely powerful clasp. “Digorie Paston,
¹⁶
madam,” he said, in English, “ordained back in Dijon by Charles’s bishop. I won’t let you or God down, ma’am.”

Hearing the order in which he said it, Ash raised an eyebrow but managed to restrain herself from any comment.

“You’re going to win this battle for us, Digorie, Richard,” she said. “Well, you and the other three hundred and ninety-eight…”

Godluc responded to a touch of the spurs, bringing her around to where she could look down the hill, over the heads of her own men, towards the Visigoth army.

“Oh,
shit,
” Ash remarked. “That’s all we needed.”

In the half-light, she could see dozens of Visigoth command flags, spanning the eastern road from Dijon towards Auxonne, and the thousands of marching and mounted men with them. Narrowing her eyes against the keen wet wind, she recognised positions: they have anchored their right flank hard up against the marsh down
there,
in the north; and got the southern valley
there
sat on with four companies of troops, and—

And.

“Well,” Ash’s voice sounded thin to her own ears, “that’s us fucked. That’s us well and
truly
fucked.”

Robert Anselm grabbed her stirrup and heaved himself briefly up, high enough to look down across the slope, and see what she was seeing. “Son of a
bitch!
”

He fell back, heels jolting on the mud.

Ash shifted her gaze, slitting her eyes to be sure of what she was seeing in the dimness. There was no mistake. Over the troops who anchored themselves on the Visigoth right – about a thousand archers and light horsemen – white pennants flew.

The wind unrolled the silk on the air, letting her clearly see the red crescents.

“Those are Turkish troops,” she confirmed.

Robert Anselm, below her, muttered, “So much for them cutting the Visigoths’ supply lines…”

“Yeah. Not only are they not cutting their supply lines, there’s a detachment of the Sultan’s troops in the mainward. Oh,
fuck,
” Ash exclaimed. “There’s been some kind of treaty, alliance, something – the fucking Sultan’s in bed with the fucking Caliph now!”

“I doubt quite that,” John de Vere said, riding up beside them.

“Did you know about this, my lord?”

De Vere’s face, under his armet’s pinned-up visor, showed white with anger. “What would Duke Charles tell an indigent English Earl? His intelligence is too good for him not to know – he must think he can beat them,” the Earl of Oxford said abruptly. “God’s teeth! but he thinks he can defeat the Visigoths
and
the Turks! The greater enemy, the greater the glory.”

“We’re dead,” Ash murmured, sing-song. “We’re dead … okay, my lord. If you want my advice, stick with the plan. Let the priests pray.”

“If I wanted your advice, madam, I should have demanded it.”

Ash grinned at him. “Well, hey, you got it for free. Not everybody can say that. I’m a mercenary, you know.”

The constriction of humour at his eyes gave him crow’s feet. The laughter faded, as he and Ash sat their restless horses. In the twilight, it seemed the Visigoth and Turkish battles
¹⁷
might be drawing up in what local intelligence had suggested would be their optimum position.

“Will your men follow you in this?”

Ash said absently, “They’re a damn sight more frightened of me than of the enemy – and besides, the Visigoths might not get them, but my battle police certainly will.”

“Madam, much depends on this.”

A feeling of great relaxation spread through her body. She reached down to adjust the strap of the plackart that protected her belly, and thought longingly of the protection afforded by full armour. Her hand came to rest on the leather-bound grip of her sword, checking the lanyard chain fastened around it below the pommel, and attached to her belt.

“I’ve got rid of the liabilities,” Ash said, looking back at him. “Most of the rest of these men have been fighting for me for three years now. They don’t give a fuck about Duke Charles. They don’t give a fuck about – beg pardon – the Earl of Oxford. They give a fuck about their lance-mates, and about me, because I’ve got them out of fields worse than this in one piece. So yes, they’ll do it. Maybe. All other things being equal.”

The Earl of Oxford looked curiously at her.

Ash avoided the Englishman’s gaze. “Okay
-
we’re facing people who beat the Swiss: morale isn’t
that
good. You ask Cola de Monforte!”

A clarion rang out across the field. Momentarily, men’s voices stilled. The sounds of horses, their tack, the clatter of barding, and the snorts of breath gave way to the distant shout of Sergeants of Archers, and an unholy noise of singing from the gunners’ position. Ash stood upright in her stirrups.

“Meanwhile,” she said, “it isn’t quite hopeless, and I’ve got a contract with you.”

The Earl of Oxford saw his brothers approaching, and Ash saw the rest of her officers coming up; all with questions, needing orders and direction, and the time ticking away now to nothing.

John de Vere formally offered his hand, and Ash gripped it.

“If we survive the field,” he said, “I shall have questions to ask you, madam.”

“Good thing they don’t do guns,” Ash murmured to Robert Anselm. “They’d do what Richard Gloucester did to your Lancastrians at Tewkesbury, and blow us right off the top of this hill!”

Anselm nodded approvingly. “The Duke’s got it well thought out.”

“Bugger Charles of Burgundy!” Ash remarked. “Why do I have to fight a fucking hopeless battle before we can do anything useful? It isn’t that lot we need to take out – it’s her fucking Stone Golem, that’s telling her how to win! This is a sheer waste of time.”

“Particularly if we get killed,” Anselm grunted.

Both of them sat in their saddles, gazing down the long muddy slope at banners galloping, as the Visigoth light cavalry got themselves into position. The Faris’s banner held their centre – as Ash’s scouts had informed her, it was a Brazen Head, on a black field. Ash absently rested her hand on the skirt of her brigandine, over her belly.

She missed, suddenly and painfully, whatever Florian might be saying at this moment, if she were here – something caustic about the stupidity of military life, and battles, and getting cut up for no good reason.

“Florian would say I have to fight harder because I’m a woman,” Ash said inconsequentially, watching her officers moving along the back of lines of men. “She means, a male commander could get taken prisoner, but I’d get gang-raped.”

Anselm grunted. “Yeah? It was me that found Ricardo Valzacchi after Molinella, remember? Tied across a wagon with a poleaxe shaft up his arse. I think he’s—
she’s
getting war confused with something else…”

What little she could see of Anselm’s face in the vee between bevor and raised visor was hidden, now, by the dark sweep of clouds across the sky; a sweep of dank shadow that took the brightness out of blue and red and yellow banners, dulled the hooks and points of bills, and caused a muttered swearing among the archers and crossbowmen.

A blast of cold air brought rain into her face; stingingly cold, almost sleet.

Ash stirred, tapped spurs to the big gelding’s flanks and rode down in among the company lines. Godluc’s big feathery feet picked a way between men and women bundled into jacks and helms and standing on the wet trampled crops.