Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  “Yes, Demoiselle-Captain.” There was no emotion in his voice.

  She turned to Vitteleschi. “Let’s go.”

  The men parted, letting her back through; almost all drawn up to their unit pennants now. She walks among men in Burgundian livery, Lion livery; men talking in low tones, and over it all now the screaming and shrieks of wounded men, men lying out between them and the ranks of the Visigoth legions, crawling, or sprawled on their faces. One woman, helmet gone, vomited; blood spidering down over her forehead.

  Shit, is that Katherine Hammell? No: one of her archers, though—

  The Visigoth doctors and their assistants are already moving out of the opposing army. Some Frankish voices went up in protest. The legionary medics bend down by men, leaving some, calling hurdles for others.

  They do not distinguish between their own men and hers.

  “Send a runner into the town. Tell the monks to come out here and help see to these men. No, I don’t know that it’s safe! Tell them to get their fucking arses out here! Get Blanche’s women, too.”

  She looked for de la Marche’s banner.

  “Back to the city. The way we came in. Muster on the ground outside the walls.”

  She walked on past the Burgundians, Rickard with the standard, Elias with the spear, and Vitteleschi and his men behind her. Ranks parted in front of her. Thin ranks. She glanced back, saw few, very few; thought shit I don’t believe it, we can’t have lost that many! and found herself walking on to the edge of an area of blackness, even the crushed tents only charcoal frameworks, and men writhing on the baked earth.

  “Get a fucking medic over here!”

  One of Leofric’s robed Visigoths strode past her, in a flurry of cloth, sandals cracking burnt tent-pegs and bones underfoot. The hood fell back, and she saw a woman doctor, pinch-faced; calling out to her assistants in medical Latin.

  I know her.

  “You.” The Visigoth woman’s voice sounded in front of her. She opened eyes she had not been aware of shutting; recognised the face, too, and the voice saying the gate of the womb is all but destroyed.

  “I will give your slave here a salve for your eyes; they will swell, otherwise. You have missed the worst of the burn, but do not neglect—”

  “Fuck off.” She pushed past the woman.

  She stopped at a pile of men charred black, and a leg in blue hose. The body lay with head downhill, lower than its feet. The tail of a yellow-and-blue livery jacket showed, unburned. Vitteleschi gave a short order. Two billmen knelt, and turned the blackened body over. After a second, he said, “Captain Campin.”

  Under Adriaen Campin’s body, his lance-leader was almost unburned. Willem Verhaecht’s eyes were open in his florid face, not blinking at the sky’s brightness. Something, most likely the hand of a golem, had punched into his body through his breastplate, and pulled one lung out on to the torn metal. She stared for ten breaths, and the red-black flesh did not twitch, did not beat.

  Take teams: take out the golems: take out their Greek Fire weapons.

  “Check and see if anyone’s alive here.”

  The sunlight showed her tears pouring down Vitteleschi’s lined, filthy face.

  “Shit, just do it,” she said, her voice weak; and he nodded, still weeping, and bent over to pull away crisped arms and torsos, that fell apart in his hands like a roasted joint from the oven.

  The Lion standard and the Burgundian standard came slowly down the slope behind her, ranks of men under them. Back down the slope: past the second swathe cut by Greek Fire, and here—

  A hand grabbed at her armoured knee. She looked down at the gauntlet against her poleyn, and into the face of a man recognisable only because he wore livery with a lion’s head on it, his own face smashed, unrecognisable. Bubbles blew in the blood where his mouth had been. Sitting next to him, a billman held the stump of his right wrist with his left hand, his face glassy and white.

  “Medics!” Vitteleschi bawled back over his shoulder. “Get the doctors down here!”

  The standards came on. Men began to pick their way. The ground for ten yards was covered in foot-knights in her livery, some moving, some not, all bloody. She took one step aside and her sabaton kicked a man’s arm, severed at the elbow.

  A faint voice called for help. Her gaze still on the bloody, unrecognisable man – it’s de Tréville, it’s Henri, I know his armour – she backed up, turned around, saw Thomas Rochester’s crossbowman Ricau kneeling on the ground, with Thomas Rochester sitting up braced against him.

  “Boss,” the man Ricau said. “Help me with him, boss, I don’t know what to do!”

