by Mary Gentle
He swung his mace up.
The sliding plates of his arm defences squealed where her blow had crushed metal, and stuck. Jammed.
He could not bring his arm up – or down—
She struck her blade in hard towards his vulnerable under-arm mail.
Three wildly plunging horses stampeded through the mass of heaving bodies, pushing them apart. She looked left, right, wildly around: the Lion banner there – soul’s damnation, if I’m not sticking with the unit banner, how can I expect them to? – and the Duke’s standard about twenty yards away, close to the edge of the fight.
She gasped, “Enemy command group – in reach—”
‘Then neutralise their unit commander.’
“A Lion! A Lion!” Ash stood up high in the stirrups, pointing with her sword. “Get the Duke! Get the Duke!”
Something crashed only glancingly off the back of her sallet, but it knocked her face-down on to Godluc’s neck. The war-horse wheeled around and reared up. Busy clinging on, Ash felt his hooves crush something. Screams dinned in her ears, and shouted commands in French and Flemish, and again the Lion banner slid off to the side, and she swore, and then saw the Ducal banner jerk and go down, and the knight in front of her threw his sword point-first at her face, and she ducked, and the ground was empty—
Thirty or so horses and men in Burgundian colours galloped, routing, across the packed earth towards their camp. Only minutes. Ash thought, dazed. It’s only been minutes, if that!
The little running figures at the Burgundian camp-line resolved themselves into infantry, in the liveries of Philippe de Poitiers and Ferry de Cuisance – archers from Picardy and Hainault.
“Archers – veteran – five hundred—”
‘If you do not have sufficient missile troops, withdraw.’
“No chance now. Fuck it!” She jerked up her arm, caught Robert Anselm’s eye, and threw her whole weight into the gesture of back! “Withdraw!”
Two of Euen Huw’s lance – a disreputable bunch of bastards at the best of times – were swinging down from their horses to strip the still-living wounded. Ash saw Euen Huw himself slam a bollock dagger straight down into the visor of an unhorsed knight. Blood sprayed.
“You want to be crossbow meat?” She swung half down from the saddle and pulled the Welshman up. “Bugger off back – now!”
The stabbed man was not dead, he thrashed and screamed, and blood jetted up from his visor. Ash hauled herself up into her saddle, rode over him on her way to Robert Anselm’s side, and screamed, “Ride back to camp – go!”
The Lion banner withdrew.
A man in a blue livery jacket with a blue lion on it dragged himself up from under his dead horse. Thomas Rochester, an English knight. Ash sat still in the saddle for one minute, holding Godluc by pressure of her knees, until the man reached her and she pulled him up behind her.
The open ground in front of Neuss was scattered now with riderless horses that abandoned their panic and slowed and stopped.
The man behind her on her horse yelled, “Boss, ’ware archers, let’s get out of here!”
Ash picked a careful way across the ground covered by the skirmish. She leaned down, searching among the unhorsed men to see if any of the dead and wounded were hers – or were the Duke – and none were either.
“Boss!” Thomas Rochester protested.
The first Picardian longbowman passed a bush she had privately decided was four hundred yards away.
“Boss!”
Thomas must be rattled. He doesn’t even want me to stop and capture a stray horse, to replace his. There’s money out there on four hooves.
And archers.
“Okay…” Ash turned and rode back, fording the almost-dry stream of the Erft, and moving on up the slope. She forced herself to ride at walking pace towards the wattle barriers of the Imperial camp’s nearest gate. She thumped Godluc’s armoured neck. “Just as well we fed you up for the practise exercise.”
The gelding threw up his head. There was blood at the corners of his mouth, and blood on his hooves.
Men wearing the Blue Lion and carrying bows came crowding out of the Imperial camp – which was a wagon-walled mirror of the Burgundian camp, down on the river plain. Ash rode in through the sentinelled gap between their wagons.
“There you go, Thomas.” She reined in for the man to slide down, looking back at him. “Lose another horse and you can walk back next time…”
Thomas of Rochester grinned. “Sure, boss!”
Figures running, men from her sector of the camp, crowding up to her and Robert Anselm, yelling questions and warnings.
