Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  Jesus! Now we’re in here – what have I done?

  Leaning out, looking west, she picked out the burned ruins of great wooden pavises, that had sheltered at least four massive bombards. The cannon seemed apparently untouched – their distant crews beginning to crawl out of their bashas and poke campfires into more life.

  Frost limned every blade of grass. Amid the dozens of intact mangonels, ballistae, trebuchets and cannon, she saw a few blackened areas of grass and collapsed canvas. White-haired slaves desultorily cleared up the mess, cold-fingered and slow; she heard nazirs bellowing at them. Their voices came clear across the cold air.

  Glancing east, she saw no sign whatsoever of any attack there, not even burned canvas.

  Two attacks didn’t even dent them.

  She leaned forward, feeling her men crowding in beside her; moving her gaze to the north.

  Men are small, three or four hundred yards away, beyond the trenches and outside bow- and arquebus-shot; but livery is still visible. She could not make out the Faris’s Brazen Head livery on any of them. Wind-tears blurred the edges of pavilions and the colours of pennants. She lifted her head, looking further out from the walls.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, there’s thousands of them!”

  Down on the Visigoth horse lines, men fetching feed stopped, listening to the sudden noise from Dijon. The low morning sun shone on Carthaginian spear-points, and men’s helmets, on the camp perimeter. The sound of barked orders came clear across the open air. Down towards the western bridge, half-hidden by pavises, men sprinted to serve guns – a puff of white smoke came from the muzzle of one mortar, and perceptible seconds later, the thump! of its firing.

  Fat crows flew up from camp middens.

  “And a good morning to you rag-heads, too!” Rochester growled, beside her, in profile against the yellow eastern sky.

  Ash squinted, head whipping round, not able to see where the mortar shot hit – lobbed somewhere inside the burned streets of Dijon, back of her.

  Another flat thwack! brought her head back around. Ten yards down the parapet, the crowd of men folded in on itself; a swirl of figures in belted gowns and chaperon hats; one voice raised in high, shocked agony. The constant shout of the crowd lining the walls drowned him out.

  Shit. There is a whole legion out there. Oh, shit…

  No wonder the Faris thinks that all a ‘betrayal’ would save her is time.

  A man-at-arms in Lion livery leaned precariously out from under the hoardings, yelling down at the frost-glittering tents of the Visigoths, four hundred yards out from the walls, spit spraying out from his mouth:

  “Your city’s fucked! Your Caliph’s dead! How about that, motherfuckers!”

  A great cheer went up along the walls of Dijon. With Rochester and the banner at her shoulder, Ash pushed in close. The man-at-arms, a redhead she remembered as one of Ned Mowlett’s men, all but lost his grip on the brattice-strut he held. A mate hauled him back.

  “Pearson!” Ash thumped him on armoured shoulders, hauling him around to look at the first one of the men who had stayed in Dijon – filthy with mud, straggle-haired, and with a healing scar across one eyebrow.

  “Boss! ” Pearson bellowed; sweating, surprised, happy, transcendent. “Those fuckers are done for, aren’t they, boss?”

  His gold-and-blue livery was unaltered, her own device of the Lion Passant Guardant5; nothing added or subtracted by Robert Anselm. She contented herself with another slap on his shoulder.

  A second priest called, “Deo gratias, the Visigoths and their stone demons are thrown down!”

  Two yards away, a Burgundian man-at-arms yelled down, “We didn’t even have to be there! You’re outside our city, and our walls stand! We didn’t even have to go to Carthage and it’s fucking flattened!”

  Someone further down the north city wall blew a herald’s horn, wildly. More men-at-arms entered the crowd, unshaven men in Lion livery pushing through the press towards the frost-stiff blue-and-gold of the Lion Affronté on her personal banner. Behind them, men in rich gowns with their faces full of sleep – sergeants with staffs, constables, burghers – made vain attempts to clear the parapet. The deep flat crack of mortar fire sounded again: two shots, five, and then a slow, erratic succession of explosions.

  The soldiers, starting with the Lion company men clustered around her, leaned out off the brattices and started to chant:

  “Carthage fell down! Carthage fell down! Carthage fell down!”