  “Rickard, get some of those fucking medics here—”

  “Runner, boss – there aren’t enough here yet—”

  Stiff, she got down on one knee, in frozen earth now muddy with fluids and excrement. She put out her hand, and hesitated. Vitteleschi squatted beside her, a piece of bloodied cloth in his hand – torn-off livery – and reached out. Ricau took it, wiped gingerly at the man leaning back against him, and Rochester screamed. His sound pierced the semi-silence of the field; ended in something like and not like a sneeze, an explosion of blood.

  “It’s his eye!” Ricau wailed.

  He had got his commander’s sallet off. Two black oval holes streamed blood down Rochester’s face and on to his mail standard, and down his breastplate. Nothing of his nose was left, only a fragment of cartilage. A shattered white splinter of bone jutted out of the red mess of his right eye – his own bone, she realised, from his shattered nose.

  The men plodding back down the hill slowed, looking down at Rochester, casting numb or angry looks, trying not to breathe in the stench of shit that rose up from him.

  “Get a grip.” She licked at her lips. “Keep him still, and quiet. Put the cloth there, soak it up – let him breathe. Tom. Tom? Help’s coming. We’ll get you back. Fuck—” she straightened and sprang up, “has anybody got any wine? Any water?”

  Word went back through the crowd, men feeling at their belts; very few costrels; none, it seemed, with anything left—

  “Here!” Rickard turned away, yelling and waving the Lion banner at white-robed men picking their way across the earth from the massed legions. “Over here!”

  “Shit!” She turned on her heel and walked on among Burgundian units, among broken tents now. She heard panting. Rickard and the banner caught her up. He said something. She kept going. There was an empty space beside her, the men parting and going around Rickard where he knelt down. She stopped.

  Two bodies lay together on the ground, among the stained canvas of a barrack-tent. This is where we broke through to the road: this is where the tent-teams did their stuff.

  A small, squat body lay under his hands. Rickard rolled it over. The head flopped, neck boneless as a dead rabbit. A few strands of yellow hair stuck out under the helmet lining of the open-faced sallet. Blood had run out of eight or nine holes punched through the brigandine.

  “Margaret Schmidt,” another man’s voice said, and she looked up to see Giovanni Petro, and the archer Paolo.

  He shrugged at her implicit question. “’S all that’s left of us.”

  White and glossy-skinned as the wounded, Rickard got back up on to his feet. The banner-staff leaned loosely back across his shoulder.

  “That’s Katherine Hammell,” he said.

  About to speak, she saw he meant not Margaret, but the other body, curled up on the mud in a foetal position. The woman groaned. An arrow stuck out of her mail shirt under her shoulder-blade. A sword stuck through her stomach, the point projecting out of her lower back. Her blood-soaked gauntlets clenched in her spilled intestines.

  “She’s still alive. Get a doctor to her.” And, seeing Rickard’s expression, “Who knows?”

  “We need a miracle!” he wailed.

  A cynical smile almost burst out of her. For a second, she could have screamed, or burst into tears. “That, we can’t manage…”

  A fast pace took her th
rough the marching men, down on to flat ground, out towards the golem-dug trenches encircling the city. She walked stiffly, in silence.

  Fewer bodies here. She stumbled on, momentarily looking across to the gap in the walls, seeing Leofric’s banner, and Anselm’s and Follo’s; and a handful of civilians coming out over the demolished wall—

  “Look out!” Rickard screamed.

  Her foot came down on something soft. She staggered and caught her balance. The man under her feet shrieked and burst into sobs. Black-feathered arrows jutted out of him; alive enough to make a noise, she thought; and then, Euen—!

  The wiry, dark man looked bulky in mail and livery jacket. Bloodstains blotted out the Lion. She knelt down, counted arrow in arm, arrow in face, two arrows in thigh and said, “Euen, hold on!”

  “Shit, boss!” Rickard groaned.

  “If he can shout, he’ll make it—” Her hand, patting him down, examining by touch, froze. She awkwardly peeled back his livery, and hauberk, and took her hand away thick with hot, red blood pouring out of his groin or belly, she couldn’t see where. “Get somebody here.”

  Rickard sprinted.

  She stayed pressing her whole weight against his wound until Visigoth medics arrived, saw him on to a hurdle, screaming at the men to get him to a hospital tent. She stood up, hands dripping, watching the last of her force moving past her and over the improvised bridges of the ditch.