“The damn Burgundians are hardly going to follow us in here. Hang on.” The sun blasted down. Ash nudged Godluc a step aside from the crowd, and wrenched her gauntlet buckles open, and then grabbed for her helmet.
She had to lean her head way back to get at the strap and buckle under the chin-piece of her bevor. She yanked the buckle open. The sallet almost fell backward off her head, but she caught it, and put it down over the pommel of the saddle, and then sprang the pin on her bevor and concertina’d the laminations down.
Air. Cool air. Her throat rasped dry and raw. She straightened up in the saddle again.
His Most Gracious Imperial Majesty Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor, faced her from the war saddle of his favourite grey stallion.
Ash glanced around. A full knightly entourage rode with the Emperor. All bright liveries, and ostrich plumes on their helmets. Not so much as a scratch on the steel. Far too late to join any skirmish. She caught sight of one man at the back – by the look of him, from the Eternal Twilight,5 in mail hauberk; his eyes bandaged with thin strips of dark muslin – nonetheless wearing a mildly cynical smile.
Sweat stuck her braided-up silver hair to her forehead and cheeks. Her skin felt wet and red as fire. Calm-eyed, she rode towards the Emperor, away from her shouting men. “Majesty.”
Frederick’s dry little voice whispered, “What are you doing on this side of my camp, Captain?”
“Manoeuvres, Your Imperial Majesty.”
“In front of the Burgundian camp?”
“Needed to practise advancing and retreating with the standard, Your Imperial Majesty.”
Frederick blinked. “When you just happened to see the Duke’s escort.”
“Thought it was a sally against Neuss, Your Imperial Majesty.”
“And you attacked.”
“Paid to, Your Imperial Majesty. We are your mercenaries, after all.”
One of the entourage – the southern mail-clad foreigner – stifled a noise. There was a pointed silence until he muttered, “Sorry, Your Imperial Majesty. Wind.”
“Yes…”
Ash blinked her indeterminately coloured eyes at the little fair-haired man. The Emperor Frederick was not visibly in armour, although his velvet doublet probably concealed mail under it. She said mildly, “Didn’t we ride here from Cologne to protect Neuss, Your Imperial Majesty?”
Frederick abruptly wheeled his gelding, and galloped back into the centre of the Imperial German camp with his knights.
“Shit,” Ash said aloud. “I might have done it this time.”
Robert Anselm, helmet at hip, rode up beside her. “Done what, boss?”
Ash glanced sideways at the crop-headed man; twice her age, experienced, and capable. She reached up and pulled her hairpin, and let her heavy braid fall down, unwinding over pauldrons and breastplate as far as the tassets that hung to mid-thigh, and only then noticed that her arms were dripping red to the elbow-couters, and that her silver hair was sopping up the blood.
“Either got myself into deep shit,” she said, “or got where I want to be. You know what I want us to get, this year.”
“Land,” Anselm murmured. “Not a mercenary’s reward of money. You want him to give us land and estates.”
“I want in.” Ash sighed. “I’m tired of winning castles and revenues for other people. I’m tired of never having anything at
the end of a season except enough money to see us through the winter.”
His tanned, creased face smiled. “It isn’t every company can do that.”
“I know. But I’m good.” Ash chuckled, deliberately immodest, getting less of an answering grin from him than she expected. She sobered. “Robert, I want somewhere permanent we can go back to, I want to own land. That’s what all this is about – you get land by fighting, or inheritance, or gift, but you get land and you establish yourself. Like the Sforza in Milan.” She smiled cynically. “Give it enough time and money, and Jack Peasant becomes Sir John Wellborn. I want in.”
Robert shrugged. “Is Frederick going to do that? He could be mad as hell about this. I can’t tell with him.”
“Me either.” Heartbeat and breath quietened now, ceasing to thunder in her ears. She stripped one gauntlet off and wiped her face, glancing back at the dismounting knights of the Company of the Lion. “That’s a good lot of lads we’ve got there.”
“Haven’t I been raising troops for you for five years? Did you expect rubbish?”
It was a remark intended jokingly, Ash noted; but sweat poured down the older man’s face, and his eyes flinched away from hers as he spoke. She wondered, Is he after a bigger share of our money? and realised, No, not Robert – so, what?
“That wasn’t war,” Ash added thoughtfully, pondering her captain. “That was a tournament, not a battle!”
One arm cradled his helmet; the Lion standard was socketed at his saddle. Anselm’s blunt fingers prodded under the mail standard at his throat. Its visible rim of leather was black with his sweat. “Maybe a tourney.6 But they lost knights.”
“Six or seven,” Ash agreed.
“Did you hear—?” Robert Anselm swallowed. His eyes finally met hers. She was troubled to see his forehead white with sweat or nausea.
“Down there – I took one man in the face with my sword-hilt,” he said, and shrugged an explanation: “He had his visor up. Red livery, white harts rampant. I ripped half his face away, just with the cross of my sword. Blinded him. He didn’t fall, I saw one of his mates helping him ride off towards their camp. But when I hit him he shrieked. You could hear it, Ash, he knew, right then, he’d been ruined for life. He knew.”
Ash searched Robert Anselm’s features, familiar to her as her own. A big man, broad across the shoulders, armour bright in the sun, his shaved scalp red with heat and sweat. “Robert—”
“It isn’t the dead ones that bother me. It’s the ones who have to live with what I’ve done to them.” Anselm broke off, shaking his head. He shifted in his war-horse’s saddle. His smile was wan. “Green Christ! Listen to me. After-battle shakes. Don’t take any notice, girl. I’ve been doing this since before you were born.”
This was not hyperbole but a pure statement of fact. Ash, more sanguine, nodded. “You should talk to a priest. Talk to Godfrey. And talk to me, later. This evening. Where’s Florian?”
He appeared slightly reassured. “In the surgeon’s tent.”
Ash nodded. “Right. I want to talk to the lance-leaders, we were all over the place down there. Take company roll-call. Find me back at the command tent. Move it!”
Ash rode on through the young men in armour flinging themselves down from their war saddles, shouting at each other, shouting at her, their pages grabbing their war-horses’ reins, the babble of after-battle stories. She banged one hard on the backplate, said something obscene to another of her sub-captains, the Savoyard soldier Paul di Conti; grinned at their yells of approval, dismounted, and clattered up the slope, her steel tassets banging on the cuisses that covered her thighs, towards the surgeon’s tent.
“Philibert, get me fresh clothes!” she yelled at her bob-haired page-boy, who darted away towards her pavilion; “and send Rickard, I need to get unarmed. Florian!”
A boy threw down more rushes as Ash ducked in through the flap of the surgeon’s pavilion. The round tent smelled of old blood and vomit, and of spices and herbs from the curtained-off area that was the surgeon’s own quarters. Thick sawdust clotted the floor. The sunlight through the white canvas gleamed gold.
It was not crowded. It was all but empty.
“What? Oh, it’s you.” A tall man, of slight build, with blond badly cut hair flopping over his eyes, looked up and grinned from a dirty face. “Look at this. Shoulder popped right out of its socket. Fascinating.”
“How are you, Ned?” Ash ignored the surgeon Florian de Lacey for the moment in favour of the wounded man.
She has his name to hand: Edward Aston, an older knight, initially a refugee of the rosbifs’7 royal wars, a confirmed mercenary now. The armour stripped off him and scattered on the straw was composite, bought new at different times and in different lands: Milanese breastplate, Gothic German arm defences. He sat with the wheat-coloured light on his balding head and fringe of white hair, doublet off his shoulders, bruises blacker by the minute, his features screwed up in intense pain and greater disgust. The joint of his shoulder looked completely wrong.
“Bloody warhammer, weren’t it? Bloody little Burgundian tyke come up behind me when I were finishing his mate. Hurt my horse, too.”
Ash ran over Sir Edward Aston’s English lance in her mind. He had raised for her service one crossbowman, one fairly well-equipped longbow archer, two competent men-at-arms, a bloody good sergeant and a drunken page. “Your sergeant, Wrattan, will look after your mount. I’ll put him in command of the rest of the lance. You rest up.”
“Get my share, though, won’t I?”
“Bloody right.” Ash watched as Florian de Lacey wrapped both hands around the older man’s wrist.
“Now say ‘Christus vincit, Christus regnit, Christus imperad’,” Florian directed.
“Christus vincit, Christus regnit, Christus imperad,” the man growled, his outdoor voice too loud in the confines of the tent. “Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus.”
“Hold on.” Florian planted a knee in Edward Aston’s ribs, yanked at full strength—
“Fuck!”
—and let go. “There. Back in its socket.”
“Why di’nt you tell me that was going to hurt, you stupid bugger?”
“You mean you didn’t know? Shut up and let me finish the charm.” The blond man frowned, thought for a second, and bent to murmur in the knight’s ear: “Mala, magubula, mala, magubula!”
The older knight grunted, and raised thick white eyebrows. He gave a sharp nod. Ash watched Florian’s long strong fingers firmly bind the shoulder into temporarily immobility.
“Don’t worry about it, Ned,” Ash said, “you’re not going to miss much fighting. It took Frederick-our-glorious-leader seventeen days to march the twenty-four miles from Cologne to here, he’s not exactly raring for glory.”
“Sooner have my pay for not fighting! I’m an old man. You’ll see me in my fucking grave yet.”
“Fucking won’t,” Ash said. “I’ll see you back on your horse. About—”
“About a week.” Florian wiped his hands down the front of his doublet, smearing the red wool, red lacing, and white linen undershirt with dirt. “That’s it, except an arm fracture, which I fixed up before you got here.” The tall master surgeon scowled. “Why don’t you bring me back any interesting injuries? And I don’t suppose you bothered to recover any dead bodies for anatomising?”
“They didn’t belong to me,” Ash said gravely, managing not to laugh at Florian’s expression.
The surgeon shrugged. “How am I ever going to study fatal combat injuries if you don’t bring me any?”
Ned Aston muttered something under his breath that might have, been ‘fucking ghoul!’
“We were lucky,” Ash stressed. “Florian, who’s the arm fracture?”
“Bartolomey St John. From van Mander’s Flemish lance. He’ll mend.”
“No permanent cripples? No one dead? No plague outbreak? Green Christ loves me!” Ash whooped. “Ned, I’ll send your sergeant up here for you.”
“I�
�ll manage. I’m not dead yet.” The big English knight glowered at Florian de Lacey in disgust as he left the surgeon’s tent, something of which the anatomist-surgeon remained apparently oblivious; and had done as long as Ash had known him.
Ash spoke to Florian, watching Ned Aston’s retreating back. “I haven’t heard you use that charm for a battle injury before.”
“No… I forgot the charm for bloodless injuries. That one was for farcioun.”
“‘Farcioun’?”
“It’s a disease of horses.”8
“A disease of—!” Ash swallowed a very un-leaderlike snuffle of laughter. “Never mind. Florian, I want to get out of this kit and I want to talk to you. Now.”
Outside, the sun hit like a dazzling hammer. Heat stifled her, in her armour. Ash squinted towards her pavilion tent and the Lion Azure standard limp in the airless noon.
Florian de Lacey offered his leather water bottle. “What’s happened?”
Unusually for Florian, the costrel did indeed contain wine thoroughly drowned by water.9 Ash doused her head, careless of spillage over steel plate. She gasped as the warm water hit. Then, swallowing greedily, she said between gulps, “Emperor. I’ve committed him. No more sitting around here – hinting to the Burgundians that Neuss is a free city – and Herman of Hesse is our friend – so would they please go home? War.”
“Committed? You can’t tell with Frederick.” Florian’s features, pale and fine-boned under the dirt, made a movement of disgust. “They’re saying you nearly got the Burgundian Duke. That right?”
“Damn near!”
“Frederick might approve of that.”
“And he might not. Politics, not war. Aw, shit, who knows?” Ash drank the last of the water. As she lowered the bottle, she saw her other page Rickard running towards her from the command tent.
“Boss!” The fourteen-year-old boy skidded to a halt on dry earth. “Message. The Emperor. He wants you at his tent. Now!”
“He say why?”