  “But it—” wasn’t quite like that! Ash mentally protested.

  A company archer, one of Euen Huw’s men, shouted, “Yer Caliph’s dead and yer city fell down!”

  “But it was a quake—”

  Floria del Guiz’s voice, at her ear, bellowed, “They know that!”

  Despite the precariousness of being an exposed target, Ash could only grin helplessly as the sound grew, a chant that was deep, male voices bellowing, loud enough to reach the enemy lines and then some; and she put her face up to the dawn breeze, grinning out at more Visigoth, men who began to collect along the front line, muttering and gathering in groups.

  “’Ware trebuchets!” Thomas Rochester touched her arm and pointed west across the Suzon river to the big counterweight siege weapons, their crews visible now, tiny figures staring at the city walls. Eighty or ninety per cent of the engines undamaged, she thought.

  “Jesus, this lot aren’t bright! You couldn’t shift ‘em with bombards!” Ash shrieked back. “Let ’em have their shout, Tom, then start moving them back down off the walls! I want us across the broken ground and out of here!”

  “THE CALIPH IS DEAD! CARTHAGE FELL DOWN!”

  The wind shifted, coming from the east as the sun rose up. She focused into the distance – up on the northern slopes, above the water meadows, an empty shell stood: nothing now but fire-blackened stone. I wonder what happened to Soeur Simeon and the nuns?

  Ash’s throat tightened. She wiped at her watering eyes.

  Half the population of Dijon up on the defences now: despite the rapid tremble of the stone parapet underfoot, where mangonel boulders struck home against the outside wall.

  “They’re getting the range!” she yelled to Floria, her mouth at the woman’s ear to be heard over bells, men shouting, women shouting, children shrieking.

  “THE CALIPH IS DEAD! CARTHAGE FELL DOWN!”

  “But Caliph Theodoric died before the earthquake!” Floria yelled back, her mouth now to Ash’s ear, warm damp breath feathering her skin. “And they elected another one!”

  “And Gelimer’s still with us. These people don’t care about that. Oh, the hell with it! The Caliph is dead!” Ash raised her voice: “Carthage fell down!”

  Several men in armour and Burgundian livery jackets came pushing through the crowd, towards her banner. Ash let herself down off the masonry. She inclined her head, bowing a speechless greeting.

  Behind the men, squads of foot soldiers began clearing the walls, heaving people back from the brattices. She blinked, hearing the faintest diminution in the sound-volume. Two of the men she recognised from the summer: an elderly chamberlain-counsellor of the Duke’s court, and a nobleman she knew to be one of Olivier de la Marche’s aides.

  “It’s her!” the chamberlain-counsellor exclaimed.

  “Messire—” Ash managed to remember his name: “—Ternant. What can I do for you? Tom, get these bloody idiots down from here! Green Christ on a crutch, I didn’t get them back here to have them shot off the walls! Sorry, Messire Ternant, what is it?”

  “We expected Captain Anselm!” de la Marche’s aide bellowed, his face a picture of sheer incredulity.

  “Well, you’ve got Captain Ash!” She shifted as the first of her men filed back off the brattices, boots booming on the hollow wooden floors.

  “In that case – it is your presence that the siege council requests, Captain!” Ternant bawled, his voice cracking with age and effort.

  “‘Siege council’—? Never mind!” Ash nodded
her head emphatically. “I’ll come! I’m settling my men here in their quarters first! When? What time?”

  “The hour before Terce.6 Demoiselle, we are hearing such rumours—”

  She waved him to silence, in the face of the wall of sound. “Later! I’ll be there, Messire!”

  “CARTHAGE FELL DOWN! CARTHAGE FELL DOWN!”

  “I give up.” Floria stood up on her toes, grabbing at Thomas Rochester’s mail-shirted shoulder for support. She bellowed towards the open air, “Down with the Caliph! Carthage fell down!”

  Thomas Rochester gave a snort. Abruptly, the dark Englishman caught Ash’s eye, and pointed. At the standards set up at different points in the enemy camp, she realised. Standing aside to let the last of her men past, she looked out from the walls at the tents Rochester indicated.

  Frankish pavilions, not Visigoth barracks.

