Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  One of the gunners would always give her food or copper coins. He bent her forwards over an iron-bound gun carriage, undid the points of her hose, and fucked her up the arse.

  “You don’t have to be that careful,” Ash complained. “I won’t have a child. I haven’t shown flowers – blood – yet.”

  “You haven’t shown a cock, either,” the gunner answered. “Until I find a pretty boy, you’ll have to do.”

  Once he gave her a spare strip of mail. She begged thread from one of the company’s clothiers, and a piece of leather from the tanner, and sewed the riveted metal links on to that. She shaped it into a mail standard or collar, tied on to protect the throat. She wore it at every skirmish, every cattle-raid, every bandit ambush where she learned her business – which was, as she had always known, war.

  She prayed for war the way other little girls her age, in convents, pray to be the chosen bride of the Green Christ.

  Guillaume Arnisout was a gunner in the mercenary company. He never touched her. He showed her how to write her name in Green alphabet: a vertical slash with five horizontal cuts (“the same number as your fingers”) jutting out of it on the right-hand side (“sword-hand side!”). He didn’t teach her how to read because he couldn’t. He taught her how to figure. Ash thought, All gunners can calculate to a single powder-grain, but that was before she understood gunners.

  Guillaume showed her the ash tree and taught her how to make hunting bows from that wood (“a wider stave than you need for a yew bow”).

  Guillaume took her to visit the slaughterhouse, after the August siege at Dinant, before the company went overseas again.

  The spring sun shimmered on hawthorn blossom hedging the cattle pastures. A chill wind still blew. The company encampment’s noise and smell were carried away, downwind.

  Ash rode the cow into the village, sitting sideways on the peaked bone ridge of its back. Guillaume walked beside the cow, on the rutted lane. She looked down at him walking in the dust. He carried a carved stick of a secret black wood, using it at each step for support. Ash knew she had not been born when a poleaxe smashed his knee in a line-fight and he retired to the siege guns.

  “Guillaume…”

  “Urh.”

  “I could have brought her on my own. You didn’t have to come.”

  “Hurh.”

  She looked ahead. The double spire of the church was visible over the trees now. Blue smoke went up. They came to the edge of the cleared ground around the village palisade and the wind changed. The smell of the abattoir was full and choking.

  “God’s blood!” Ash swore. A hard hand clipped her skinny shank. She looked down round-shouldered at Guillaume and let water brim over her lower lids.

  “Now that,” Guillaume pointed, “is where we’re going. Get off that old bag of bones and lead her, for Christ’s pity’s sake.”

  Ash kicked her heels out and launched herself into the air. She landed in the dusty road ruts, dipping briefly to steady herself with one hand, and sprang up. She leaped exuberantly around the plodding cow, skipping, and then ran back to the tall man.

  “Guillaume.” She took his arm, gripping the rusty brown sleeve of his doublet. There was no cloth under the cuff: the gunner had no more shirt to his name at the moment than Ash did. “Guillaume, is it boys you like?”

  “Ha!” He stared down at her with his dark eyes. Stringy black hair hung down shoulder-length from his head, except at his crown where he was balding. He had a habit of shaving himself every so often with his dagger, generally the same day that he remembered to get his dagger sharpened, but his cheeks were brown and leathery and hardly showed one more nick from a blade.

  “Do I like boys, missy? Is that you asking me why you can’t twist me round your little finger, as you do the rest? Must I like little boys better than little girls for that to be true?”

  “Most of them do what I want when I pretend.”

  He yanked her long silver-white hair. “But I like you the way you are.”

  Ash pushed her hair back down over her pointed ears. She kicked at the waving heads of grass that grew on the side of the village road. “I’m beautiful. I’m not a woman yet but I’m beautiful. I’ve got elvish blood in me, look at the hair. Look at my hair, you don’t care…” She sang that to herself for a few minutes, and then looked up with what she knew to be large, widely spaced eyes. “Guillaume…”

  The gunner strode ahead, ignoring her, planting his stick with great firmness in the dust, and then flourishing it to greet the two guards on the village gate. They had iron-shod quarterstaffs, Ash noted, and thick leather jerkins in lieu of armour.

  She took the rope that hung around the cow’s neck. The cow had been dry for six months. It remained barren now no matter which town’s bull the mercenaries put it to on their way through the countryside. It would make stringy meat but quite good shoe leather. Ash kicked her bare soles on the earth. Or good leather for sword-belts.

  With the smell of the dusty road overcome by the smell of the village’s street, she wondered, Is it another place where they shout obscenities at scars, and make the sign of the Horns?

  “Ash!”

  The cow had drifted to one side of the path, and mouthed grass unenthusiastically. Ash set her bare heels on the path and heaved. The cow’s head came up. It drew in a noisy breath and mooed. Ropes of saliva trailed from its jaws. Ash led it towards the village gate and the wattle-and-daub houses, after Guillaume.

  Ash had a blade now. She fingered it, staring down the guys on the gate. Someone’s twenty-inch dagger originally, so it was more of a short sword for her. At nine she is small, you could take her for seven. It did come with its own scabbard, and a loop for hanging it off her belt. She earned it. She steals food, she will not steal weapons. The other mercenaries – she has been thinking of them and herself in those terms recently – regard this as an interesting and peculiar quirk, and take advantage.

  It being not long past dawn, few of the village folk were on the street. Ash regretted no one being there to see her.

  “They let me enter the village armed,” she boasted. “I didn’t have to give up my dagger!”

  “You’re on the books as one of the company.” Guillaume had his own falchion at his belt, a meat-cleaver of a blade with a hair-splitter single edge. In the same way that Ash habitually wore over-large doublets and played camp’s-little-mascot, she deeply suspected that Guillaume played up to the stereotypical idea that gormless villagers had of mercenaries: filthy dress and spotless weapons. Certainly he did the other thing the yokels expected and cheated them at cards, but badly, even Ash could spot him doing it.

  Ash walked with her thin shoulders back and her head up. She stared down a couple of idlers standing under the hanging bush that marked one hut as a tavern.

  “If I didn’t have this God-rotted barren animal,” she yelped at the gunner walking in front of her, “I’d look like a proper contract soldier!”

  Guillaume Arnisout laughed briefly. He walked on. He didn’t look back.

  She worried the complacent cow as far as the abattoir gates before it got its belly full of the smell. The stink of excrement and blood was strong enough to be tangible. Ash’s eyes streamed. Something stuck in the back of her throat. She handed the cow’s bridle over to a slaughterman at the gate, coughing.

  A voice bawled, “Ash! Over here!”

  Ash turned. Something warm and heavy hit her in the face and chest.

  Surprise made her gasp, intake a breath. Immediately she choked on hot liquid. A solid mass of stuff slid from her shoulders, down her chest. She ground the heels of her hands into her burning eyes. She coughed, choked again, began to cry. The tears cleared her vision.

  Blood soaked the front of her doublet and hose. Hot, steaming blood. Blood stuck her white hair together in crimson tendrils, dripping spatters into the dust. Blood covered her hands. Yellow matter crusted the creases of her clothes. She put her hand up and scooped a mass of matter out of the neck of
her doublet. A lump of meat flecked with blood clots the size of her small fist.

  The solid mass slid and flopped over her bare feet. It was hot. Warm. Cooling fast. Cold. Pink tubes and red tubes slid to the ground. She moved her foot out from under a kidney-shaped lump that she could not have held in her two hands.

  Ash stopped crying.

  She did something. It was not new, or she would not have known how to do it now. It might have been something she did just before or after she fired the crossbow point-blank at her rapist and his body exploded in front of her.

  She wiped the back of her hand across her chin. Blood tightened on her skin as it dried there. She got rid of the constriction in her throat and the tears pricking behind her eyes.

  She stared at Guillaume and the slaughterman, now carrying empty wooden pails.

  “That was stupid,” she raged. “Blood’s unclean!”

  “Come here.” Guillaume pointed to a spot in front of himself.

  The gunner was standing at a skinning rack. Timbers as stout as those that made up a siege machine held a chain on a pulley. Hooks hung from the chain, over a gutter dug in the earth. Ash lifted her feet out of pig’s guts and walked towards Guillaume. Her clothes stuck to her. Her nose was ceasing to smell the reek of the slaughterhouse.

  “Take out your sword,” he said.

  She had no gloves. The hilt of her weapon was bound with leather, and slippery in her palm.

  “Cut,” Guillaume said calmly, pointing at the cow that now hung head-down beside him, still alive, hooves trussed. “Slit her belly.”

  Ash had not been in a church but she knew enough to scowl at that.

  “Do it,” he said.

  Ash’s long dagger was heavy in her hand. The weight of the metal pulled on her wrist.

  The cow’s long-lashed eyes rolled. She groaned frantically. Her thrashing did no more than roll her from side to side on the hook. A stream of shit ran down her warm, breathing flanks.

  “I can’t do this,” Ash protested. “I can do it. I know how. I just can’t do it. It’s not like she’s going to do me any harm!”

  “Do it!”

  Ash flicked the blade clumsily and punched it forward. She leaned all her weight into the point, as she had been taught, and the sharp metal punctured the cow’s brown and white pelt. The cow opened her mouth and screamed.

  Blood sprayed. Sweat made the dagger grip slide in Ash’s hand. The dagger slid out of the shallow wound. She stared up at the animal that was eight times her size. She got a double-handed grip on the blade and cut forward. The edge skimmed the cow’s flank.

  “You’d be dead by now,” Guillaume rasped.

  Tears began to leak out of Ash’s eyes. She stepped up close to the breathing warm body. She raised the big dagger over her head and brought it down overarm with both hands.

  The point of the blade punched through tough skin and the thin muscle wall and into the abdominal cavity. Ash wrenched and pulled the blade down. It felt like hacking cloth. Jerking, snagging. A mess of pink ropes fell down around her in the dawn yard, and smoked in the early chill. Ash hacked doggedly down. The blade cut into bone and stuck. A rib. She yanked. Pulled. The cow’s flesh sucked shut on her blade.

  “Twist. Use your foot if you have to!” Guillaume’s voice directed over her harsh, effortful breathing.

  Ash leaned her knee on the cow’s wet neck, pressing it back against the wood frame with her tiny weight. She twisted her wrists hard right and the blade turned, breaking the vacuum that held it in the wound, and coming free of the bone. The cow’s screams drowned every other sound.

  “Hhaaaaah!” Both her hands on the dagger-grip, Ash swiped the blade across the stretched skin of the cow’s throat. The rib bone must have nicked her blade. She felt the steel’s irregularity catch on flesh. A wide gash opened. For a fraction of a second it showed a cross-section of skin, muscle sheath, muscle and artery wall. Then blood welled up and gushed out and hit her in the face. Hot. Blood heat, she thought, and giggled.

  “Now cry!” Guillaume spun her around and cracked his hand across her face. The blow would have hurt another adult.

  Astonished, Ash burst into loud sobs. She stood for perhaps a minute, crying. Then she wept, “I’m not old enough to go into a line-fight!”

  “Not this year.”

  “I’m too little!”

  “Crocodile tears, now.” Guillaume sighed. “I thank you,” he added gravely; “kill the beast now.” And when she looked, he was handing the slaughterman a copper piece. “Come on, missy. Back to camp.”

  “My sword’s dirty,” she said. Suddenly she folded her legs and sat down on the earth, in animal blood and shit, and howled. She coughed, fighting to breathe. Great shuddering gasps wracked her chest. Her reddened hair hung down and streaked her wet, scarred cheeks. Snot trailed from her nostrils.

  “Ah.” Guillaume’s hand caught her doublet collar and lifted her up into the air, and dropped her down on her bare feet. Hard. “Better. Enough. There.”

  He pointed at a trough on the far side of the yard.

  Ash ripped her front lacing undone. She stripped off her doublet and hose in one, not bothering to undo the points that tied them together at her waist. She plunged the blood-soaked wool into the cold water, and used it to wash herself down. The morning sun felt hot on her bare cold skin. Guillaume stood with folded arms and watched her.

  All through it she had her discarded sword-belt under her foot and her eyes on the slaughterhouse men.

  The last thing she did was wash her blade clean, dry it, and beg some grease to oil the metal so that it should not rust. By then her clothing was only damp, if not dry. Her hair hung down in wet white rats’ tails.

  “Back to camp,” the gunner said.

  Ash walked out of the village gate beside Guillaume. It did not even occur to her to ask to be taken in by one of the village families.

  Guillaume looked down at her with bright, bloodshot eyes. Dirt lodged in the creases of his skin, clearly apparent in the brightening sun. He said, “If that was easy, think of this. She was a beast, not a man. She had no voice to threaten. She had no voice to beg mercy. And she wasn’t trying to kill you.”

  “I know,” Ash said. “I’ve killed a man who was.”

  When she was ten, she nearly died, but not on the field of battle.

  IV

  First light came. Ash leaned out over the stone parapet of the bell tower. Too dark to see the ground, fifty feet of empty air below. A horse whinnied. A hundred others answered it, all down the battle-lines. A lark sang in the arch of the sky. The flat river valley began to emerge from darkness.

  The air heated up fast. Ash wore a stolen shirt and nothing else. It was a man’s linen shirt and still smelled of him, and it came down past her knees. She had belted it with her sword-belt. The linen protected the nape of her neck, and her arms, and most of her legs. She rubbed her goose-fleshed skin. Soon the day would be burning hot.

  Light crept from the east. Shadows fell to the west. Ash caught a pinprick of light two miles away.

  One. Fifty. A thousand? The sun glinted back from helmets and breastplates, from poleaxes and warhammers and the bodkin points of clothyard arrows.

  “They’re arrayed and moving! They’ve got the sun at their backs!” She hopped from one bare foot to the other. “ Why won’t the Captain let us fight?”

  “I don’t want to!” The black-haired boy, Richard, now her particular friend, whimpered beside her.

  Ash looked at him in complete bewilderment. “Are you afraid?” She darted to the other side of the tower, leaning over and looking down at the company’s wagon-fort. Washerwomen and whores and cooks were fixing the chains that bound the carts together. Most of them carried twelve-foot pikes, razor-edged bills. She leaned out further. She couldn’t see Guillaume.

  Day brightened quickly. Ash craned to look down the slope towards the river’s edge. A few horses galloping, their riders in bright colours. A flag: the company ensign. Th
en men of the company walking, weapons in hand.

  “Ash, why are we so slow?” Richard quavered. “They’ll be here before we’re ready!”

  Ash had started to be strong in the last half-year or so, in the way that terriers and mountain ponies are strong, but she still did not look older than eight. Malnutrition had a lot to do with it.

  She put her arm around him. “There’s trouble. We can’t get through. Look.”

  All down by the river showed red in the rising sun. Vast cornfields, so thick with poppies that she couldn’t see the grain. Corn and poppies together – the crops so thick and tangled that they slowed down the mercenaries walking with bills and swords and halberds. The armoured men on horseback drew ahead, into the scarlet distance, under the banner.

  Richard bundled his arms around Ash, pale enough for his birthmark to stand out like a banner on his face. “Will they all die?”

  “No. Not everybody. Not if some of the other lot come over to us when the fighting starts. The Captain buys them if he can. Oh.” Ash’s guts contracted. She reached down and put her hand between her legs and took her fingers out bloody.

  “Sweet Green Christ!” Ash wiped her hand on her linen shirt, with a glance around the bell tower to see if anyone had overheard her swear. They were alone.

  “Are you wounded?” Richard stepped back.

  “Oh. No.” Far more bewildered than she sounded, Ash said, “I’m a woman. They told me, in the wagons, it could happen.”

  Richard forgot the armed men moving. His smile was sweet. “It’s the first time, isn’t it? I’m so happy for you, Ashy! Will you have a baby?”

  “Not right now…”

  She made him laugh, his fear gone. That done, she turned back to the red river fields that stretched away from the tower. Dew burned off in bright mist. Not dawn, now, but full early morning.

  “Oh, look…”

  Half a mile away now, the enemy.

  The Bride of the Sea’s men moving over a slope, small and glittering. Banners of red and blue and gold and yellow gleamed above the packed mass of their helmets. Too far away to see faces, even the inverted V that disclosed mouth and chin when, in the heat, they left off falling-buffs and bevors.4