by Mary Gentle
They rode past the nearer mill.
Speech impossible, Ash did nothing for a moment but study the streets they rode through. A cluster of men in shirts and rolled-down hose, fixing an ox-wain’s wheel, moved aside. They removed their straw hats, Ash saw, but neither rapidly nor fearfully; and one of the Burgundian riders reined in and spoke to their foreman.
Ash glimpsed an open space ahead, between diamond-paned-windowed buildings. The street opened out into a square – which she saw, as she rode into it, was a triangle. Rivers flowed past on the two sides, this land being at the very confluence of both. The high city walls gleamed, and the men on guard there leaned on their weapons and looked down with interest. They were well-armed, clean, with the kind of faces that have not suffered famine in the near past.
“You understand, your Grace,” Ash said, “that rumours are getting out – that I hear voices, that I don’t hear voices, that the Lion Azure are really still paid by the Visigoths, because I’m the Faris’s sister. That sort of thing.”
De Vere looked at her. “You have no wish to be abandoned as a bad risk?”
“Exactly.”
“Madam, the responsibilities of a contract work both ways.”
De Vere’s battle-hardened voice gave his words no particular emphasis, but Ash found herself painfully and fearfully abandoning a habitual cynicism. The sun dazzled her eyes. Ash felt her voice catch.
As steadily as she could, she said, “Their general, their Faris, she’s slave-born. She doesn’t make any secret of it. And I … look like her. Like two pups in a litter. What does that make me?”
“Courageous,” the Earl of Oxford said gently.
When he met her gaze, she looked straight ahead, with hard eyes.
He said, “Because your method of hiding from this is to put a plan to me, to attack the enemy in their strongest city. I could have reason to doubt your impartial judgement over that, if I chose to take it as such – but I do not doubt it. Your thoughts chime with mine. Let us hope the Duke agrees.”
“If he doesn’t,” Ash said, gazing at the richly apparelled knights in the escort, “there’s damn-all we can do about it. We’re broke. This is a very rich, very powerful man, with an army outside this city. Let’s face it, your grace, two orders and I’m his mercenary, not yours.”
Oxford’s voice snapped, “I have responsibility for my brothers and my affinity!1 And for someone I have taken under my protection!”
“That isn’t quite the way most people regard a condotta…” Ash reined back to where she could look at him. “But you do, don’t you?”
Watching him, she was confirmed in her opinion that people would follow John de Vere well beyond the bounds of reason. And only wonder why afterwards, when it would be far too late.
Ash took a deep breath, feeling unusually constricted by the brigandine she was wearing. Godluc snorted breath from wide nostrils. Ash automatically shifted her weight back, halting him, and looked for what had worried her mount.
Two yards ahead, a line of ducklings fluttered up from the river’s edge, and pattered across the cobbled space. Preceded by a mother duck, they fluttered, squawking, towards the mill on the far side of the triangle, and the other, swift-flowing river.
Twelve Burgundian knights, an English Earl, his noble brothers, a viscount, a female mercenary captain and her escort all reined in and waited until nine ducklings passed.
Ash shifted up from leaning over in the saddle, about to speak to John de Vere. She found herself looking up at the ducal palace of Dijon. Soaring white Gothic walls, buttresses, peaked towers, blue slate roofs; flying a hundred banners.
“Well, madam.” The Earl of Oxford smiled, slightly. “The court of Burgundy is like no other court in Christendom. Let’s see what the Duke makes of my pucelle and her voices.”
Dismounting, she was met by a sweating Godfrey Maximillian, on foot; who fell in with the rest of Thomas Rochester’s men, behind her banner.
Inside the palace, the size of the space enclosed by stone stunned her. Soaring thin pillars jutted up, between long thin pointed windows; all the stonework fresh, white, biscuit-coloured; and with the late afternoon sun on it, looking, she thought, like fretworked honey.
She shut her gaping mouth and stumbled in John de Vere’s wake, a clarion call ringing out and a herald shouting their names and degrees, loud enough to shake the banners hanging down each side of the hall; and a hundred faces turned, men of wealth and power, looking at her.
They were all dressed in blue.
She gazed rapidly at sapphire, aquamarine and royal blue silk, at indigo and powder-blue velvet, at the rolled chaperon hats as deep as the midnight sky, and the long robe of Margaret of York, the colour of the Mediterranean sea. Her feet took her in the Earl of Oxford’s wake, quite independently; and Godfrey bent his bearded head close, whispering rapidly in her ear:
“There are Visigoths here.”
“What?”
“A deputation. An embassy. No one is sure of their status.”
“Here? In Dijon?”
“Since noon, I hear.”
“Who?”
Godfrey’s amber eyes moved away to survey the crowd. “I could not buy names.”
Ash scowled. She ignored the dazzling profusion of jewelled badges on chaperon hats, gold and silver linked collars around noble necks, brass folly-belly sewn to younger knights’ doublets, tissue-thin linen veiling the noble women.
All, all in blue, she suddenly realised. With a blue velvet brigandine she was moderately in the fashion, or at least, enough in it not to offend. She spared a glance for the four de Vere brothers and Beaumont, all of the noble English in full harness, a blaze of steel against the velvet and silk robes of the Burgundian court.
“Godfrey, who’s here? Don’t tell me you don’t know. You’ve got a damn network of informers out there! Who’s here?”
He deliberately dropped back a pace on the chequered tiles. Without causing confusion, and drawing attention to herself, there was no way she could continue to question him. She clenched her fist, for a second wanting nothing more than to hit him.
“Your Grace,” she said, without looking at the Englishman’s face, “did you know there’s a Visigoth delegation here?”
“God’s bollocks!”
“I’ll take that as a ‘no’, shall I?”
They were escorted on down the great hall. There was more: paintings set in niches, tapestries of great hunting expeditions hung from the walls, but Ash couldn’t take it in. Above it all that noble architecture soared up, ogee window and clustered columns, to the clear glass windows that disclosed the other roofs of the ducal palace of Dijon, and the fine, white-gold finials of stone piercing up towards the afternoon sky.
A flutter of doves flurried past the glass. Ash dropped her gaze, halting, her heels trodden on painfully by Dickon de Vere. Both escorts – hers, and de Vere’s – parted, letting the other brothers come through to stand beside the Earl of Oxford. Godfrey kept to the back, his face calm, his eyes giving away nothing of what he might feel, confronted by so many churchmen, as well as so many nobles and their ladies.
Ash stared around, could see no Visigoth robes or mail anywhere.
John de Vere knelt, and his party also; Ash scraping down on to one knee and dragging her hat off in haste.
A youngish man in white puff-sleeved doublet and hose sat on the ducal throne, his head bent, conferring with another man at his elbow. Ash saw his somewhat lugubrious face, and black shoulder-length hair cut straight across the forehead, and realised this must be him: Charles, Duke of Burgundy, nominal vassal of Louis XI, more splendid than most kings.2
“An inauspicious day, then?” the Duke said, quite clearly, as if unconcerned that his private conversations might be overheard.
“No, sire.” The man at his elbow bowed. He wore a long, azure demi-gown, his arms out of the hanging sleeves, and his hands busy with papers marked with diagrams of wheels and boxes. “Say, rather, an opportun
ity to avenge an old wrong.”
The Duke signalled him to move away, and leaned back, looking down from the dais at the kneeling Englishmen. The sole man in white, he stood out among his court for simplicity. Ash thought, Signifies a Virtue – probably his day for representing Nobility or Chivalry or Chastity. I wonder what the rest of us are?
His voice, when he spoke, was pleasant. “My lord of Oxenford.”
“Sire.” De Vere stood up. “I have the honour to introduce to you my mercenary captain, whom your Grace wished to see. Ash.”
“Sire.” Ash stood up. Behind her, Thomas Rochester and Euen Huw wore the Lion Azure livery; Godfrey gripped a Psalter. She smoothed her hair on the left side, assuring herself that it covered the healing injury there.
The rather dour young man on the ducal throne, who could not yet have been thirty, leaned forward with one hand on the arm of it, and stared at Ash with eyes so dark as to be black. A faint colour touched his pale cheeks. “You tried to kill me!”
This was not an occasion to smile, Ash guessed, the Valois Duke of Burgundy not looking particularly susceptible to being charmed. She schooled her face and her bearing to modesty and respect, and remained silent.
“You have a notable warrior there, de Vere,” the Duke remarked, and turning his head away from her, spoke briefly to the woman at his side. The Duke’s wife, Ash noted, did not take her eyes off John de Vere, Earl of Oxford.
“Perhaps,” Margaret of York spoke up in a clear voice, “it’s time this man told us why he takes advantage of your hospitality, Sire.”
“In time, lady.” The Duke beckoned two of his advisors, spoke to them, and then returned his gaze to the group in front of him.
Ash weighed up the cost of the Duke’s simplicity: his demi-gown was buttoned, and with diamond buttons, and the seams of the shoulders looked to be sewn with gold thread. And all the rest of the seams of his garments, sewn with the finest gold thread… In the blue sea of his court, he gleamed like snow with the faintest tinge of winter sun gilding it; and the grip of his bollock dagger was decorated also with gold, and with pearls.
“It is our intention,” the Duke said, “to discover what you know of this Faris, maîtresse Ash.”
Ash swallowed, and managed to speak in a voice that could be heard. “By now, everybody knows what I know, sire. She has three major armies, of which one lies just beyond your southern border. She fights inspired by a voice, which she claims comes from a Brazen Head or Stone Golem device, across the seas in Carthage, and,” Ash said, holding to her line of thought with difficulty under Charles’s stare, “I have myself seen her appear to speak to it. As to the rest of it: the Goths have burned Venice and Florence and Milan because they don’t need them – there’s an endless supply of men and materials being shipped across the Med, and when I left, it was still coming.”
“Is this Faris a knight of honour, a Bradamante?”3 Duke Charles asked.
Ash judged it time to make herself both less spectacular and more human in his eyes. Rather bitterly, she replied, “A Bradamante wouldn’t have stolen and kept my best armour, Sire!”
A subdued merriment made itself felt in the court, dying out as soon as it became apparent that Duke Charles was not smiling. Ash held his gaze, the bright black eyes and almost ugly face – certainly a Valois! – and added, “As for knights, heavy cavalry doesn’t seem to be their strong point, sire. No tournaments. They have medium cavalry, huge numbers of foot-soldiers, and golems.”
Duke Charles glanced at Olivier de la Marche, and the big man, with a nod for Ash, loped up the dais steps in a very uncourtly manner. The Duke whispered in his ear. He nodded, dropped to one knee to kiss the Duke’s hand, and strode off. Ash didn’t turn her head to watch, but guessed he was actually leaving the hall.
“These dishonourable men of the south,” Charles said, more publicly, “dare to put out the sun above Christian men, and shroud us in the same penance as their own Eternal Twilight. They have not expiated the sin of the Empty Chair. We – under God, we are not sinless! But we do not deserve to have the sun which is the Son taken from us.”
Ash untangled that one after a glance at Godfrey. She nodded hastily.
“Therefore—” the Duke of Burgundy broke off at an insistent mutter from Margaret, seated beside him on a smaller throne. A short and, Ash thought, rather sharp exchange ended with the Valois Duke leaning back magnanimously. “If it eases your mind, we will consent to your asking him. De Vere! The Lady Margaret wishes a word with you.”
Slightly above Ash’s head, George de Vere whispered, “That’ll be the first time!”, and Dickon snickered.
The English noblewoman gazed down at de Vere, his brothers and Beaumont, ignoring Ash and her priest and banner. “Oxford, why have you come here? You know you cannot be welcome. My brother, King Edward, hates you. Why do you follow me here?”
“Not you, madam.” John de Vere, equally blunt, gave her no noble title. “Your husband. I have a question to ask him, but since you have an army on your borders, my question will wait for a better time.”
“No! Now. You will ask it now!”
Ash, aware that so many currents ran deep under this particular river, thought that Margaret of York might not ordinarily be a shrill woman, or an impetuous one. But something’s biting her. Biting her hard.
“It is not the time,” the Earl of Oxford said.
Charles of Burgundy leaned forward, frowning. “If my Duchess asks, it is certainly time for you to answer, de Vere. Courtesy is a knightly virtue.”
Ash shot a glance at de Vere. The Englishman’s lips were pressed tightly together. As she watched, his face relaxed, and he gave a chuckle.
“Since your husband wishes it, madam Margaret, I will tell you. His Grace King Henry, sixth of that name, being dead and leaving no close heir of his body,4 I have come to ask the next Lancastrian claimant to the English throne to raise an army, so that I may put a legitimate and honest man there, instead of your brother.”
And I thought I could be tactless…
Under cover of the outrage and shocked comments, Ash glanced back down the mirror-stone tiled floor, judging the distance to the great doors and the Ducal Guard.
Great. The Visigoth Faris puts me in prison. I get here. I get hired by de Vere. De Vere gets us all put in prison. This is not how I wanted things to be!
A tiny ripping noise sounded: the edge of Margaret of York’s veil knotted and torn between her clenched fingers. “My brother Edward is a great king!”
Oxford’s voice cracked out loud and hard enough to make Ash jump.
“Your brother Edward had my brother Aubrey’s bowels torn from his body, while he lived, and his cock cut off and burned in front of his eyes. A Yorkist execution. Your brother Edward had my father’s head cut off, with no ounce of English law behind him, since he has no claim to the throne!”
Margaret got to her feet. “Our claim is better than yours!”
“But your claim, madam, is not as good as your husband’s!”
Silence dropped, like a blade coming down. Ash became aware she was holding her breath. All the de Vere brothers stood upright, hands to scabbards; and the Earl of Oxford himself glared, like a war-weathered bird of prey, at the woman on the throne. His pale gaze moved to Charles, and he inclined his head stiffly.
“You must know, Sire, that being as you are the great-grandson of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster, then the nearest living Lancastrian heir to the English throne is now – yourself.”5
We’re dead.
Ash clasped her hands behind her back, keeping her fingers away from the hilt of her second-favourite sword with an effort powered by sheer fear.
We’re dead, we’re done for, our ass is grass; sweet Christ, Oxford, couldn’t you just for once keep your mouth shut when someone asks you for the truth?
She was astonished to open her mouth and hear herself say, quite loudly, “And if that doesn’t work, I suppose we can always invade Cornwall…”
An instant of appalled silence, so short it was only long enough to stop the breath in her throat, broke with a shout of laughter from a hundred voices; this a fraction of a second after Duke Charles of Burgundy smiled. A very wintry, tiny smile; but nonetheless, he smiled.
“Noble Duke,” Ash said quickly, “the French Dauphin had his Pucelle. I’m sorry I can’t manage one of those for you – I’m a married woman, after all. But I pray that I also have the favour of God, as Joan did; and if you give me, not troops, but some of the wealth of your army, then I’ll try and do for you what she did for France. Kill your enemies, Sire.”
“And what will your seventy-one lances do for Burgundy, maîtresse?” the Duke asked.
Ash flicked up an eyebrow, having not had the exact numbers from Anselm’s muster that long herself. She kept her head raised, aware that her face and hair were to some degree speaking for her, and that she would have been far more impressive in full harness. “It would be better not in open court, Sire.”
The Duke of Burgundy clapped his hands. Clarions sounded, the choirs at the sides of the great hall burst into song, ladies rose, men in rich pleated short gowns made their exits, and Ash – and Godfrey, and the de Veres – were ushered into a chapel or side room.
Quite some time later, Charles of Burgundy came in, a handful of attendants with him.
“You’ve upset the Queen of Bruges,” he remarked to Oxford, waving his staff away.
Ash, bewildered, glanced at Oxford and the Duke.
“My wife, being governor of that city, is sometimes called its queen,” the Valois Duke said, lowering himself into a chair. His demi-gown, unbuttoned, showed a gold-embroidered pourpoint beneath, and a drawstring-neck shirt of linen so fine it was hardly visible. “She has no love for you, my lord Earl of Oxford.”