Ash: A Secret History

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Ash: A Secret History Page 4

by Mary Gentle


  “Ashy, there are so many—!” Richard whined.

  The Serene Bride of the Sea’s host drew up into three. The vaward or advance unit was big enough on its own. Behind it, offset to one side, was the mainward, with the Bride of the Sea’s banners and their commander’s own standard. Offset again, the rearward was only just in sight as a moving thicket of pikes and lances.

  The first rows came on slowly. Billmen in padded linen jacks, their steel war-hats gleaming, bright hook-bladed bills over their shoulders. Ash knew billhooks had some agricultural use, but not what it might be. You could hook an armoured knight off his horse with one, and use it to crack his protective metal plates open. Men-at-arms in foot armour, with axes over their shoulders like peasants going out to cut wood… And archers. Far too many archers.

  “Three battles.” Ash pointed Richard bodily, holding him by his narrow shoulders. The little boy trembled. “Look, Dickon. In the front battle. There’s billmen, then archers, then men-at-arms, then archers, then billmen, then more archers – all down the line.”

  A hoarse voice, audible across the whole distance, shouted, “Nock! Loose!”

  Ash scratched at her stained shirt. Everything laid itself out suddenly plain in her head. For the first time, what had been an implicit sense of a pattern found words.

  She stuttered into speech, almost too fast and excited to be understood. “Their archers are safe because of their men with hand-weapons! They can shoot into us, loose an arrow every six heartbeats, and we can’t do anything about it! Because if we do try to get up close, their billmen or foot knights will kill us. Then their archers will draw their falchions and get stuck in too, or move out to the flanks and carry on shooting us up. That’s why they’ve put them like that. What can we do?”

  ‘If you are outnumbered, you cannot meet them in separate units. Form a wedge. A wedge-shaped formation with the point towards the enemy, then your flank archers can shoot without hitting your men in front. When their foot troops attack, they must face your weapons on each of your flanks. Send in your heavy armoured men to break their flank.’

  Ash found the hard words no more difficult to decipher than discussions she had overheard, lying in the grass, back of the Captain’s command tent. She puzzled it out, and said, “How can we? We don’t have enough men!”

  “Ashy,” Richard whimpered.

  She protested, “What have we got? The Great Duke’s men – about half as many! And the city militia. They just about know enough not to hold a sword by the sharp end. Two more companies. And us.”

  “Ash!” the boy protested loudly. “Ashy!”

  ‘Then do not array your men too close together. They are a mass for the enemy to shoot into. The enemy are out of range. You must move, fast, and close-assault them.’

  She dug with her bare toe in the dust between the tower’s flagstones, not looking at the approaching banners. “There’s too many of them!”

  “Ashy, stop it. Stop it! Who are you talking to?”

  ‘Then you must surrender and sue for peace.’

  “Don’t tell me! I can’t do anything! I can’t!”

  Richard shrieked, “Tell you what? Who’s telling?”

  Nothing happened for long seconds. Then the mass of the company moved forward, running, the Great Duke’s troops with them, crashing into the first enemy battle-line, flags dipping, the red of poppies a red mist now; thunder, iron beating on iron, screams, hoarse voices shouting orders, a pipe shrilling through the dirt rising up a bare few hundred yards away.

  “You said – I heard you!” Ash stared at Richard’s white and wine-coloured face. “You said – I heard someone saying – Who was that?”

  The Great Duke’s line of men broke up into knots. No flying wedge now, just knots of men-at-arms gathered around their standards and banners. In the dust and red sun, the main battle of the Most Serene Bride of the Sea’s army began to walk forward. Sheaves of arrows thickened the air.

  “But someone said—”

  The stone parapet smacked her in the face.

  Blood smashed across her upper lip. She put one hand to her nose. Pain made her scream. Her fingers spread and shook.

  The noise filled her mouth, filled her chest, shook the sky crashing down. Ash touched the sides of her head. A thin, high whine filled her ears. Richard’s face streamed tears and his mouth was an open square. She could just hear him bawling.

  The corner of the parapet wall fell soundlessly away. Open air gaped in front of her. Dust hung hazy. She got to her hands and knees. A violent whirring whicked past her head, loud enough for her, half-deaf, to hear.

