by Mary Gentle
Where’s the fucking enemy – ah. There.
Down at the foot of the deceptively gentle slope – be a bitch to run up, her mind commented – groups of darkness moved in darkness. Moving units of men. The glint of a banner-spike. A randy mare whinnying to the Frankish war-horses.
“How many men?” Robert Anselm murmured.
“Haven’t a clue… Too many.”
“It’s always ‘too many’,” the older man observed. “Two peasants with a stick is ‘too many’!”
Godfrey’s deacon sprinted out from the mass of armed men. Ash automatically looked for Godfrey Maximillian to be with Richard Faversham – after four days, was still looking. She had stopped asking.
“What did the bishop say?” she demanded.
“He consents!” Richard Faversham spoke softly enough that she had to bend down from the saddle to hear him, awkward in a brigandine which is not designed to do that.
“How many priests have we?”
“With the army, upwards of four hundred. With the company, but two; myself and young Digorie here.”
He’s not mentioning Godfrey either. Are we both assuming he’s left the company? Without a word?
Ash’s bare fist hit the saddle’s pommel. She stared down at her cold skin, and reached out for her gauntlets. Rickard, on toe-tip, put them into her hands. As she buckled the left one on, she continued to look down at Richard Faversham, and the intense, bony, dark young man he had introduced as Digorie.
“Are you ordained?” she asked him.
Digorie reached up a hand that appeared to be all knuckles, and gripped her remaining ungauntleted hand in an extremely powerful clasp. “Digorie Paston,16 madam,” he said, in English, “ordained back in Dijon by Charles’s bishop. I won’t let you or God down, ma’am.”
Hearing the order in which he said it, Ash raised an eyebrow but managed to restrain herself from any comment.
“You’re going to win this battle for us, Digorie, Richard,” she said. “Well, you and the other three hundred and ninety-eight…”
Godluc responded to a touch of the spurs, bringing her around to where she could look down the hill, over the heads of her own men, towards the Visigoth army.
“Oh, shit,” Ash remarked. “That’s all we needed.”
In the half-light, she could see dozens of Visigoth command flags, spanning the eastern road from Dijon towards Auxonne, and the thousands of marching and mounted men with them. Narrowing her eyes against the keen wet wind, she recognised positions: they have anchored their right flank hard up against the marsh down there, in the north; and got the southern valley there sat on with four companies of troops, and—
And.
“Well,” Ash’s voice sounded thin to her own ears, “that’s us fucked. That’s us well and truly fucked.”
Robert Anselm grabbed her stirrup and heaved himself briefly up, high enough to look down across the slope, and see what she was seeing. “Son of a bitch!”
He fell back, heels jolting on the mud.
Ash shifted her gaze, slitting her eyes to be sure of what she was seeing in the dimness. There was no mistake. Over the troops who anchored themselves on the Visigoth right – about a thousand archers and light horsemen – white pennants flew.
The wind unrolled the silk on the air, letting her clearly see the red crescents.
“Those are Turkish troops,” she confirmed.
Robert Anselm, below her, muttered, “So much for them cutting the Visigoths’ supply lines…”
“Yeah. Not only are they not cutting their supply lines, there’s a detachment of the Sultan’s troops in the mainward. Oh, fuck,” Ash exclaimed. “There’s been some kind of treaty, alliance, something – the fucking Sultan’s in bed with the fucking Caliph now!”
“I doubt quite that,” John de Vere said, riding up beside them.
“Did you know about this, my lord?”
De Vere’s face, under his armet’s pinned-up visor, showed white with anger. “What would Duke Charles tell an indigent English Earl? His intelligence is too good for him not to know – he must think he can beat them,” the Earl of Oxford said abruptly. “God’s teeth! but he thinks he can defeat the Visigoths and the Turks! The greater enemy, the greater the glory.”
“We’re dead,” Ash murmured, sing-song. “We’re dead … okay, my lord. If you want my advice, stick with the plan. Let the priests pray.”
“If I wanted your advice, madam, I should have demanded it.”
Ash grinned at him. “Well, hey, you got it for free. Not everybody can say that. I’m a mercenary, you know.”
