Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  There was a ragged, good-natured cheer: if only because they knew the amount of truth in what she said. Some men were nodding, others gazed at her in silence. She watched faces, alert for fright, for arrogance, for the imperceptible loosening of bonds between men.

  Ash pointed over her shoulder, in the general direction of the river valley and Dijon. She showed teeth in a fierce smile. “You’re expecting me to tell you how we’re going to batter those walls down, and rescue Anselm and the lads. Well, guys, I’ve been up ahead to look. And I’ve got news for you. Those walls aren’t going down, they’re fucking solid.”

  One of Carracci’s billmen put his hand up.

  “Felipe?”

  “Then how the fuck are we going to get the rest of the Lions out, boss?”

  “We’re not.” She repeated it, more loudly: “We’re not.”

  A noise of confusion.

  “That’s a siege going on up there,” Ash said, pitching her voice to carry. “Now most people are trying to break out of a siege.”

  “With the exception of the enemy,” Thomas Rochester put in helpfully, behind her.

  Antonio Angelotti snickered. A number of the men took it up, appreciative of the back-chat.

  Ash, who knew very well why – in the midst of Visigoths, twenty-four-hour-a-day darkness, and speaking stone pyramids – both her officers were doing this, contented herself with a glare.

  “All right,” she said, breath smoking on the icy air. “Apart from the enemy. Pair of bloody smartarses.”

  “That’s why you pay us, madonna…”

  “He gets paid? ” Euen Huw complained, in broad Welsh.

  Ash held up her hands. “Shut up and listen, you dozy shower of shit!”

  A voice from the back of the ranks murmured whimsically, “‘We’re the best’…”

  The outburst of laughter made even Ash grin. She stood, nodding and waiting, until quiet returned; and then wiped her red, runny nose with her sleeve, put her hands on her hips, and projected her voice out to them:

  “Here’s the situation. We’re in the middle of hostile countryside. There’s two Carthaginian legions just down the road in front of us – the Legio XIV Utica and some of the Legio VI Leptis Parva: six or seven thousand men between them.”

  Murmurs. She went on:

  “The rest of their forces are behind us in French territory, and up north in Flanders. Okay, it isn’t winter here yet, like it is under the Dark – but there’s corn rotted in the fields, and grapes rotted on the vine. There’s no game, because they’ve hunted it all. There’s nowhere left to loot, because every town and village for miles around has been stripped. This land is bare.” She stopped, waiting, looking around; hard dirty faces scowled back at her.

  “No need to look at me like that,” Ash added, “since you looted your share on the way up here…”

  An archer’s voice: “Fuckin’ right.”

  “You bastards carried away everything that wasn’t tied down. Well, I got news for you. It’s gone. I’ve talked to Steward Brant, and it’s – all – gone.”

  Ash gave that a slow emphasis, saw it sink in. A billman crouched down a few feet away looked at the hunk of dark bread in his hand, and thoughtfully tucked it away in his purse.

  “What we gonna do, boss?” a crossbow-woman called.

  “We’ve done one hell of a forced march,” Ash said, “and we’re not finished yet. We’re in the middle of a war here. We’re about to run out of rations. Now, most people are trying to break out of a siege…”

  She flirted a quick glance at Angelotti, gave Florian a grin; and turned her attention back to the men yowling questions:

  “Most people. Not us. We’re going to break in.”

  Those in the front row bawled their amazement.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you again.” Ash paused, for emphasis. “We’re not going to break Robert Anselm and the lads out of Dijon. We’re going to break in.”

  Simon (or Thomas) Tydder blurted out, “Boss, you’re mad!” and blushed bright red. He stared down at his boots.

  She let the buzz die down. “Anyone else got anything to say?”

  “Dijon’s under siege!” Thomas Morgan, Euen Huw’s 2IC, protested. “They got the whole bloody Visigoth army in front of their gates!”

  “And they have had – for three months. Without taking the city! So what better place to be than safe inside Dijon? If they find us out here,” Ash said, looking around at faces again, “we’re catsmeat. We’re in the open. Most of our heavy armour’s in Dijon. And we’re outnumbered thirty to one. We can’t face a Visigoth legion in the field – not even you guys can do that. Now we are here, there isn’t any option. We need walls between us and the Visigoth army, or that’s the end of the Lion Azure, right now.”