  The boy stood with his hands loose at his sides. He stared over Ash’s head, out from the broken bell tower. She saw his particoloured legs tremble. The front of his cod-flap wetted with urine. With a ripe, wet sound, he shat in his hose. Ash looked up at Richard without condemnation. There are times when losing control of your bowels is the only realistic response to a situation.

  “That’s mortars! Get down!” She hoped she was shouting. She got Richard by the wrist and pulled him towards the steps.

  The sharp edge of the stone barked her knees. Her sun-blasted vision saw nothing but darkness. She fell down inside the bell tower, cracking her head against the wall of the stairwell. Richard’s foot kicked her in the mouth. She bled and yelled and tumbled down to ground-level and ran.

  She heard no more gunfire, but when she looked back from the wagon-fort, her chest raw inside and burning, the monastery tower was gone, only rubble and dust blackening the sky.

  Forty-five minutes later the baggage train were declared prisoners.

  Ash ran away, out of their sight, down to the river.

  Searching.

  Bodies lay so thick on the ground that the air swam with the smell. She clamped her linen sleeve over her mouth and nose. She tried not to step on the faces of the dead men and boys.

  Scavengers came by to strip the bodies. She hid in the wet, red corn. Their peasant voices were rapid, inflected music.

  She felt the skin across her cheeks and nose crisping in the high summer heat. The sun burned at her calves below the linen shirt, turning her fair skin pink. Her toes burned. She stood and put her wide-brimmed straw hat back on. The whole world smelled of shit and spoiling meat. She kept spitting without being able to get the taste of vomit out of her mouth. Heat made the air waver.

  One of the dying men wept “Bartolomeo! Bartolomeo!” and then pleaded with the surgeon’s cart, long-handled, dragged on two wheels by a man who grunted and shook his head.

  No Richard. No one. The crops were burned black for a mile or more. Ravens dragged bits of two armoured horse carcasses apart. If there had been anything else – bombards, bodies, salvageable armour – it had been cleared up or looted.

  Ash ran, breathless, back to the company cooking fires. She saw Richard sitting with the washerwomen. He looked up, saw her, and ran away.

  Her steps slowed.

  Abruptly, Ash turned and tugged the sleeve of a gunner’s doublet. Not realising how deaf she was, she shouted, “Where’s Guillaume? Guillaume Arnisout?”

  “Buried down in the lime pit.”

  “What?”

  The unarmed man shrugged and faced her. She followed his lips as much as the whisper of sound. “Dead and buried in the lime pits.”

  “Uhh.” Air left her lungs.

  “No,” another man called from beside the fire, “they took him prisoner. The bloody Brides of the Sea have got him.”

  “No,” a third man held his hands apart, “he had a hole in his stomach this big. But it wasn’t the Most Serene, it was our side, the Great Duke’s men, it was someone he owed money to.”

  Ash left them.

  No matter what turf the camp was set up on, the camp was always the same. She made her way into the middle of the camp, where she did not often go. Now it was full of armed strangers. At last she found a manicured, blond man with a harassed expression, who wore a gold-edged green surcoat ove
r his armour. He was one of the Lord Captain’s aides and she knew him by sight, not by name; the gunners referred to him derisively as tabard-lifter. She already understood why.

  “Guillaume Arnisout?” He put his hand through his thick bobbed hair. “Is he your father?”

  “Yes.” Ash lied without hesitation. She did the thing she had learned to do and the constriction in her throat went away, so that she could speak. “I want him! Tell me where he is!”

  The aide pricked down a parchment list. “Arnisout. Here. He was taken prisoner. The Captains are talking. I imagine prisoners may be exchanged after a few hours.”

  Ash thanked him in as quiet a voice as she could manage and returned to the edges of the camp to wait.

  Evening fell across the valley. The stench of bodies sweetened the air unbearably. Guillaume did not come back to camp. Rumour began to say he had died of his wounds, died of plague caught in the Bride of the Sea’s camp, signed on with the Most Serene as a master gunner at twice the pay, run off with a noblewoman from the Duke’s city, gone home to his farm in Navarre. (Ash hoped for a few weeks. After six months, she stopped hoping.)