  “What? Oh. Uh-huh … oh, right…”

  Five hundred yards away, men were gathering in a businesslike way under a great white standard, bearing a lamb surrounded by rays of gold. It flapped in the frosty air on the eastern side of the camp.

  Under the sound of bells, impacting rocks, and the chant that had got up a rhythm now – the men and women of Dijon struggling not to be herded off the walls – Thomas Rochester yelled, “We can kick his ass, boss!”

  Besides Agnus Dei’s standard, in what was obviously the mercenaries’ part of the Visigoth camp, Ash picked out the banner of Jacobo Rossano – wondered who was paying him after Emperor Frederick.! – and half a dozen other small mercenary companies. One standard, a naked sword, teased her memory.

  “Shit, that’s Onorata Rodiani.”

  “What?” Floria screamed.

  “I said, that’s Onorata—” Ash broke off. The rising wind unwrapped the standard next to Rodiani’s. It was the ripped, scarred and triumphant banner carried on to a hundred fields by Cola de Monforte and his sons.

  The surgeon’s voice, at her ear, breathed, “The bastards! Those are Burgundian mercenaries!”

  “Not any more! He must have gone over, after Auxonne! That’s a lot of men out there. Cola doesn’t have a company. He has a small army.” Ash narrowed her eyes against the slanting brilliance from the east. “Looks like nobody gives a shit for this city’s chances—”

  Floria’s hand tightened on her arm. Ash glanced where the surgeon stared, into the now-sunlit Visigoth camp. When she saw it, she did not know how she had missed it before. In the Frankish tents back of Monforte’s pavilions, a silver and blue banner: the Ship and Crescent Moon.

  “Joscelyn van Mander,” she said bleakly.

  Thomas Rochester swore. “Fucking Flemish cock-sucker! What’s he doing out there?”

  “Ah, shit, Tom! He’s a mercenary!”

  A stench of wood-smoke filled the air. She winced, as the paving stones underfoot juddered; and glanced towards the north-west gate. The nearest brattice was on fire.

  “Fucking incendiaries now!”

  The rhythm of sound broke: men and women only too eager, now, to struggle down the steps and off the walls. Distantly, the creaking of siege-weapons being wound up for a shot came to her. In the Visigoth artillery park, the red sandstone arms of a golem glinted, raising the great trebuchet counterweight at four times the speed of a human crew.

  A succession of badly aimed, jagged missiles slammed into the wall above the gate; a merlon flew apart in stone fragments, and the press of bodies lurched, cannoning into each other, screams now audible above the noise.

  And just in case the Visigoths also have a gunner who can show you the brick in the castle wall that he’s about to hit—

  “Time to go,” Ash murmured, turning, as Rochester raised the banner.

  “No: look!” Floria took another step forward, until she stood pressed against the hide-covered wooden frame of the brattice. Ash heard the surgeon’s harsh intake of breath. “Sweet Green Christ…”

  Far over, under the pale sun, the distances of the river valley were plainly visible. On the far side of the Suzon and its bridge, people on foot plodded to the south. Too far to see who they were – peasants and craftsmen, goodwives and maids, a few deserting men-at-arms, maybe; maybe even a priest. Indistinguishable figures wrapped in cloaks and blankets, plodding, head-down in the biting wind; small figures – children or old men – huddled by the side of the road, some still crying out to those that had left them.

  Hungry, frozen, exhausted, the column of walking refugees snaked on down the track, no end of them in sight.

  “They’re still coming,” Floria breathed, almost inaudible over the roaring mob hanging off the walls.

  Rather less interested than her surgeon, Ash grabbed Florian’s arm, pulling her back from the wall. “Let’s go!”

  “Ash, those aren’t soldiers, those are people!”

  “Well, don’t sweat it; the rag-heads are leaving them alone. We appear to still have some of the rules of war operating…” The press of bodies on the parapet lessened. Ash tugged the surgeon towards the steps, in the wake of her men; Rochester and the banner at her shoulder.

  Shrill, Floria yelled, “I expect they come down and rape and rob a few, when it gets boring in camp – don’t you think, girl?”

  “Depends how good her discipline is. I’d want them concentrating on getting inside these walls, if it was my troops.” Ash looked back over her shoulder at the distant road, and the thick clogging masses of people.

