Ash: A Secret History (67 page)

A great curving streak of fire blasted up the hill past Ash’s right-hand side. She screamed. Godluc reared. In a clatter of barding barely heard above the screaming men, he thudded down; her teeth clicked painfully together.

The mud steamed and hissed under a jet of blue-white fire.

It suddenly cut off. Black streaks blotched her vision: retinal after-images. Through them, Ash glimpsed large numbers of men sprinting up the hill towards the crest.

Down the hill, below the brushwood barrier of thousands of Visigoth arrows, uselessly stuck in the earth and burning now—

Ash saw the moving figures of golems, ahead of the Visigoth mainward. Thirty or forty of them; each with huge brass tanks fixed to their backs, nozzles in their hands that spat flame. Carrying the weight of the tanks with no effort, bearing the heat of the flame with no hurt.

“Get Angelotti to me!” she roared at Thomas Rochester.

The jolt of Godluc scrambling up the slope knocked breath out of her; page, escort and riders all with her, all on the heels of the company’s archers. She reined in, slowing deliberately; felt the ground flatten as she came up over the crest, and rode down in among the company as they went down into dead ground, out of mangonel-range, and spurred forward to the banner marking the guns.

“Angeli!” She leaned down from the saddle. “Get the hackbutters! Those damn things are made of
stone,
arquebus balls will
crack
them—”

“Got you, madonna!” the master gunner shouted.

“Jesus
Christ!
War-golems! Greek Fire!
¹⁹
We should have been warned! Can’t the scouts get
anything
right?”

Between screaming one order and the next, she realised there must be a battle going on out on the right flank, but that was all a wet confusion of banners streaming, gouts of mud kicked up by frantic riders, and one huge, immense roar of male voices that she guessed to be heavy cavalry going down the hill towards the wagons, the golems, the Greek Fire.

“Fuck, no!” Thomas Rochester gasped, riding to her side. “This is no time to be a hero!”

“If Oxford doesn’t send orders—” Ash stood in her stirrups, trying to pick out the Blue Boar, or the Burgundian banner, as great throngs of men streamed past her; men-at-arms in Burgundian livery running; and she exclaimed, “Shit, have we routed, and nobody’s told us?”

Man after man was carried back past her on hurdles ripped up by the women of the baggage train. She registered heads hanging down, hair matted with blood, mouths open; a man screaming with his leg bloody and the big bone of the thigh stuck up white through the skin; a woman in a kirtle, bloody from chin to hem, staring at her hand, lying a yard away in the mud. All faces she knew. She felt nothing, not even numb. She felt only the intensity, the necessity, of getting them through it as whole as she could.

Anselm appeared at her side on a rangy bay. “What now, boss?”

“Get scouts on the ridge! Tell me if they’re advancing. Draw up into battles. We’re not running yet!”

It is far easier to be killed running away.

No sun to tell her what hour this might be. She galloped along the front of the Lion Azure lines, partly to show any runners her banner, partly to discourage any man from running away. Two urging strides took Godluc up on to the skyline, even as she thought
This is suicidally dangerous but I have to know what’s going on!

Robert Anselm rode up beside her.

“Roberto, fuck off!”

“There!”

Ash followed the direction of his gauntlet. On the far right, de la Marche’s men had galloped down the slope, full charge, lances down, and joined battle. Men-at-arms swarming with them: bills rose and fell like a threshing machine. Among the Visigoth black pennants at the foot of the slope, next to the chevrons of Lebrija, a green and yellow personal banner briefly appeared.

“The Eagle of Del Guiz,” Robert yelled. His voice sounded hoarse, electric, excited. “That –
there he goes!
”

Anselm stood in his stirrups and whooped the way a hunt hallows a fox. The nearest billmen in Lion livery took breath to see where he was pointing.

“Boss, your husband’s running away!” Carracci bawled.

“Yeah!” Anselm grinned fiercely at Ash. “Petition the Emperor to award him another heraldic beast – the Lying Hound!”

She has a second to think
I
am
ashamed of Fernando, why am I ashamed of him, why should
I
care?
and then the bad light and confusion of men slashing away at each other hides banner, standard, the glint of weapons, and men’s backs as they run away.