  By sunset, prisoners moved aimlessly between the camp’s tents, unused to walking around without sword, axe, bow, halberd. The evening sun lay gold over blood and poppies. The air tasted of heat. Ash’s nose numbed itself to the worst of the decomposition. Richard stalked up to her where Ash stood in dung-stained straw, her back to a cart’s wheel, with one of the baggage train’s washerwomen dabbing witch hazel on the yellow bruises down her shins.

  “When will we know?” Richard shivered, and glared at her. “What will they do with us?”

  “Us?” Ash’s ears still thinly sang.

  The washerwoman grunted. “We’re part of the spoil. Sell us to whorehouses, maybe.”

  “I’m too young!” Ash protested.

  “No.”

  “Demon!” the boy shrieked. “Demons told you we’d lose! You hear demons! You’ll burn!”

  “Richard!”

  He ran away. He ran down the earth-track that soldiers‘ feet had beaten into existence over the peasants’ crops, away from the baggage wagons.

  “Man-bait! He’s too pretty,” the washerwoman said, suddenly vicious, throwing her wet rag down. “I wouldn’t be him. Or you. Your face! They’ll burn you. If you hear voices!” She made the sign of the Horns.

  Ash leaned her head back, staring up into the endless blue. The air swam with gold. Every muscle ached, one wrenched knee hurt, her little toenail had been torn off bloody. None of the normal euphoria of hard exertion over and done with. Her guts churned.

  “Not voices. A voice.” She pushed with her bare foot at the clay pot of witch hazel ointment. “Maybe it was sweet Christ. Or a saint.”

  “You, hear a saint?” the woman snarled incredulously. “Little whore!”

  Ash wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Maybe it was a vision. Guillaume had a vision once. He saw the Blessed Dead fighting with us at Dinant.”

  The washerwoman turned to walk away. “I hope the Most Serene look at your ugly face and make you fuck their nightsoil men!”

  Ash scooped up and hefted the pot of witch hazel in one hand, preparing to throw. “Poxy bitch!”

  A hand came out of nowhere and clouted her. It stunned her. She burst into a humiliatingly loud squall, dropping the clay pot.

  The man, now visible as wearing the Bride of the Sea’s livery, snarled, “You, woman, get up to the centre of camp. We’re doing shares of spoil. Go! You too, you little scarred freak!”

  The washerwoman ran off, laughing too shrilly. The soldier followed.

  Another woman, suddenly beside the wagon, asked, “Do you hear voices, child?”

  This woman had a moon-round, moon-pale face, with no hair showing under her tight headdress. Over her big body a grey robe hung loosely, with a Briar Cross on a chain at her belt.

  Ash snivelled. She wiped her dripping nose again. A line of thin, clear snot hung from her nostrils to the shirt’s linen sleeve. “I don’t know! What’s ‘hearing voices’?”

  The pale moon-face looked avidly down at her. “There’s talk among the men of the Most Serene. I think they’re looking for you.”

  “Me?” A tightness took hold of Ash’s ribs. “Looking for me?”

  A clammily hot white hand reached down, seizing Ash’s jaw and turning her face up to the evening light. She strained against the imprint of sharp fingertips, without success. The woman studied her intently.

  “If it was a true sending from the Green Christ, they hope you will prophesy for them. If it’s a demon, they’ll drive it out of you. That could take until morning. Most of them are well gone in drink now.”

  Ash ignored the grip on her face, her sick fear and her bowels churning. “Are you a nun?”

  “I am one of the Sisters of St Herlaine, yes. We have a convent near here, at Milano.”5 The woman let go. Her voice sounded harsh under the liquid speech. Ash guessed it not to be her first language. Like all mercenaries, Ash had the basics of most languages she had heard. Ash understood the big woman as she said, “You need feeding up, girl. How old are you?”

  “Nine. Ten. Eleven.” Ash dragged her sleeve across her chin. “I don’t know. I can remember the big storm. Ten. Maybe nine.”

  The woman’s eyes were light, all light. “You’re a child. Small, too. No one has ever cared for you, have they? Probably that’s why the demon got in. This camp is no place for a child.”

  Tears stabbed her eyes. “It’s my home! I don’t have a demon!”

  The nun put her hands up, each palm to one of Ash’s cheeks, surveying her without her scars. Her hands felt both warm and cold on Ash’s wet skin.

  “I am Sister Ygraine. Tell me the truth. What speaks to you?”

  Doubt bit cold in Ash’s belly. “Nothing, nobody, Soeur! Nobody was there but me and Richard!”

  Chills stiffened her neck, braced her shoulders. Rote words of a prayer to the Green Christ died in her dry mouth. She began to listen. The nun’s harsh breathing. Fire crackling. A horse whinnying. Drunken songs and shouting further off.

  No sensation of a voice speaking quietly, to her, out of a companionable silence.

  A burst of sound roared from the centre of the camp. Ash flinched. Soldiers ran past, ignoring them, running towards the growing crowd in the centre. Somewhere in a wagon close by, a hurt man called out for his maman. Gold light faded towards dusk. The tall sky began to fill with sparks showering up from the campfires, fires let burn too high, far too high; they might burn all the mercenary tents by morning, and think nothing of it but a brief regret for plunder ruined.

  The nun said, “They’re despoiling your camp.”

  Not speaking to Soeur Ygraine, not speaking to anyone, Ash deliberately breathed words aloud: “We’re prisoners. What will happen to me now?”

  ‘Licence, liberty, and drunkenness—’

  Ash clamped her hands over her ears. The soundless voice continued:

  ‘—the night when commanders cannot control their men who have come living off the battlefield. The night in which people are killed for sport.’

  Soeur Ygraine shifted her big hand to Ash’s shoulder, the grip firm through Ash’s filthy-dirty shirt. Ash lowered her hands. A growl in her belly told her she was hungry for the first time in twelve hours.

  The nun continued to gaze down at her as if no voice had spoken.

  “I—” Ash hesitated.

  In her mind now she felt neither silence, nor a voice, but a potential for speech. Like a tooth which does not quite ache, but soon will.

  She began to hurt for what she had never before given two thoughts to: the solitariness of her soul in her body. Fear flooded her from scalp to tingling fingertips to feet.

  She abruptly stuttered, “I didn’t hear any voice, I didn’t, I didn’t! I lied to Richard because I thought it would make me famous. I just wanted somebody to notice me!”

  And then, as the big woman dis
interestedly turned her back and began to stride away, into the chaos of firelight and drunken condottieri, Ash shrieked out hard enough to hurt her throat:

  “Take me somewhere safe, take me to sanctuary, don’t let them hurt me, please!”

  DR PlERCE RATCLIFF Ph.D. (War Studies)

  Flat 1, Rowan Court, 112 Olvera Street, London W14 OAB, United Kingdom

  Fax: ██████████

  E-mail: ██████████

  Tel: ██████████

  Anna Longman

  Editor

  █████ University Press

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  9 October 2000

  Dear Anna,

  It was good to meet with you in person, at last. Yes, I think doing the editing section by section with you is by far the wisest way to go about this, particularly considering the volume of the material and the proposed publication date in 2001, and the fact that I am still fine-tuning the translations. As soon as my net connection is properly set up I can send work to you direct. I’m glad you’re reasonably happy with what you have so far. I can, of course, cut down on the footnotes.

  It’s kind of you to admire the ‘literary distancing technique’ of referring to fifteenth century Catholicism in such terms as ‘Green Christ’ and ‘Briar Cross’. In fact, this is not my technique for making sure the readers can’t impose their own preconceptions about mediaeval life on the text! It’s a direct translation of the mediaeval dog-Latin, as are the earlier Mithraic references. We shouldn’t be too concerned, this is just some of the obviously false legendary material – supernatural lions and similar – attributed to Ash’s childhood. Heroes always gather myths to themselves, still more so when they are not remarkable men but remarkable women.

  Perhaps the Winchester Codex purports to reflect Ash’s limited knowledge as a child: Ash at eight or ten years old knows only fields, woods, campaign tents, armour, washerwomen, dogs, soldiers, swords, saints, Lions. The company of mercenaries. Hills, rivers, towns – places have no names. How should she know what year it is? Dates don’t matter yet.

 

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