  She had the experience to wait then, while a hubbub of talk rose up; to wait with her arms folded, weight back on one hip, her bare cropped silver hair exposed to the wintry light under the trees; a woman no longer beautiful, but in mail coat and sword and with her pages, squire, and officers ranked behind her.

  One of the billmen stood up. “We’d be safe in Dijon!”

  “Yeah, till the Goths batter the gate down!” a man-at-arms in Flemish livery remarked.

  Until we find out what the Wild Machines have bred the Faris for.

  Ash stepped forward and held her arms up.

  “Okay!” She let their noise die down. “I’m getting in contact with our people inside Dijon. I’m arranging for a gate to be opened tonight. De Vere picked you guys to move fast, for the raid on Carthage, so moving fast is what we’re going to do! We won’t have to fight our way in – but I’ll want volunteers for a diversionary attack.”

  The Englishman John Price nodded and stood up, his mates with him. “We’ll do it, boss.”

  Ash spoke quickly, not letting any more questions be asked.

  “You, Master Price, and thirty men. You’ll attack tonight, two hours after moonrise. Angelotti, give them whatever slow-match and powder we’ve got left. You guys: wear your shirts over your armour: kill anything that doesn’t show up white.”

  “That won’t work, boss,” Price’s lance-mate objected. “All them fuckers wear white robes!”

  “Shit.” Ash let them see her look amused. “Y’know – you’re right. Sort out your own recognition signal, then. I want you down at the west bank of the Suzon, setting fire to their siege engines – that’ll bring the whole army awake, siege-machines are expensive! When you’ve done it, fall back into the forest. We’ll pick you up in a boat tomorrow evening and bring you in through one of the water-gates.”

  Ash turned to her officers.

  “That’ll give the rest of us time enough to move. Okay, we’ve got ten hours before dark. We’re leaving any carts: I want everything in the baggage train either on someone’s back or slung out. I want the mules blindfolded.” She gauged spirit, looking around at all the faces she could see in the November morning. “Your lance-leaders will tell you where you are in line of march – and when we go in tonight, we go in with weapons muffled, and wearing dark clothes over armour. And we don’t hang about! They won’t know we’re here until we’re in.”

  There was still some murmuring. She made a point of making eye-contact with the dissenters, gazing around at white, pinched faces, cheeks flushed with small beer and bravado.

  “Remember this.” She looked around at their faces. “That’s your mates up ahead in Dijon. We’re the Lion – and we don’t leave our own. We may be broke, it may be winter, we may need a siege-proof roof over our heads right now, but don’t forget this – with the whole company together, we can kick any damn Visigoth’s ass from here to breakfast! Okay. We go in, we assess the situation, and when we move on out later on, we move out with all the armour and guns we had to leave here – and we move as a full-strength company. You got that?”

  Mutters.

  “I said, you got that?”

  The familiar bullying tone cheered them, enabled a com
plicit cheer:

  “YES, BOSS!”

  “Dismiss.”

  In the resulting ordered chaos of men running, shelters being demolished, and weapons being packed up, she found herself standing beside Floria again.

  A sudden awkwardness made her avoid the woman’s eye. If Florian too was uncomfortable, she showed no sign of it.

  But she will be.

  “Don’t—” Ash coughed, getting rid of some congestion in her throat. “Don’t do a Godfrey on me, Florian. Don’t you vanish off out of the company.”

  She surprised a sudden unmonitored expression on Florian’s face; a raw anguish, gone before she could be sure it was anything more than a cynical, brilliant grin.

  “No danger of that.” Florian folded her arms across her body. “So… You’ve solved the immediate military problem. If it works. We get into Dijon. What then?”

  “Then we’re part of the siege.”

  “For how long? Do you think Dijon will hold out? Against those numbers?”

  Ash looked levelly at the Burgundian woman. There will be unease, she thought. Not enough to matter – and not for long. Because it is still Florian.

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” Ash said, with a release of breath and tension, in sudden honesty. “I think I made a shit-lousy mistake in coming here – but once we landed at Marseilles, once we were committed, there hasn’t been a damn thing I can do about it.”

  Floria blinked. “Good God, woman. You’ve been keeping this lot on the road by sheer will-power. And you think we’re wrong to be here?”

  “Like I said on the beach at Carthage – I think we should have sailed for England then.” Ash shivered in the morning cold. “Or for Constantinople, even, with John de Vere, and taken service with the Turk. Got as far away from the Wild Machines as possible, and left the Faris to whatever shit there’s going to be in Burgundy.”

  “Oh, bollocks!” Floria put her fists on her hips. “You? Leave Robert Anselm and the rest of the company here? Don’t make me laugh! We were always coming back here, whatever happened at Carthage.”

  “Maybe. The smart thing to do would be to cut our losses and start again with the men I’ve got here. Except that people don’t sign up with commanders who dump their people.”

  Some internal honesty prompted, unexpectedly: But she’s right, we were always coming back here.

  She squinted into the morning wind, her eyes tearing, thinking, weather’s bad even for November, and that’s a weak sun. And it’s been so cold, south of here, for so long now. There won’t have been a harvest.

  “Too late now,” she said, hearing herself sound almost philosophical. She smiled at Florian. “Now we are here – there isn’t anywhere else to go, except behind the nearest walls! Better dead tomorrow than dead today, right? So you can pick between Dijon falling sometime soon, and the legions up ahead finding us tomorrow…”

  She felt an immense release, as if from a weight, or an unrelenting grip. Fear flooded through her, but she recognised it and rode it; let herself become fully aware, again, that it is not merely the usual business of war that concerns her.

  Floria snorted, shaking her head. “I’ll get my deacons praying. Fix where we’ll be in line of march. Where will you be, on this moonlight flit? In front, as usual?”

  “I won’t be with the company. I’ll join you in the city, before dawn.”

  “You’ll what?”

  Ash beat her cold hands together. Warming circulation pricked at the impacts. Cool, damp air touched her face.

  Her gaze met Florian’s: whimsical, bright, utterly determined.

  “While the company’s making an entry into Dijon tonight, I’m going to get some answers. I’m going to go down to the Visigoth camp and talk to the Faris.”

  IV

  “You’re mad!”

  In the wet, muddy daylight, Ash suddenly grinned to herself. I can still talk to Florian. At least I still have that.

  “No. I’m not mad. Yes: we had a defeat at Carthage. Yes: I needed to think. Yes: I am going to do something.” Half teasing, she added, “Once my banner goes up in Dijon, the Faris will know I’m alive anyway.”

  “So don’t raise it!” Exasperated, unguarded, Floria waved her hands in the air. “Come off it, Ash. Forget chivalry. Keep your banner rolled up. Sneak out when we do leave Dijon! But don’t tell me you’re going out there to try and talk to her!”

  “I could tell you a lot of good reasons why I should talk to a Visigoth army commander.” Ash wiped her muddy hands together, took her sheepskin mittens from her belt, and put them on: still damp and uncomfortable. “We’re mercenaries. I’m expected to do this. I’ve got to look for the best deal. She might just give us a condotta.”

  Florian looked appalled. “I know you’re joking. After Basle? After Carthage? The minute you show your face, they’ll ship you back across the Med! They’ll string you up for the raid! And then Leofric will poke around in what’s left!”

  Ash stretched her arms, feeling the ache in her muscles from the night’s exertions; watching the camp beginning to pack up. “I’d take any help I can get, including Visigoth, if it means getting the company out of here before whatever the Wild Machines have planned for Burgundy starts happening.”

  “You’re nuts,” Floria said flatly.

  “No. I’m not. And I agree about what sort of a reception I’m likely to get. But it’s like you said – I can’t hide from this for ever.”

  Florian’s dirty face scowled.

  “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard you say. You can’t put yourself in that much danger!”

  “Even if we get into Dijon okay, we’re only hiding. Temporarily.” Ash paused. “Florian – she’s the only other person on God’s earth who hears the Stone Golem.”

  In the silence, Ash turned back to find Florian looking at her.

  “So?”

  “So I need to know … if she hears the Wild Machines, too.” Ash held up her hands. “Or if it’s just in my head. I need to know, Florian. You all saw the Tombs of the Caliphs. You all believe me. But she’s the only other person on God’s earth who knows. Who will have heard what I heard!”

  “And if she didn’t?”

  Ash shrugged.

  After a pause, the surgeon asked, “And … if she did?”

  Ash shrugged again.

  “You think she knows something about this that you don’t?”

  “She’s the real one. I’m just the mistake. Who knows what’s different about her?” Ash heard bitterness in her own voice. She cocked a silver brow at the woman surgeon, and deliberately grinned. “And she’s the only one who can tell me I’m not nuts.”

  Shrugging sardonically, Florian muttered, “You’ve been nuts for years!”

  There was nothing unfamiliar in the woman’s affection. Or unfamiliar about her complicit, unverbalised consent. Ash found herself smiling at the dirty, tall woman. “You’re a doctor, you’d know!”

  A sharp thock! made Ash turn her head: she caught sight of Rickard and his slingshot – and tree-bark scarred down to raw, white wood thirty yards away, from his practice shot.

  “If you show yourself,” Florian said, “the Faris won’t be the only one who’ll find out where you are. Carthage; the King-Caliph; the Ferae Natura Machinae.”

  “Yes,” Ash said. “I know. But I have to do it. It’s like Roberto always says – I could be wrong. What use am I, if I’m not sane?”

  At dusk of that day – it came early, from a frozen sky empty of clouds; under which her officers complained lengthily after the announcement of her decision – Ash gave penultimate orders.

  “A first-quarter moon rises about Compline.11 We move then, after mass. If there’s messages from Anselm, send them to me. Call me if it clouds over. Otherwise – I’m getting a couple of hours’ sleep first!”

  A last tallow candle, unearthed from the bottom of a pack, stank and flickered in the command tent as she entered. Rickard stood up, a book in his hands.

>   “You want me to read to you, boss?”

  She has two books remaining, they live in Rickard’s pack: Vegetius and Christine de Pisan.12 Ash walked to the box-bed and flopped down on the cold palliasse and goatskins.

  “Yeah. Read me de Pisan on sieges.”

  The black-haired young man muttered under his breath, reading the chapter headings to himself, holding the book up close to the taper. His breath whitened the air. He wore all his clothes: two shirts, two pairs of hose, a pourpoint, a doublet, and a ragged cloak belted over the top of them. His nose showed red under the rim of his hood.

  Ash rolled over on to her back on her pallet. Damp chill draughts crept in, no matter how tightly the tent-flap was laced down. “At least we didn’t have to eat the mules yet…”

  “Boss, you want me to read?”

  “Yeah, read, read.” Before he could open his mouth, Ash added, “We’ve got a moon just past first quarter; that’s going to give us some light, but it’s rough country out here.”

  “Boss…”

  “No, sorry: read.”

  A minute later she spoke again, a bare few sentences into his reading, and she could not have said what he had read to her about. “Have any messages come out of Dijon yet?”

  “Don’t know, boss. No. Someone would’ve come and said.”

  She stared at the pavilion wheel-spokes. The cold burned her toes, through her boots and footed hose. She rolled over on to her side, curling up. “You’ll have to arm me in two hours. What have they been saying about Dijon?”

  Rickard’s eyes sparkled. “It’s great! Pieter Tyrrell’s lance are blacking their faces. They’re betting they can get into the city before the Italian gunners, because they’ll be dragging Mistress Gunner’s—”

  Ash coughed.

  “—Master Angelotti’s swivel-guns!”

  She rumbled a laugh under her breath.

  “Some of them don’t like it,” Rickard added. “Master Geraint was complaining, over at the mule lines. Are you going to get rid of him like you got rid of Master van Mander?”

  Preparations for the battle of Auxonne, when the sun was still in Leo: it seems a lifetime ago. She barely remembers the Flemish knight’s florid face.