The constriction of humour at his eyes gave him crow’s feet. The laughter faded, as he and Ash sat their restless horses. In the twilight, it seemed the Visigoth and Turkish battles17 might be drawing up in what local intelligence had suggested would be their optimum position.
“Will your men follow you in this?”
Ash said absently, “They’re a damn sight more frightened of me than of the enemy – and besides, the Visigoths might not get them, but my battle police certainly will.”
“Madam, much depends on this.”
A feeling of great relaxation spread through her body. She reached down to adjust the strap of the plackart that protected her belly, and thought longingly of the protection afforded by full armour. Her hand came to rest on the leather-bound grip of her sword, checking the lanyard chain fastened around it below the pommel, and attached to her belt.
“I’ve got rid of the liabilities,” Ash said, looking back at him. “Most of the rest of these men have been fighting for me for three years now. They don’t give a fuck about Duke Charles. They don’t give a fuck about – beg pardon – the Earl of Oxford. They give a fuck about their lance-mates, and about me, because I’ve got them out of fields worse than this in one piece. So yes, they’ll do it. Maybe. All other things being equal.”
The Earl of Oxford looked curiously at her.
Ash avoided the Englishman’s gaze. “Okay - we’re facing people who beat the Swiss: morale isn’t that good. You ask Cola de Monforte!”
A clarion rang out across the field. Momentarily, men’s voices stilled. The sounds of horses, their tack, the clatter of barding, and the snorts of breath gave way to the distant shout of Sergeants of Archers, and an unholy noise of singing from the gunners’ position. Ash stood upright in her stirrups.
“Meanwhile,” she said, “it isn’t quite hopeless, and I’ve got a contract with you.”
The Earl of Oxford saw his brothers approaching, and Ash saw the rest of her officers coming up; all with questions, needing orders and direction, and the time ticking away now to nothing.
John de Vere formally offered his hand, and Ash gripped it.
“If we survive the field,” he said, “I shall have questions to ask you, madam.”
“Good thing they don’t do guns,” Ash murmured to Robert Anselm. “They’d do what Richard Gloucester did to your Lancastrians at Tewkesbury, and blow us right off the top of this hill!”
Anselm nodded approvingly. “The Duke’s got it well thought out.”
“Bugger Charles of Burgundy!” Ash remarked. “Why do I have to fight a fucking hopeless battle before we can do anything useful? It isn’t that lot we need to take out – it’s her fucking Stone Golem, that’s telling her how to win! This is a sheer waste of time.”
“Particularly if we get killed,” Anselm grunted.
Both of them sat in their saddles, gazing down the long muddy slope at banners galloping, as the Visigoth light cavalry got themselves into position. The Faris’s banner held their centre – as Ash’s scouts had informed her, it was a Brazen Head, on a black field. Ash absently rested her hand on the skirt of her brigandine, over her belly.
She missed, suddenly and painfully, whatever Florian might be saying at this moment, if she were here – something caustic about the stupidity of military life, and battles, and getting cut up for no good reason.
“Florian would s
ay I have to fight harder because I’m a woman,” Ash said inconsequentially, watching her officers moving along the back of lines of men. “She means, a male commander could get taken prisoner, but I’d get gang-raped.”
Anselm grunted. “Yeah? It was me that found Ricardo Valzacchi after Molinella, remember? Tied across a wagon with a poleaxe shaft up his arse. I think he’s— she’s getting war confused with something else…”
What little she could see of Anselm’s face in the vee between bevor and raised visor was hidden, now, by the dark sweep of clouds across the sky; a sweep of dank shadow that took the brightness out of blue and red and yellow banners, dulled the hooks and points of bills, and caused a muttered swearing among the archers and crossbowmen.
A blast of cold air brought rain into her face; stingingly cold, almost sleet.
Ash stirred, tapped spurs to the big gelding’s flanks and rode down in among the company lines. Godluc’s big feathery feet picked a way between men and women bundled into jacks and helms and standing on the wet trampled crops.
Ludmilla Rostovnaya shouted up, “It’s dampening our strings, boss.”
“All bows unspanned and unstrung!” Ash ordered. “You’ll get your chance, guys. Keep your bow-strings under your helmets. It’s going to get bloody nasty, round about – now.”
With that, the church bells of distant Auxonne rang out across the hills. A great noise of voices went up from behind the Burgundian battle-line. A choir, singing mass. Ash raised her head. A whiff of incense caught in her nostrils. A little further up the crowded slope, Richard Faversham and Digorie Paston knelt in the mud, crucifixes in hand, young Bertrand holding up a stinking tallow candle. Around Ash, voices muttered, “Miserere, miserere!” She caught a flash of black and white as a magpie flew swooping down across the field, and automatically crossed herself and spat.
A bolt of blue colour, about as big as her fist, shot across the wet crops, under Godluc’s nose. His red-rimmed nostrils flared.
Ash watched the kingfisher dart away.
She tapped spurs into Godluc’s flanks again, rode up and took axe and lance from Rickard, and as she reached to close her bevor up and visor down, the first flakes of white dusted across Godluc’s blue and gold caparisons.
She raised her head, the duck-curled metal tail of her sallet allowing her to look up. Above, in a dark sky, white dots floated down.
In an instant, a howl of whiteness swirled out of the clouds, snowflakes turning from a powdery dust to thick, wet flakes; plastering her plackart, whitening Godluc’s silk caparisons, cutting her off from everyone except the three or four closest: Anselm, Rickard, Ludmilla, Geraint ab Morgan.
“Hold them!” she ordered the Welshman sharply.
Wind drove into her back. Snow flew. The wet mud under Godluc’s hooves went from black-and-brown to white in a matter of seconds. She rode a few yards, collecting her officers, halting close to Richard Faversham’s high-voiced Latin. Lance holstered, hands going up, she wrenched off her sallet and listened, standing upright in her saddle.
Far off, on the left and right wings of the Burgundian army, hoarse loud voices cried orders. A second’s pause, then the unmistakable thunk and whirr! of arrows being launched. One flight – and no other orders: an inhuman silence, all along the line.
“Shit, they’re good,” she whispered.
Somewhere below, a Visigoth man screamed.
Digorie Paston reached out and closed his bony hands over the English deacon’s, his face screwed up, prayer spilling out of his mouth.
Ash turned her head. Wind lashed her plates-covered shoulders and back. A hard wind, rising – and a blast took the breath from her mouth, her face blinded with snow, and she scraped a gauntlet across her features, grazing skin, and leaned down:
“Ludmilla, go forward!”
The Rus woman slid out of her company and went forward into the driving snow. Ash cocked her head, listening. The shrill snarl of an arrow-storm went up, all in one second, and her bladder pulsed, a trickle of hot urine soaking her hose. It is the sound. Nerve-shredding to hear coming: worse when it stops.
Her clumsy hands got her helmet back on her head; all around her, her men were shoving their visors down and leaning forward, as if into a wind, to present the deflecting surfaces of steel helmets to the arrows’ barbs-and bodkin points.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Geraint ab Morgan swore monotonously.
The abrupt cessation of the whistling sound told her the arrows had hit – something. She rode forward. No one screamed, or fell.
A white-plastered figure, stumbling, caught at her stirrup.
Ludmilla Rostovnaya shouted, “They’re hitting earth! Thirty feet in front of the line!”
“Yes!” Ash tried to look behind her, into the wind, coughed out a mouthful of sleet, and shouted, “Rickard!”
The boy ran up, an archer’s sallet crammed over his head, and a falchion at his belt. “Boss?”
“Get runners down here! I can’t see the Blue Boar banner,18 we’re going to have to rely on runners and riders. Go!”
“Yes, boss!”
“Ludmilla, ride to the Earl of Oxford, tell him it’s working! I want to know if it’s working on the rest of the field!”
The woman lifted a hand, and plunged on up the slope, slipping and sliding in snow and mud. Ash shivered, steel’s cold entering her body even through the padded arming doublet and hose beneath. Her crotch felt chill and wet. She swung Godluc around and rode back and forth in the snow in front of the Lion Azure’s five hundred men, leaving Anselm in charge of the infantry and Geraint in charge of the archers; and the knights under the dubious restraint of Euen Huw.
A thrumming whirr burst on the air.
Ash held Godluc in, needing the rein to do it. The big beast under her shivered. She stood in the stirrups, bowels unsettled; and very slowly paced up and down before the ranks. One arrow buried its fletching in the mud fifteen feet in front of her.
The sound of bowstrings cut the air. Arrow shafts shrilled. The noise grew until she thought there could not be another arrow left in Christendom, flight upon flight from the recurved Visigoth bows, flight after flight of German arrows, from the Imperial troops glimpsed down among the enemy.
The wind from behind the Burgundian lines blew so hard that the snow flew horizontally southwards.
“Keep praying!” she yelled at Digorie and Richard. The mass from Charles’s mainward came by fits and starts through the howling wind.
“Now…” she breathed.
It isn’t much of a miracle – given what weather conditions are like anyway, with the sun out – but it is a miracle.
The snow. The snow – and the wind.
Whiteness blocked the air, swirling, until she lost all sense of depth or distance. She held on to Godluc’s warmth, and his steaming breath, and rode in close among the lines; a word here to a man with a brother-in-law fighting for Cola de Monforte, a word there to a woman archer who drank with the whores following a refugee contingent of German knights, all of it serving no particular purpose of information, only it brought them near enough to her to see, hear or touch her.
“This is what we do, this is what we’re here for,” she said, again and again. “Let them keep shooting. Wasting arrows. A few more minutes, and we’ll give them the biggest shock of their lives. The last shock!”
The snow thinned.
Digorie Paston and Richard Faversham held each other up, kneeling in the mud. Bertrand put a wine flask to the lips of each in turn, his fat white face gaunt with fear. They prayed in harsh gasps. Christus, she thought, Godfrey, we need you!
Digorie Paston pitched over, flat on his face in two inches of snow.
“Prepare to shoot!” she yelled to Geraint ab Morgan.
The snow thinned still more. The sky grew brighter. The wind began to drop. Ash turned and spurred Godluc across the slope; page, squire, escort and banner-bearer with her; to Geraint ab Morgan and the archers; one fist up, sword out and held high.
She watched the skyline as she rode, searching hard among the banners in the mainward for the Blue Boar.
Up the slope, Richard Faversham fainted.
The fall of snow stopped, abruptly; the air clearing.
The Boar standard dipped.
Ash didn’t wait for the runner. As the west grew lighter, and the snow dropped to powdery drifts, she jerked her sword down. “Span and string!”
“Nock! Loose!” Geraint ab Morgan’s harsh Welsh bellow echoed flatly across the hillside. Ash heard other orders roared, in the wings and further along the mainward; and she unconsciously braced herself. The Lion Azure’s archers and crossbowmen readied their weapons, spanned bolts and nocked arrows, and at Geraint’s second shout, loosed.
The better part of two thousand arrows blackened the cold twilight air. A thousand of which, she reflected in a moment’s irony, undoubtedly came from the bows of Philippe de Poitiers and Ferry de Cuisance, whose archers from Picardy and Hainault she had run away from at Neuss.
I was right, too…
Ash’s whole body quivered with their release, and she lifted her head as they flew; and the second flight of shafts was already black in the air, crossbows cranking furiously, longbow archers loosing at ten or twelve shafts a minute, snatched up from the porcupines of arrows jammed into the wet wheat and mud – still shooting with the wind behind them—
A distant horse squealed.
Ash stood up in the stirrups.
Three hundred yards away, down a hill littered with a brushwood barrier of thousands of Visigoth arrows, the first shafts of the Burgundian army struck home.
She can just see, at this distance: Visigoth men fall, clutching at their faces, spiked through eye and cheekbone and mouth. Their riders jerk on wheeling mounts. A great bulk of horses screamed and bolted, crashing back and south, opening holes in the lines of men with pike and swords; a man in white robes sprawling, skull crushed by a hoof, banners dipping in chaos—