Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  All this changes, of course, in the next section: the del Guiz Life.

  Like the editor of the 1939 edition of the ‘Ash’ papers, Vaughan Davies, I am using the original German version of the del Guiz Life of Ash, published in 1516. (Because of the inflammatory nature of the text it was immediately withdrawn, and republished in an expurgated form in 1518.) Apart from a few minor printing errors, this copy agrees with the four other surviving editions of the 1516 Life (in the British Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the Glasgow Museum).

  Here, I have a considerable advantage over Vaughan Davies, who was editing in 1939 – I can be explicit. I have therefore translated this text into modern colloquial English, especially the dialogue, where I use the educated and slang versions of our language to represent some of the social differences of that period. In addition, mediaeval soldiers were notoriously foul-mouthed. When Davies accurately translates Ash’s bad language as, “By Christ’s bones”, however, the modern reader feels none of the contemporary shock. Therefore, I have again used modern-day equivalents. I’m afraid she does say “Fuck” rather a lot.

  Regarding your question about using different documentary sources, my intention is not to follow Charles Mallory Maximillian’s method. While I have a great admiration for his 1890 edition of the ‘Ash’ documents, in which he translates the various Latin codices, each Life, etc., in turn, and lets their various authors speak for themselves, I feel this demands more than modern readers are willing to give. I intend to follow Vaughan Davies’s biographical method, and weave the various authors into a coherent narrative of her life. Where texts disagree this will, of course, be given the appropriate scholarly discussion.

  I realise that you will find some of my new material surprising, but remember that what it narrates is what these people genuinely thought to be happening to them. And, if you bear in mind the major alteration to our view of history that will take place when Ash: The Lost History of Burgundy is published, perhaps we would be wise not to dismiss anything too casually.

  Sincerely,

  DR PlERCE RATCLIFF Ph.D. (War Studies)

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

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  Anna Longman

  Editor

  █████ University Press

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  15 October 2000

  Dear Anna,

  No indeed – although my conclusions will completely supersede theirs, I feel myself very fortunate to be following in the academic footsteps of two profound scholars. Vaughan Davies’s Ash: A Biography was still a set text when I was at school! My love for this subject goes back even further, I must confess – to the Victorians, and Charles Mallory Maximillian’s Ash: The Life of a Female Mediaeval Mercenary Captain.

  Take, for example, Charles Mallory Maximillian on the subject of that unique country, mediaeval Burgundy – because, although the emphasis in the opening part of the main ‘Ash’ texts is on the Germanic courts, it is with her powerful Burgundian employers that she is finally most associated. Here is CMM in full flood in 1890:–

  The story of Ash is, in some ways, the story of what we might call a ‘lost’ Burgundy. Of all the lands of Western Europe, it is Burgundy – this bright dream of chivalry – which both lasts for a shorter period than any other, and burns more brightly at its peak. Burgundy, under its four great Dukes, and the nominal kingship of France, becomes the last and greatest of the mediaeval kingdoms – aware, even as it flourishes, that it is harking back to another age. Duke Charles’s cult of an ‘Arthurian court’ is, strange as it may seem to us in our modern, smoky, industrial world, an attempt to reawaken the high ideals of chivalry in this land of knights in armour, princes in fantastic castles, and ladies of surpassing beauty and accomplishment. For Burgundy, itself, thought itself corrupted; thought the fifteenth century so far removed from the Classical Age of Gold that only a revival of these virtues of courage, honour, piety, and reverence could make it whole.

  They did not foresee the printing press, the discovery of the New World, and the Renaissance; all to happen in the last twenty years of their century. And indeed, they took no part in it.

  This, then, is the Burgundy which vanishes from memory and history in January, 1477. Ash, a Joan of Arc for Burgundy, perishes in the fray. The great bold Duke dies, slain by his old enemies the Swiss on the winter battlefield at Nancy; lies two or three days before his corpse can be recognised, because foot-soldiers have stripped him of all his finery; and so it is three days, as Commines tells us, before the King of France can give a great sigh of relief, and set about disposing of the Burgundian princes’ lands. Burgundy vanishes.

  Yet, if one studies the evidence, of course, Burgundy does not vanish at all. Like a stream which goes underground, the blood of Charles the Bold runs on through the history of Europe; becoming Hapsburg by marriage, merging into that Austro-Hungarian Empire which still – an ageing giant – survives to this day. What one can say is that we remember Burgundy as a lost and golden country. Why? What is it that we are remembering?

  Charles Mallory Maximillian (ed.), Ash: The Life of a Female Mediaeval Mercenary Captain, J Dent & Sons, 1890; reprinted 1892, 1893, 1896, 1905.

  CMM is, of course, the lesser scholar, full of romantic Victorian flourishes, and I am not depending on him in my translations. Ironically, of course, his narrative history is far more readable than the sociological histories that followed, even if it is more inaccurate! I suppose I am trying to synthesise rigorous historical and sociological accuracy with CMM’s lyricism. I hope it can be done!

  What he says is all perfectly factual, of course – the collection of counties, countries and duchies that was mediaeval Burgundy did ‘vanish out of history’, so to speak (although not before Ash fought in some of its most notable battles). It is true in the sense that remarkably little is written about Burgundy after its AD 1477 collapse.

  But it was CMM’s nostalgic lyricism about a ‘Lost Burgundy’, a magic interstice of history, that got me fascinated. Reading through it again, I feel a complete satisfaction, Anna, that I should have found, in my own field, what was ‘lost’ – and deduced exactly what that discovery implies.

  I enclose the next fully translated section, Part One of the del Guiz Life: Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi. A point, here – although the main bulk of my new manuscript, ‘Fraxinus’, covers events later in 1476, I am able to use parts of it to illuminate these already-existing texts, from where the del Guiz chronicle picks up her adult life in June of that year. You may find there are some surprises even in this ‘old stuff’, that eluded CMM and Vaughan Davies!

  I appreciate that, for your up-coming sales conference, you need to be ‘fully briefed’, as you put it, on what my ‘new historical theory’ arising from ‘Fraxinus’ is. For various technical reasons, I’m afraid I do not choose to go into the implications in detail just yet.

  Sincerely,

  PART ONE

  16 June AD 1476[?]–l July AD 1476

  Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi1

  I

  “Gentlemen,” said Ash, “shut your faces!”

  The clatter of helmet visors shutting sounded all along the line of horsemen.

  Beside her, Robert Anselm paused with his hand to his throat, about to thrust the laminated plate of his steel bevor up into its locking position over his mouth and chin. “Boss, our lord hasn’t told us we can attack them…”

  Ash pointed. “Who gives a fuck? That’s a chance down there and we’re taking it!”

  Ash’s sub-captain Anselm was the only rider apart from herself in full armour. The rest of the eighty-one mounted knights wore helmets, bevors, good leg armour – the legs of a man on horseback being very vulnerable
– and cheap body armour, the small overlapping metal plates sewn into a jacket called a brigandine.

  “Form up!”

  Ash’s voice sounded muffled in her own ears by the silver hair she wore braided up as an arming cap, padding the inside of her steel sallet.2 Her voice was not as deep as Anselm’s. It came resonant from her small, deep chest cavity; piercing; it sounds an octave above any noise of battle except cannon. Ash’s men can always hear Ash.

  Ash pushed her own bevor up and locked, protecting mouth and chin. For the moment, she left the visor of her sallet up so that she could see better. The horsemen jostled around her in a packed mass on the churned earth of the slope. Her men, in her company’s livery: on geldings of mostly medium to good quality.

  Down the slope in front of her, a vast makeshift town littered the river valley. Bright under noon sunlight, walled with wagons chained together, and crammed with pennon-flying pavilions and thirty thousand men, women and baggage animals inside it – the Burgundian army. Their camp big enough (confirmed rumour had it) to have two of its own markets…

  You could hardly see the little battered walled town of Neuss inside the enclosing army.

  Neuss: a tenth the size of the attacking forces camped around it. The besieged town rested precariously within its gates – rubble, now – and behind its moats and the wide protecting Rhine river. Beyond the Rhine valley, pine-knotted German hills glowed grey-green in the June heat.

  Ash tilted her visor down to shade her eyes from the sunlight. A group of about fifty riders moved on the open ground between the Burgundian camp that besieged Neuss and her own Imperial camp that (theoretically) was here to relieve the town. Even at this distance Ash could see the men’s Burgundian livery: two red criss-cross slashes, the Cross of St Andrew.

  Robert Anselm brought his bay around in a neat circle. His free hand gripped the company’s standard: the azure Lion Passant Guardant on a field or.3 “They could be trying to sucker us down, boss.”

  Deep in the pit of her stomach, expectation and fear churned. The big iron-grey gelding, Godluc, shifted under her, responding. As always in chance ambushes, the suddenness, the sense of moments slipping away and a decision to be made—

  “No. Not a trick. They’re overconfident. Fifty mounted men – that’s someone out with just an escort. He thinks he’s safe. They think we’re not going to attack them, because we haven’t struck a blow since us and Emperor-bleeding-Frederick got here three weeks ago.” She hit the high front of the war saddle with the heel of her gauntleted hand, turned to Anselm, grinning. “Robert, tell me what you don’t see.”

  “Fifty mounted men, most in full harness, don’t see any infantry, no crossbowmen, don’t see any hackbutters, don’t see any archers – don’t see any archers!”

  Ash couldn’t stop grinning: she thought her teeth might be all that was visible under the shadow of her visor, and you could probably see them all the way across the occupied plain to Neuss. “Now you get it. When do we ever get to do the pure knightly cavalry-against-cavalry charge in real war?”

  “—Without being shot out of the saddle.” His brows, visible under his visor, furrowed. “You sure?”

  “If we don’t sit here with our thumbs up our arses, we can catch them out on the field – they can’t get back to their camp in time. Now let’s shift!”

  Anselm nodded decisive compliance.

  She squinted up at the dark blue sky. Her armour, and the padded arming doublet and hose under it, burned as if she stood in front of an armourer’s furnace. Godluc’s foam soaked his blue caparisons. The world smelled of horse, dung, oil on metal, and the downwind stench of Neuss where they had been eating rats and cats for six weeks now.

  “I’m going to boil if I don’t get out of this lot soon, so let’s go!” She raised her plate-covered arm and jerked it down.

  Robert Anselm’s thick-necked horse dipped its hindquarters and then sprang forward. The company standard lifted, gripped high in Anselm’s armoured gauntlet. Ash spurred Godluc into the thicket of raised lances and through, ahead of her men, Anselm at her shoulder now, half a pace behind her trotting mount. She tapped the long spurs back again. Godluc went from trot to canter. The jolting shook her teeth to her bones, and rattled the plates of her Milanese armour, and the wind whipped into her sallet and snatched the breath out of her nostrils.

  Percussive concussion shook the world. The hundreds of steel horseshoes striking hard earth threw up showers of clods. The noise went unheard, felt in her chest and bones rather than heard with her ears; and the line of riders – her line, her men; sweet Christ don’t let me get this wrong! – gathered speed down the slope and out on to clear ground.

  No rabbit holes, she prayed, and then: Fuck me, that isn’t one of their commanders’ standards, it’s the Duke’s banner. Sweet Green Christ! That’s Duke Charles of Burgundy himself there!

  Summer sun struck brilliances from Burgundian knights in full harness, steel-silver plates from head to toe. The sun winked from the stars that were the tips of their light war lances. Her vision blotted green and orange.

  No time for new tactics now. Anything we haven’t practised, we can’t do. This season’s training will have to get us through it.

  Ash glanced quickly right and left at the riders coming up nose and nose with her. Steel faces, not recognisable now as lance-leaders Euen Huw or Joscelyn van Mander or Thomas Rochester; anonymous hard-riding men, thickets of lances dropping down to attack position.

  She brought her own lance down across Godluc’s thick arched neck. Her gauntlet-linen over her palm was ridged and wet with sweat where she gripped the wood. The massive jolting of the horse shook her in the high-backed saddle, and the flapping of Godluc’s azure caparisons and the rattle of horse armour deafened her already muffled hearing. She had the smell, almost the taste, of sweat-hot armour in her mouth; metallic as blood. Motion smoothed as she spurred Godluc into full gallop.

  She mumbled into the velvet lining of her bevor, “Fifty mounted men. Full harness. Eighty-one with me, medium armour.”

  ‘How are the enemy armed?’

  “Lances, maces, swords. No missile weapons at all.”

  ‘Charge the enemy before the enemy is reinforced.’

  “What the fuck,” Ash shouted happily to the voice in her head, “do you think I’m doing? Haro! A Lion! A Lion!” She threw up her free arm and bellowed, “Charge!”

  Robert Anselm, half a length to her rear, boomed back in answer, “A Lion!” and jammed the staff of the rippling cloth banner up above his head. Half her riders were pelting ahead of Ash now, almost out of formation; too late to think about that, too late to do anything but think let them learn to stick with the banner! She dropped the reins over the pommel, brought her free hand up in the automatic gesture over her sallet, slamming the visor fully down, reducing vision to a slot.

  The Burgundian flag jerked wildly.

  “They’ve seen us!”

  Not clear, least of all to her now, at this speed and this restricted vision, but were they trying to cluster around one man? Move away? Gallop back breakneck towards their camp? Some mixture of all three?

  In a split second four Burgundian horses wheeled and came up together and burst into a full gallop towards her.

  Foam splattered back on her breastplate. Heat blinded her out of a dark blue sky. It was as real and as solid as bread to her – those four men galloping towards me on three-quarters of a ton of horse each, with curved metal plates strapped around them, carry poles with sharpened lance-heads as long as my hand, that will hit home with the concentrated momentum of horse and sixteen-stone rider. They will punch through flesh like paper.

  She has a mental flash of the lance-tip punching through her scarred cheek, her brain, the back of her skull.

  One Burgundian knight hefted his lance, gripping it with his steel gauntlet, couching it on the lance-rest on his breastplate. His head was polished metal, plumed with white ostrich feathers, slit by a bar of blackness –
a visor through which not even eyes could be seen. His lance-point dipped straight towards her.

  A grim exultation filled her. Godluc responded to her shift of weight and swerved right. She dropped her lance down – down – down again, and took the grey stallion of the leading Burgundian knight squarely in under the jaw.

  The shaft wrenched out of her hand. His horse reared, skidding forward on broken hind legs. The man went straight over his horse’s arse and under Godluc’s hooves. Trained as a war-horse, Godluc did not even stumble. Ash slid the lanyard of her mace over her gauntlet to her wrist, swung up the 24-inch shaft, and crashed the small flanged metal head square across the back of the second man’s helmet. The metal creased. She felt it give. Something crashed into Godluc’s flank: she went careering across grass – hot grass, slippery in the heat, more than one horse missing its footing – and shifted her body-weight again to bring Godluc up beside Robert Anselm. She reached over and hauled on his war-horse’s reins, and pulled him up with her. “There!”

  The confusion of colours, red and blue and yellow liveries and guidons,4 resolved itself into a mass of skirmishing men. First charge over, lances mostly abandoned, except there were the German guys from Anhelt’s crew, skimming around the edge of the fray, lances jabbing as if they were boar-sticking – and Josse in the blue brigandine reaching over from his saddle with his hand on the backplate of a Burgundian knight, trying to punch his dagger down into the gap between plackart and backplate – and a man down, face-down on the dirt – and a spray of red straight up her breastplate, someone hit in a femoral artery, nothing to do with her own wild swing at someone’s head – the leather lanyard breaking and her mace flying up in a perfect parabola into the sunlight.

  Ash grasped the leather-bound hilt of her sword and whipped it out of its sheath. In a continuation of the same movement she smashed it pommel-first into the face of an armoured man. The strike jarred her wrist. She brought her sword round and slammed it down on his right upper arm and elbow. The impact jarred and numbed the whole length of her arm.