by Mary Gentle
Ash heaved herself over the wagon-shafts, jumping down on to the flattened straw that strewed this part of the camp, further away from the knight’s tents; and straightened to find her hand being wrung by her steward Henri Brant, and Jan-Jacob Clovet struggling to lace his cod-flap with his injured arm and thump her on the back at the same time. Blanche’s daughter Baldina, a red-haired woman, dropped her skirts with aplomb and got up from the straw where she had been accommodating the man-at-arms.
“Boss!” she called croakily, “are you back for good?”
Ash ruffled the whore’s flaming hair. “No, I’m marrying Duke Charles of Burgundy, and we’re going to spend every day eating ’til we burst, and fucking on swansdown mattresses.”
Baldina said broadly, “Suits us. We’ll make you a widow so you can. That’s if that little limp-dick you married is still alive somewhere.”
Ash made no answer, being engulfed in the wiry embrace of Euen Huw, and a torrent of Welsh admiration and complaint; and finding herself at the centre of a rapidly growing mob, made up of the company’s boys, musicians, washerwomen, whores, grooms, cooks and archers; and being swept off – as she had intended – towards the centre of the camp.
First of all the men-at-arms, Thomas Rochester threw his arms around her; his harsh face streamed with tears.
“Typical emotional rosbifs!” Ash thumped his back. Josse and Michael piled in on top of her; and half the English lances with them.
Fifteen minutes later, her head pounding and half-blind with renewed pain, Joscelyn van Mander was shaking her hand with a grip that left red imprints on her fingers, his blue eyes brimming with wetness.
“Thanks to Christ!” he blurted. He looked around, at the mob of men-at-arms and archers and billmen pressing close, and the knights elbowing in; all trying to reach Ash. “Lady, thanks to Christ! You’re alive!”
“Not for much longer,” Ash said under her breath. She managed to free her hands. One arm went comradely over Euen Huw’s shoulder, and she rested her weight on the little Welshman; the other held Baldina’s hand, the red-headed whore not willing to be parted from her for a second, mopping her face with the hem of her kirtle.
Lowering his voice for confidentiality, and breathing warm wine-breath in her face, Joscelyn van Mander interrupted. “I’ve been speaking to the Viscount-Mayor on behalf of the company; we have trouble with allowing knights into the town—”
Oh, you’ve been speaking on behalf of the company, have you? Uh-huh.
Ash beamed at the Flemish knight. “I’ll sort it.”
She grinned around at the thronging faces.
“It’s boss!”
“She’s back!”
“So – where’s Geraint-the-Welsh-bastard?” Ash inquired, in a voice of piercing good humour.
Amid a roar of laughter, Geraint ab Morgan forced his way through the crowd in front of the command tent. The big man was stuffing his shirt into the back of his hose, between a set of broken points. His bloodshot blue eyes flinched, seeing Ash in the middle of a throng of delirious admirers.
Geraint shoved out with both arms to clear a space, and thumped down on both knees on the earth in front of her. “It’s all yours, boss!”
Ash grinned at the note of heartfelt relief in his voice. “Sure you don’t want to keep my job?”
At this point, she knew exactly the answer he would make. Geraint didn’t have any choice. She had chosen to come in by way of the menial members of the company, who had no chance, nor would ever have a chance, of competing for rank within it. Their genuine joy carried itself to the men, and that left the knights – given van Mander’s volte face – with nothing to do but forget any quite viable ambitions that had started to grow in her absence, any unauthorised promotions and demotions, and cheer her to the echo.
In broad Welsh, Geraint said, “Stuff your fucking job, boss, have it and welcome!”
“Lightbringer!” someone shouted behind her, and someone else, Jan-Jacob Clovet, she thought, bellowed, “Lioness!”
“Listen up!” Ash loosened her grip and held up both hands for silence. The camp’s failings could wait an hour, she decided. “Okay! I’m here, I’m back, and I’m going up to the chapel now. Anyone else who wants to give thanks for our deliverance from the darkness, follow me!”