  “You know what it is?” Floria said suddenly. “They’re heading south. To the border at Auxonne. Look at them, they’d rather go under the Sunless Sky than stay here!”

  Too far, up here on the walls, to hear human voices; only the shriek of ungreased axles came up through the still air, and the scream of a driven packhorse. A dot – a person – lurched and fell down, got up on their feet, fell again, got up and trudged on.

  Floria said, “Darkness or sun, they don’t care where they’re going. They just want to get away from here. These are Duchy people, townsmen, farmers, villagers, craftsmen; they’re just going, Ash. They don’t care what’s in front of them.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s in front of them – starvation!”

  The crack! of a small-calibre cannon: a ball thwacked off the eastern gate-tower. A huge roar of contempt and adrenalin went up from the remaining people crowding the walls:

  “THE CALIPH IS DEAD! CARTHAGE FELL DOWN!”

  In a moment of stillness, Ash looked out from the walls at the refugees. Despite what Florian said, she could see people trudging north, too, further into Burgundian territory; into sunlit cold and famine.

  That could be us. I can’t feed my people, not out there, there’s no land to live off. The war-chest won’t buy anything if there’s nothing for money to buy. There was no harvest: we’re due a famine. And out there it’s dark, and cold. We’d fall apart as a company inside three days.

  Let’s hope it’s better in here.

  For however long this lasts.

  Because the only way out of here is treachery.

  Ash clapped her hand on Rochester’s shoulder. “Okay, if the civilians want to get themselves killed, fine – we’re leaving! Lions, to the banner!”

  There was a pleasing amount of legionary discipline in the way that men wearing Lion livery detached themselves from the crowds to follow her banner, tugging in the wind above their heads. They scrambled across the devastation, into city streets again – away from the chanting crowd that now sank to its knees in prayer, still deafened by celebratory bells.

  “Company billet’s this way, boss!” Rochester pointed south-east into winding streets.

  “Let’s go!”

  Green Christ, this place has been battered about!

  They shouldered their way down narrow cobbled streets, under heavily timbered overhanging buildings. Glass and tiles covered the cobbles, clattering underfoot, slippery in the frost. Coming out into the open again – crossing a bridge into a square, beside the walls of silent mills – she recognised
it. In the summer, a dozen Burgundian noblemen had reined in their horses here, to let a duck and her chicks waddle past to the water.

  The memory took all her attention for a second; not until Rochester called the men to a halt did she rouse from her reverie, focus eyes gritty with lack of sleep, and realise she was at the company billet.

  The shadow of a square, squat tower blocked out what November sun there was. Over its surrounding wall, she saw it was old, brutal in its construction; with featureless sides and narrow arrow-slit windows. Four, maybe five storeys high.

  She opened her mouth to speak. A gust of wind down the cramped street snatched the breath out of her mouth. She swallowed, eyes running in the sudden, bitter blast.

  One of the men-at-arms swore and stepped back as a roof-tile fell, hit, and sprayed fragments across the dung-covered cobbles. “Jesu! Fuckin’ storms coming again!”

  Ash recognised him as another of the men who had stayed behind in Dijon; one of di Conti’s Savoyards, remaining after his captain quit. She looked up, beyond the tower’s flat roof, at a sky that was rapidly losing morning clarity, turning grey and cold. “Storms?”

  “Since August, boss,” Thomas Rochester said, at her elbow. “I’ve got reports. They’ve been having foul weather here. Rain, wind, snow, sleet; and storms every two or three days. Bad storms.”

  “That’s… I should have thought of that. Shit.”

  A darkness freezing Christendom beyond the Burgundian border – the border that, here, is barely forty miles away.

  The body of air around her shifted. Even down between these buildings, it tugged hard at the silk of her rectangular banner, the material cracking loudly in the wind. A scurry of white dust – almost too powdery to be snow – blew into her face. Under velvet and steel, her warm flesh shivered at the sudden chill.

  “Son of a bitch. Welcome to Dijon…”

  It got a laugh, as she knew it would. Only Florian’s face remained serious. Despite reddening cheeks and nose, the tall woman spoke with gravitas: