Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  Cold sweat slicked Ash’s palms. Dry-mouthed, she asked, “What do you hear, Faris?”

  “I hear a heretic priest, persuading me that I should betray my religion and my King-Caliph. I hear a heretic priest telling me that my machina rei militaris is not to be trusted—”

  On the last word, risen an octave, she cut herself off.

  Almost in a whisper, the Faris finished: “I hear great voices, tormenting a heretic’s soul.”

  Ash, holding her breath, released air slowly and silently through her nostrils. The golems’ perfumed lamps made the atmosphere heavy; both cold and stifling. Aware that one wrong word or gesture could lose it, she said quietly, “A ‘heretic priest’ … yes, it is; it must be. Godfrey Maximillian. I … heard him too.”

  With that, the realisation hit home. She momentarily forgot where she stood; was back in the command tent, her dream of boars and snow fading, hearing a voice—

  It really is him. Godfrey, dead Godfrey; if she hears him too, it has to be!

  She pushed the heel of her hand into her eye-sockets, one after the other, smearing away water. Rapidly, remembering the woman in front of her, she said, “And the ‘great voices’ you hear are the Wild Machines.”

  “A dead heretic, and ancient machine-minds?” The Faris’s perfect face moved in an expression of sardonic humour, fear, forgiveness: all in a second. “And you’ll tell me, too, that I can’t trust the Stone Golem to win my battles for me, now. Ash – what else would you say to me? You’re fighting with the Burgundians.”

  “And if you pay me to fight on the same side as your men,” Ash said steadily, “I’ll tell you exactly the same thing.”

  “I will not trust an enemy!”

  “But you’ll trust the Stone Golem, after this?”

  “Be quiet!”

  The flickering light of oil lamps gleamed on armour, on mail, on the red stone limbs of the golem.

  Godfrey, Ash thought, dazed. But how?

  “I could hire your men,” the Faris said absently, “but not to fight under your command: I would need you elsewhere. Father wants you,” she added. “He told me so, before he grew ill. Sisnandus tells me he still orders your presence.”

  Oh shit, I bet he does!

  “Your ‘father’ Leofric wants to dissect me, to know how you work.” Ash lifted her eyes to discover an expression of bewilderment on the woman’s face. “Didn’t you know that? Probably he’d want it even more badly, now! If you and I can hear a dead man—”

  A voice outside bellowed, “To arms!”

  Oh, Christus, not now! What a time to be interrupted!

  A fist hammered at the outer door of the command building. Ash heard shouting, did not shift her gaze from the Visigoth woman’s face.

  “Maybe,” Ash said, “it isn’t just Leofric and this Sisnandus who want me in Carthage. Do you know who’s giving you orders, Faris?”

  “To arms!” a male voice bawled again, outside the chamber door.

  The Faris swung around, breaking eye-contact with Ash; marched to the door and flung the curtains aside, just before a slave male could do it.

  “Give me a proper report, ’Arif,” she snapped.

  The man-at-arms, with the ’arifs rank on his livery, gasped, “They’re attacking the camp—!”

  “Which perimeter?”

  “South-west. I think, al-sayyid.”2

  “Ah. That will be a diversion. Get me the qa’id for the engineers‘ camp, but first, send a message to alert the qa’id of the east camp. Get me ’Arif Alderic and his troop, here, now. Slaves! Clothe me!”

  She flung back into the room, brushing past Ash, who had to take a step back to keep her balance. Jolted, Ash had time to think, Is that what I look like when I get in gear?

  “I’m not sending you to Carthage, yet. Father will have to wait. I need the city. I’m sending you back to Dijon, jund.” The Faris looked up from the clothing on her bed, with a brief, surprising smile. “With an escort. Just in case you get ambushed on the way.”

  Back to Dijon. Into Dijon!

  A handful of slaves pushed past Ash, two or three of them showing stark surprise and recognition at seeing her. They began to strip robe and shift from the Visigoth general, and dress her from the skin out.

  “You’re giving me an escort?”

  “Dijon is where you are crucial to me, now. I need the city! We will talk again. About these… Wild Machines. And your dead priest. Later.”

  Ash shook her head, spluttering between frustration and anger. “No. Now, Faris. You know what war is! Don’t leave something because you think you can do it tomorrow.”

  The other ’arif rushed back in. “Now they are attacking the eastern perimeter, al-sayyid!”

  Ash opened her mouth, all but said, aloud and incredulously, Two attacks? She shut her mouth again.

  “And that will be the true attack. Get your men to arms! You were a distraction, to allow these sallies out of the city? Well, you may still have your price!” Not waiting for a confirmation, and still with a wicked smile covering her immense weariness, the Visigoth woman put her arms up as her slaves lowered her mail hauberk over her head, wriggling arms and body and neck until the mail snugged down over her body.

  I need another hour with her! Ash thought, frustrated. She wants to talk, I can feel it—

  As a child tied the waist of the hauberk to her belt with aiglettes, the Faris continued:

  “Alderic will take you to the gates once we have contained these attacks. We will talk again – sister.”

  Stunned at the swiftness of it, Ash found herself stumbling out, down steps into the moonlit camp, into a flurry of lanterns, men running with spears and recurved bows, nazirs bawling hoarse orders; all the ordered confusion one might wish to see in a camp surprised by a night-attack. By the time she got her helmet on and her night-vision back, she was being hurried along between two of ’Arif Alderic’s men, boots ringing on the frosted earth, towards the great dark bulk of the city walls of Dijon.

  She can’t just send me off like this! Not without answers—!

  Torches moved outside the impromptu holding-area. Her feet grew numb in her boots.

  From somewhere to the east she heard steel blades slamming together.

  Two attacks? One will be mine. I wonder if Robert’s sent a force out of the sally-gate himself? It’d be like him. Twice the confusion.

  “‘Hurry up and wait’,” she remarked to Alderic’s nazir, a small, spare man in well-worn mail. He said nothing, but he gave a brief smile. No different in this man’s army.

  After an interminable wait, the sounds of combat moved off. Nothing then but torches moving in the Visigoth camp; legionaries on fire-watch shouting in frustration; war-horses neighing from their lines. She considered asking if the cooks had been woken up too; decided against it; found herself almost falling asleep on her feet, the length of the wait blurring in her mind.

  “Nazir!” The ’arif Alderic strode back into the circle of torchlight, nodded abruptly at his men, and they all moved off; Ash in the middle of the eight, the cold forcing her half-sleeping mind back to alertness.

  She stumbled down trenches, behind palisades, the smell of earth and powder thick in her nostrils; then out into the open, beyond the last of the defensive barriers. Ahead, across a wide expanse of blasted, raw earth, torches already began to flare – up on the hoardings hanging out from the battlements, above the north-west gate.

  “Best of luck,” the ’arif said brusquely. Glimpsing Alderic’s face, she saw the last of his guilt-induced kindness.

  He and his men vanished back into the trenches, the darkness, the flames.

  “God damn it!” Ash remarked into the cold air.

  She let me go. Yeah. Because she can. She’s sending me into a siege. Because she wants me to betray Dijon. She doesn’t think I’m going anywhere.

  And she thinks she can get me for Leofric any time…

  “Cow!”

  Ash stopped dead, on the battered,
rutted, rough ground, up to her ankles in mud. Cold wind made her eyes leak tears down her numb, scarred cheeks. Through the helmet’s padding, she could hear the river running somewhere off on her right-hand side; water not yet frozen over. Closer, dancing in her vision, she saw sheer towering walls; and lights in front of her, over the north-west gate of Dijon.

  “Oh, the cow. She’s already got my armour. Now she’s kept my bloody sword, too!”

  A nervous voice came from the parapet above the portcullis and gates. “Sarge, there’s someone out there laughing.”

  Ash wiped her eyes. Godammit, they should have had word about me – fine time to go down to friendly fire!

  “Some crazy rag-‘ead tart,” a second, invisible male voice commented. “You going to go down there and give ’er one?”

  “Yo, the wall!” She walked forward, at an easy pace, into the circle of light now spread by the lanterns; keeping an eye on the combat-ready and twitchy men lining the parapet of the gate above her. She squinted. In the poor light, their livery was unclear.

  “Whose men?” she sang out.

  “De la Marche!” a beer-roughened voice bawled, arrogantly.

  “Who the fuck are you?” another, anonymous, voice demanded.

  Ash looked up at bows, bills; one man in armour with a poleaxe.

  “Don’t for the Green Christ’s sake shoot me now,” she said unsteadily. “Not after what I’ve just been through! Go tell your boss he wants to see me.”

  There was a silence of sheer, dumbstruck amazement.

  “You what?”

  “I said, go tell your boss de la Marche he wants to see me. He does. So open the gate!”

  One of the Burgundian men-at-arms snorted. “Cheeky bitch!”

  “Who is that?”

  “Can’t see, sir. Not in the cloak. It’s a woman, sir.”

  Still, grinning, Ash put her cloak back over her shoulders.

  Over her brigandine, dirty-yellow but perfectly distinct, the livery of the lion Azure shone in the light of their torches.

  A clutch of Burgundian men-at-arms, swords drawn, hustled her through the man-high door cut into Dijon’s great gates; hustled her into darkness, and echoes off masonry, and the smell of sweat and shit and pitch-torches burned down to the socket.

  I’m in! I’m inside the walls!

  The relief of such safety deafened her, for a second, to the voices of men and officers.

  “She could be a spy!” an over-excited billman shouted.

  “A woman dressed as a man? Whore!”

  A lance-leader stuttered, “No, last August I s-saw her in the English Earl’s affinity—”

  She blinked, eyes gradually adjusting to the torchlight in the long tunnel of the gates, and the faint glimmer of light – dawn? torches? – at the arched exit.

  And I’m sane. Or – a smile hidden by helmet and hood – as sane as the Faris, anyway, which may not be saying much.

  Her smile faded.

  And it is Godfrey … dear God: how?

  Ash returned her attention: raised her voice. “I have to find my men—!”

  I’m in. Are they? Fuck!

  And – if we are – now how the hell do I get us out again?

  II

  Growing first light showed her devastation – a shattered no-man’s-land stretching two hundred yards from the north-west gate back into the city, and as far to either side as she could see. Dawn picked out man-high heaps of rubble, the broken beams of bombard-wrecked houses and shops; scarred cobbles, burned thatch; one teetering retaining wall.

  Ash stumbled, between the Burgundian soldiers; the cold wind numbing her scarred cheeks. She spared a glance for heraldry and faces: definitely Olivier de la Marche’s troops. And therefore Charles of Burgundy’s loyal men.

  We were with them at Auxonne, they’ll be assuming we’re still hired on with them—

  But we might just be a damn sight better off selling Dijon to the Visigoths, and heading east to the Sultan and his armies. Mercenaries are always welcome.

  If we’re not all dead out there.

  Noise shocked the air.

  Above Ash’s head, in the chill pre-light before dawn, the bells of Dijon suddenly began to peal out. Church after church, St Philibert and Notre Dame, noise running back from the street where she stood; abbey and monastery, within the city walls; all their great bells pealing out high and low, shrill and clear, shaking the birds up from the roofs and the citizens awake in their houses: the bells of Dijon clamouring out into the morning, cascading with joy.

  “What the fuck—?” Ash yelled.

  The Burgundian officers fell back. She glimpsed Thomas Rochester shoving his way through the pack – Christus, the first familiar face in hours! – battered, not badly injured; safe in the city; an escort of company men-at-arms with him under the tattered Lion standard. Seeing her, he signalled, and one of the men-at-arms unrolled and raised her personal banner beside it.

  “Where the fuck have you been?” Ash bellowed.

  The dark Englishman shouted something, inaudible in the Dijon street for the noise. Pushing in close, shoulder to shoulder, he lowered his mouth to her ear, and she thumbed up one side of her sallet to hear him shouting:

  “…got in! They swam rope-bridges across at the south gate! Where the bridge has been mined?”

  The scent of summer dust is suddenly heavy in her memory: she recalls riding into Dijon by that bridge, at the side of John de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Into a white, fair city.

  Floria del Guiz appeared from behind Rochester, yelling; Ash read her lips rather than heard her above the bells and the shouting: “News has got out! I thought we’d never find you!”

  “Where’s Robert? What news?”

  The woman grinned: might have said, “Sometimes you’re slow!”

  Voices shrieked at windows above Ash’s head. She glanced up, listening – the earth still darker than the lightening sky – and a body cannoned into her and Thomas Rochester together. She caught her balance, shoving back at a burly man tumbling out of his scarred wooden front door, a fat woman fumbling at his shoulder and tying his points; two small children howling underfoot.

  “Jesus wept!”

  Amazed, Ash signalled to the banner, attempting to back off across the trebuchet-battered cobbled streets. Among the familiar military silhouettes in the crowd – pinch-waisted doublets, hose, bill-points and sallets – there were civilian men bundling themselves into their gowns, cramming on their tall felt hats: neighbour shrieking to neighbours, all questions, all demands.

  “Find me Roberto!” Ash directed Thomas Rochester, at battlefield-pitch. The Englishman nodded, and signalled to the men-at-arms.

  Now bodies pressed up against Ash from all sides. Their breath whitened the air; the smell of old sweat and dirt filled her nostrils. She shoved. Hopeless! she thought. There was no way to move without using force. Rochester looked back at her and raised his shoulders, in the press of bodies. She shook her head at him, ruefully, almost relaxing into the chaos; still dazzled by the implicit safety of the city’s towering walls.

  The press of bodies swayed against her; the narrow street spilling people out into the no-man’s-land of demolished streets and burned-out houses. Not all civilians. Ash noted; Burgundian-liveried men in mail and plate, or in archer’s jacks, were also running out across the bombarded ground, towards the northwest gate and walls of the city. The pressure of the crowd began to push her inexorably back in that direction.

  “Okay, guys! Listen up! Better find out what the fuss is…”

  The aches of the night’s exertions, and the lack of sleep, blurred her mind. It was a minute before she realised she and her escort were stomping up stone steps – up to the walls, in the wake of armed men; deafened still by the bells.

  Is this…?

  She automatically glanced back down the flight of stone steps, looking for a house with a bush hanging from it, to signify an inn. Is this where Godfrey came to me, on the walls of Dijon, and told
me he wanted me?

  There were no undamaged buildings below: everything at the foot of the wall was a mess of beams, broken plaster, scrambled roof tiles, and abandoned furniture; and masonry scorched black.

  No: we must have been further down the west wall, I remember looking down at the southern bridge…

  Wry humour made her smile; there was nothing other than cynicism and adrenalin to keep her going now:

  …The same day I saw Fernando in the Duke’s palace, was it? Or the day we beat up Florian’s aunt? Christus!

  She crowded between a priest and a tanner and a nun, pushing her way towards the crenellations, where the soldiers were leaning out under the wooden brattices3 and shouting down off the city’s north wall.

  At her elbow, a monk in green robes bellowed, “It’s a miracle! We have prayed, and it has been granted to us! Deo gratias!”

  To Rochester and Floria del Guiz, impartially, Ash bawled, “What the fuck is this?”

  Nearly Prime4, on the morning of the fifteenth of November, 1476: Ash tastes the chill of winter in her mouth, on the wind that blows from the northeast. She has time to notice the streaming lines of people running up to the walls – used to estimating numbers on the field, she thought: the better part of two thousand men, woman and children. Leaning into an embrasure, she touched her hand to the walls above Dijon’s north-west gate, feeling their protection.

  She cupped her gauntlet, shielding her eyes from the sun that rose on her right hand, listening for what was being so rhythmically shouted. The sight in front of her put it clear out of her mind.

  A greater ‘town’ surrounds the walls of Dijon now – the town that is the Visigoth siege-camp. Clear in the daylight, it has its own streets and muster-grounds; its own turf-roofed barracks and Arian chapels and army markets. Two months is long enough to make them seem frighteningly established and permanent. Rank upon rank of weather-worn, bleached tents stretch out, too, into the white-misted distance. They cover all the acres between Dijon and the forests to the north.

  Cold air making her eyes water, Ash let her gaze travel across the sweep of the Visigoth camp: pavises, shelters; fenced siege-engine parks; saps and trenches snaking towards the walls of the town … and thousands upon thousands of armed men.