She couldn’t make herself heard for sixty seconds. Eventually she stopped trying, thumped Euen Huw on the back, and pointed. They moved towards the camp’s main gate, at least four hundred strong; and Ash answered questions and asked for news and congratulated men recovering from wounds, all in one breath, under a staggering hot sky.
Being a chapel of Mithras,10 it was naturally on separate land to the convent. Ash led the way uphill to the nearby copse, lost in the great crowd.
Trees in full leaf shuttered out the sun. Ash breathed a long sigh, not aware of how dazzled she had been by heat and light until now. She looked ahead, down the path, to where her officers waited outside the low, heavy masonry entrance: Floria, Godfrey, Robert and Angelotti, standing in sepia dappled shadow. She gave one very tiny nod of her head and saw them relax.
Floria fell in step with her as she came up to them; Godfrey on the other side. Angelotti bowed; he and Robert Anselm dropping back to let her pass.
Ash gave the two men a thoughtful glance over her shoulder.
Priests stood in the chapel entrance. She linked arms with Florian and Godfrey. Behind her, knowing there would be no room below, men-at-arms and archers were sinking to their knees on the leaf-mould, filthy men dappled with the sun’s light through the green leaves, pulling off helmets and hats, talking at the tops of their voices, and laughing. Junior priests of Mithras moved away from the entrance towards the groups of armed men, so that the service could be held here as well as below.
She fell in beside Godfrey, linking arms, going under the lintel and down the steps; exchanging the scent of dry woodland for the moist cold of the earth-walled passage. “So – what did you hear at court? Will the Duke fight?”
“There are rumours. No information I would trust. Surely he can’t ignore an army forty miles away, but— But I’ve never seen such magnificence!” Godfrey Maximillian spluttered. “He must have three hundred books here in his library!”
“Oh, books.” Ash kept a steadying hand on her clerk’s arm as she reached the bottom of the steps, and walked into the chapel of Mithras. Sunlight slanted down through the bars above, casting the stone cave into floods of light and shadow. Roman mosaics under her feet depicted the Proud Walkers and the April Rainers in tiny pastel squares. “What am I going to care about Duke Charles’s books for, Godfrey?”
“No, I don’t suppose you will. Not in the present situation.” He inclined his head, a smile partly concealed by his beard. “But he has the most wonderful Psalters. One illustrated by Rogier van der Weyden, no less. He also has all the Chansons du Geste, child – Tristram, Arthur. Jaques de Lalaing…”
“Oh, what! Really?”
Godfrey chuckled, mimicking her tone. “Really.”
“Now that’s what’s wrong with war,” Ash said, wistfully, as they knelt in front of the great Bull altar.
“Ehh? Jaques de Lalaing is what’s wrong with war?” Godfrey murmured, puzzled. “Good lord, child, the man’s been dead for thirty years.”
“No.” Ash cuffed the priest affectionately. From the altar, the Bull priest gave her a quelling glare.11 She subsided to a whisper, aware she was still born up by the intensity of her welcome back to the company. They kept up a constant chatter behind her. “I mean what happened to him is what’s wrong with war. There you have him, perfect gentle knight, wins all the tourney circuit matches for years, been on every field of battle of note, a real warrior chevalier – actually set up a knightly pavilion and defended a ford with his lance against all-comers12 – and what happens to him?”
Godfrey searched his memory. “Killed at one of the sieges of Ghent, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah – by a cannon ball.”
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nbsp; The blood bowl was passed around. Ash drank, bowed her head for the blessing, and said formally, “I give thanks for my recovery and dedicate my life to continuing the battle of the Light against the Dark.” As the steaming bowl continued to the vast numbers of the company crowded into the chapel, and queued back up the steps, she murmured, “That’s what I mean, Godfrey. All the virtues of chivalric war, and what happens to him? Some damn gun-crew blows his fucking head off!”
Godfrey Maximillian reached down with a broad arm to haul her up off the flagstones. She took the necessary help without resenting it.
“Not that I ever thought war was anything but a dirty business,” she added dryly. “Why are Robert and Angelotti avoiding me, Godfrey?”
“Are they? Dear me.”
Ash pressed her lips together. The blessing concluding, she waited while the white- and green-robed boys sang, and then ascended up into the light between her lance-leaders; a mass of men in bright steel and brilliant linen, walking out into the wood with her, swatting buzzing insects away; and each of them desperate to have just one reassuring word with Ash.
“The riding horses need exercise!” The company farrier.
“Twenty carcasses of pork, and nine of them off,” Wat Rodway complained.
“Huw’s archers keep brawling with my men!” An indignant fair-haired Sergeant of Bill. Carracci, she recognised; unusually fraught.
Euen Huw swore. “Bloody Italian bum-boys messing about with my lads!”
One of the female hackbutters complained, “And half my powder is left behind at Basle—”
Ash stopped dead on the path.
“Wait.”
Her page, Bertrand, handed her her velvet bonnet. She heard the snort of horses and looked ahead. Beyond the brown trunks of trees and the arching green loops of briars, out in the meadow, war-horses were being held by grooms.
“Later,” she ordered.
A group of armed men stood just within the copse’s shade. Their banner hung limp and unreadable, but looked to be – she squinted – quartered squares of red and yellow, with white bars, mullets,13 and either crosses or daggers. The men’s livery jackets were white and murrey-coloured.14
A hand under her armpit lifted her out of the discussion group and several yards on down the path from the crowd of her soldiers. Robert Anselm, without looking down at her, said, “I got us a contract. He’s here. Meet your new boss.”
“‘New boss’?” Ash stopped dead.
She was no weight to stop Anselm, but the big Englishman let go of her arm and abruptly dropped to one knee in front of her.
A second man knelt on the dry leaves: Henri Brant. Antonio Angelotti thumped down beside him. Ash looked down at her steward and second-in-command and gunner. She put her hands on her hips. “Excuse me, my new what? Since when?”
Anselm and Angelotti exchanged glances.
“Two days ago?” Robert Anselm ventured.
“New employer,” Henri Brant spoke up. “I had difficulty getting credit in Dijon. Prices are going up, now there’s an army at their border. And I can’t supply eight-score horses and a whole company on what there is left from Frederick!”
So how much were we forced to abandon at Basle? Shit.
Ash surveyed Henri’s broad face. He still favoured his right side a little, she noted, where he knelt. “Stand up, you idiot. You mean no food-merchant would give you credit unless the company had a formal contract with someone?”
Henri, getting to his feet, nodded agreement.
That’s just about time for the news to get out that our last contract was with the Visigoths… Whoever it is, Ash thought, he didn’t waste any time making his move.
Ash tapped the toe of her boot on the leaf mulch floor of the copse. “Roberto.”
The two men, kneeling before her, could not have been more different: Anselm still in his blue woollen doublet, face unshaven; Angelotti with his mass of gold hair falling below his shoulders, and his gather-necked shirt spotless and of the finest linen. What they had in common were identical expressions of shifty apprehension.
“You said go run the company. I’ve run it.” Robert shrugged where he knelt. “We need money! This is a good contract…”
“With a man that we know.” Angelotti uncharacteristically stumbled over his words. “That Roberto knows, knew, knew his father, that is—”
“Oh, Christ, don’t tell me it’s one of your goddams!”15 Ash glared. “There’s a country I’m never going back to! Nothing but barbarians and rain. Roberto, I’m going to nail your ears to the pillory for this one.”
“He’s here. You better meet him.” Robert Anselm got up, untangling his scabbard from a thorn bush. Angelotti followed suit.
“He’s one of your fucking Lancastrians, isn’t he? Oh, sweet Christ! On top of everything else, you want me to go and fight English King Edward for his throne. I don’t think so.” Ash stopped, scowled, suddenly realising, That would put me a hundred leagues and a good chunk of sea north of the Faris and her army.
Maybe there’s something in this. If I go to England, at the worst I die on the field of battle. Who knows what might happen in Carthage, if they ever found out that I hear— no!
She muttered, “Now, who’s white-and-murrey?” and began to ransack her memory of the heraldry of dispossessed Lancastrian lords in exile from Yorkist England.
Robert Anselm coughed. “John de Vere. The Earl of Oxford.”
Ash absently took her sword as Bertrand brought it, and let the boy belt it around her waist. Dapples of sunlight shone on its battered red leather scabbard. Her green and silver doublet was still quite obviously an expensive garment: equally obviously, it had not been washed or brushed for nearly a week. And no armour, not so much as a jack of plates.
“The fucking Earl of fucking Oxford, and I look like I’m worth ten shillings a year. Thank you, Robert. Thank you.” She gave the wriggle of her hips that settled her sword-belt comfortably at her waist. She looked keenly at him. “You fought in his household, didn’t you?”
“His father’s. His older brother, too. Then him, in ’71.” Robert shrugged uncomfortably. “I got us what I could. He needs an escort here, he says.”
Ash glanced around for Godfrey, and saw the priest in conversation with a man-at-arms in a murrey livery jacket with a white mullet on it. She could not very well approach her clerk at this point to ask him why a Lancastrian lord might be at the court of Charles of Burgundy, what he might want with a hefty contingent of armed mercenaries, and what, she ended in her own mind, he thinks of the Visigoth forces about forty miles away from here!
“His father, your old boss – he died in battle?”
“No. His father and Sir Aubrey – that’s his brother – they were executed.”
“Oh yippee,” Ash said sourly. “Now I’m being employed by attainted nobility – he is under attainder, I suppose?”
Antonio Angelotti quietly put in, “Madonna, here he is.”
Ash straightened her shoulders quite unconsciously. The annoying insects still buzzed, gold motes in the light under the trees. A horse snorted. The men with the de Vere banner jingled as they approached, their surcoats tied over light mail. There were a few burned-red faces under the helmets. Ash guessed the escort largely consisted of those who had recently displeased a sergeant. The man at the centre of the group she could not see clearly, but she nonetheless hauled off her hat and went down on one knee as the escort parted and made way for him. Her officers knelt with her.
“My lord Earl,” she said.
She was aware of the bulk of her company halted outside the chapel of Mithras watching her. She was fortunately too far ahead to hear much of what they were saying. The earth felt hard under her knee. A blink of pain went through her head. When a cool voice said in English, “Madam Captain,” she looked up.
He might have been any age between thirty and fifty-five: a fair-haired Englishman with faded blue eyes and an outdoor face, wearing tall riding boots pointed to the
skirts of a faded linen doublet. He stepped forward, extending a hand. She took it. He had bony wrists. Any doubts about strength were dispelled by his effortlessly bringing her to her feet.
Ash dusted her hands, and looked shrewdly at the man. His doublet was Italian fashion, not so barbaric as she had feared; and if it looked as though he had been hunting all day across hard country in it, it had started life as an expensive garment. He was wearing a dagger but no sword. She managed not to say Mad English!
“We’re at your command, my lord Earl,” Ash said, and also failed to add Or so I’m told…
“I find you recovered, madam?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Your officers have told me the strength of your company. I want to know your manner of commanding them.” The Earl of Oxford turned on his heel and began to walk towards his horses. Ash muttered a brief command to Anselm, left him to get the company back to their camp, and walked briskly off in de Vere’s tracks. His assumption that he did not have to tell anyone to follow him both amused her, and impressed her by how correct it seemed to be.
At the wood’s edge, she found her servants and the de Vere grooms vying for shade; and mounted with a minimum of fuss. Godluc shifted his great quarters under her, pushing for a gallop. She brought him up beside the Earl of Oxford’s bay gelding.
Over the jingle of tack, the Englishman said, “A woman, most unusual,” and smiled. He was missing a side tooth, and now they were out in the light she could see old white scars seaming his wrists, and vanishing under the neck of his shirt. The dimple-puncture of an arrow wound marked one cheek.
He added, “They appear devoted to you. Are you a virgin-whore?”
Ash spluttered at his English translation of pucelle. She said cheerfully, “I don’t see what damn business it is of yours, Sir.”
“No.” The man nodded. He leaned over in the saddle, offering his hand again. “John de Vere. You call me ‘your Grace’ or ‘my lord’.”
Manners of the camp, not the court, Ash thought. Good. It always helps if they know something about soldiering. I must have seen his father around at some point, he looks familiar.