“Captain Ash!” a rider in red X livery bellowed, “the Duke wants you!”

Ash waved acknowledgement, bellowed, “You’re in command, get off this fucking skyline!” to Anselm, and spurred Godluc – weary, hooves bloody, flanks heaving – across the back of the hill. Back of the lines, and down, into a tiny red streamlet, tributary of the river; splashing across it. She galloped into a paddock between hedges, trampled down by the passing of a thousand men.

A throng of men and riders packed the paddock. Appalled, she thought,
This is the back-of-the-lines HQ, have we been driven back this far, this fast?
She shoved up her visor, stared frantically at coloured cloth, and picked out the draggled Blue Boar, with Charles’s White Hart. She rode in between the ranks of armed knights. Liveries were useless now, blood and brains and mud soaking their bright colours.

One man made to block her way.

“For the Duke, motherfucker!” Ash shrieked.

He recognised a woman’s voice and let her through.

Charles of Burgundy, in full gilded armour, stood as the centre of the command group of nobles. Pages held their horses. One roan gelding delicately lipped at the verge of the stream, not willing to drink through mud and body fluids. Ash dismounted. The ground hit her heels, jarring her; she was instantly weary to the bone. She shook it off.

A man, his armet crowned by a blue boar, faceless in steel, turned at her voice. Oxford.

“My lord!” Ash elbowed between four armed knights in bloody yellow and scarlet livery. “We got to re-group. Take out the catapults and the Fire. What does the Duke want me to do?”

He thumbed his visor up, giving her a sight of red-rimmed pale blue eyes, fiercely keen. “The Duke’s mercenaries on your left flank are holding back. They won’t push an advance. He wants you to go in there.”

“He wants
what?
” Ash stared. “Didn’t anyone ever tell him, don’t reinforce failure?”

She realised she was breathing hard, and shouting too loud, despite the battle fifty yards away.

More quietly and hoarsely, she said, “If we mass the cannon and the hackbuts, we can blast the stone men off the face of this field—”

Her hands move, describing shapes in the air which she knows approximate not to actual men, slicing at each other in this black morning’s random confusion, but to their force, their will, their ability to
make
someone else go back: an ability not really dependent on weapons.

“—but we won’t do it piecemeal. The Duke’s got to give the orders!”

“He won’t do it,” John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, said. “The Duke is ordering a heavy cavalry charge.”

“Oh, fuck chivalry! This is his chance to do something, we’re getting chewed up here—” There is no time to argue on the field of battle. “Yes, my lord. What—”

Ash glimpsed something black and whirring and brought up her arm by instinct.

A bodkin arrow-head clicked off her upraised shoulder and glanced into the dirt.

The shock through the brigandine’s plates momentarily numbed her right arm. She grabbed left-handed for Godluc’s reins – a page in red doublet and white hose knelt before Godluc, slumped forward under her horse’s hooves, two shafts protruding from his throat.

Not a red doublet, a white doublet soaked red.

“
Oxford!
” She had her four-foot short axe off the saddle, gripping it between two hands.
When the commanders have to draw weapons, it’s trouble.
The scream and shout and sudden battering of hooves broke over the hedge in front of her, new riders piling into the enclosed paddock: ten, fifty, two or three hundred men in robes and mail on desert horses—

A spurt of flame leaped out in front of her.

Ash never saw the hand-gunner, or heard the
bang
and
crack!
of the gun; she was deaf before she knew it.

Another gun spoke. Not a hand-gun but an organ-gun. Between grey smoke, she saw a Burgundian cannon crew sponge, load, ram and fire, in less time than seemed possible. She swung round and the paddock was full of mounted Visigoth knights – and men in white mullet liveries, John de Vere bellowing an attack – and Godluc trampling someone a dangerous two yards from her right hand – and she brought her axe up and over and drove through the impact of flesh, of bone. The axe took off a Visigoth rider’s arm, clean, with a spray of blood that reddened her armour from sallet to sabatons.

The impact of horses’ hooves pounded up through the soles of her boots. She felt the
bang!
of another gun in the hollow of her chest. She took a grip, braced her feet, yelled as well as she could for Godluc; and turned a lance-shaft aside with a well-timed cut. Coming up on the backswing for the Visigoth knight’s leg, she made no connection, almost falling—

“No! I won’t ask!” She sobbed it aloud. “
No voices!
”

No riders in front of her.

The paddock was nothing but horses in red and yellow and blue caparisons: galloping Burgundian knights. Ash took three seconds to swing up into the saddle, loop her axe to it, and draw her sword: within that time, there was no longer a man in Visigoth mail and livery alive, wounded horses screamed, butchered; and the great mass of the Burgundian Duke’s escort closed up around them – around what had been, she realised, a flying wedge attack.

At her horse’s feet, the Visigoth standard-bearer lay face down on his flag, a red rent in his mail shirt, and a broken sword blade jammed through his eye-socket.

“The Duke!” John de Vere was in the mud, staring up at her. He knelt, cradling a man in gilded armour and Hart livery – Charles, Duke of Burgundy. The gilt articulated steel was leaking thick, red arterial blood. “
Get surgeons! Now!
”

A flying wedge of men from the land of stone and twilight, willing to be chopped apart if it meant one of them could find, under his standard, Duke Charles of Burgundy. She shook her ringing head, trying to make out what the Earl of Oxford was saying.

“SURGEONS!” His voice reached her faintly.

“My lord!” Ash wheeled Godluc. The arch of the sky above her was black, with that lightlessness that she treated now as if it were just another natural phenomenon. North, the morning was distantly bright. Chill wind still blew in her face. She slammed her visor shut, jammed spurs home, and thundered across the slippery slope, her banner-bearer and escort hard put to keep up with her.

The light in the north began to die.

Godluc’s gallop slowed instantly to a walk as her attention shifted. His head drooped. His barrel chest shuddered, white with foam. Thomas Rochester’s little Welsh mare caught up, with the Lion banner behind him. She pointed, wordless.

Back towards Dijon, over the Burgundian border, the sunlight was beginning to dim.

“Surgeons for the Duke!” Ash ordered. “Ride!”

The slope of the hill rose up in front of her, wet, muddy, slippery with wreckage. The Surgeon-General’s tents were fifty yards off, just below the crest. Godluc, doing his best, could not surmount it; she turned and rode with her group hard towards the west, along the contour of the hill, to where the slope would shallow out and allow her to get back, along the crest, to the rear and the surgeons’ wagons.

Rochester and the escort outdistanced her, on horses that had done less in the past two hours. She found herself struggling in the rear, behind her banner, behind her escort.

She had no warning.

A crossbow bolt struck the flank of the horse in front: Rochester’s mare. Wet meat exploded across her face and body.

Godluc reared.

A mailed hand from nowhere jerked her reins down, bloodying Godluc’s mouth. The gelding screamed. A sword-slash cut one stirrup leather: she jerked in the high-backed saddle, grabbing with her free hand for the pommel, and balance.

Sixty Visigoth knights in mail and coat-of-plates rode past and over and through her escort, streaming out across the hill.

A spear thrust home from behind into Godluc’s quarters. His hind hooves lifted, his head dipped, and she went straight over his head.

The mud was soft, or she would have died with a broken neck.

The impact was too hard to feel. Ash felt nothing but an absence, realised that she lay, staring up at the black sky, stunned, hurt, chest an acid void; that her hand gripped her sword and the blade had snapped off six inches from the hilt, that something was wrong with her left leg, and her left arm.

A man in the snatch-squad leaned down from his mount. She saw his pale face, behind the helmet bar, satisfying itself about her livery. He hefted a mace in his left hand. He dismounted, and struck twice: once to her left knee, the poleyn locking down, pain blazing through the joint; and once to the side of her head.

She knew nothing clearly after that.

She felt herself lifted, thought for a time that it might be Burgundians or her own men; recognised, at last, that the language they spoke was Visigothic, and that it was dark, the sun was nowhere in the sky, and that what rocked and shook unsteadily beneath her was not a field or road or hay-cart, but the deck of a ship.

Her first clear thought came perhaps days later.
This is a ship and it is sailing for North Africa.