  The defences are manned again now: Visigoth soldiers in coats-of-plates and helmets gazing at her, over mail aventails. Soft, accented voices went up into the still air; and a nazir snapped a command. She felt how many of the bows were surreptitiously lifted, how many of them exchanged glances, thinking close enough to kill the cunt.

  She reached out a hand to Rochester’s sergeant, Elias, and took the heavy-laded spear from him. An unsteady oak door and two window-shutters groaned under her weight as she walked across the ditch. Rickard stumbled after her.

  Yeah, we made it across the siege trenches.

  Out of the walls, bridge the ditch, flatten the tents, find the roads through. And they must have found Gelimer by his banner. I knew he’d have to put it up, to command. I knew he’d break and run. And Jonvelle stopped him on the bridge. Some billman or foot-knight killed him. I knew they would.

  I knew.

  Who needs the Lion’s voice?

  She glanced back, seeing more Visigoth faces at the trenches. The Lion banner above her, she felt herself their focus; like a player on a pageant wagon, visible to thousands.

  Men and women still limped off the field behind her, forming up in stunned silence into their muster-lines. Except that it is not a line, it’s a ragged clump of men here, another there; nothing that even looks like a continuous line; and counting by eye she cannot make it come to more than five hundred men.

  Stunned. As if this were a defeat, not a shocking, beyond-hope victory.

  Behind the ones who can walk come the ones who can walk with help: Pieter Tyrrell with his arm over Jan-Jacob Clovet’s shoulder, Saint-Seigne with two foot-knights carrying him sitting on crossed bill-shafts; an archer with eyes that are a mask of blood, being led. Two more blinded men behind her. A billman, blood squelching in his shoe; no fingers on one hand. A stumbling column of wounded men, mostly still carrying weapons cocked back over their shoulders, coming towards her; so that she sees them as an apparently motionless mass, crusted blades bobbing gently up and down above their heads.

  And then men face-down on hurdles, or with a man at ankles and armpits, gripping and hefting their dead-weight. People who lie still; blood trickling down. People who cry, shriek; appalled, frantic, desolate screams. Fifteen, twenty, forty; more than fifty; more than a hundred. Monks and Visigoth doctors trot between them, giving quick diagnoses; moving to those they can help.

  The thump of a shod horse’s hooves made itself felt through the ground. A Visigoth archer on a chestnut Barb wheeled, a few yards from her. “My lord Leofric has all ready for you.”

  The man sounded not just respectful, but frightened.

  “Tell him… I’ll be there.”

  She stood long enough for the sergeants to bring her the count. Olivier de la Marche moved to her side, on the frozen earth, his great red-and-blue standard behind him; and a few of the centeniers – Lacombe; three more. Saint-Seigne. Carency. Marie. All there are left?

  “Demoiselle-Captain?” De la Marche sounded numb.

  “Three hundred and twelve Burgundians killed. Two hundred and eighty-seven wounded. There are—”

  Rickard, Vitteleschi, and Giovanni Petro looked at her.

  “There are ninety-two of us not killed or wounded. A hundred and eight dead.”

  The Italian captain of archers said, “Shit.” Rickard burst out crying.

  “And another hundred wounded: about two-thirds of them walking wounded. The Lion’s come out of this with less than two hundred of us, and that only if we’re lucky.”

  The bright wind blew cold. Awkwardly, she picked open the buckle of her right gauntlet’s fingerplates, took hold of the wet glove that contained it, dragged her broken ring-finger back into place, and yanked the strap tight again over it, to hold it.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  V

  A cloth of gold carpet covered twenty square yards of the earth below the Byward Tower. An awning covered that. Under it, banners surrounded men at a long table; and she felt the heat of bonfires, walking towards them, kindled for their heat.

  Past the tongues of flame, she looked out from ground level at the wintry sky and the immense siege camp.

  “Mad.”

  De la Marche nodded agreement, with a smile that has already begun to discount the dead and wounded. “But you did it, Demoiselle-Captain! Maid of Dijon! You did it!”

  All she could see as they walked across the earth were mantlets and pavises, and the first peaked roofs of barrack-tents. Nazirs and ’arifs bawled orders, in the trenches and among the tents. It didn’t stop men coming up to stare out at the huge gap in Dijon’s walls. Thousands.

  She shook, suddenly, in her stifling armour; stopped; and could only just manage to signal Rickard to give the banner to Giovanni Petro, and come and unbuckle her bevor. She choked a breath of air in. She felt Rickard ease her helmet off – this is either peace or it isn’t, and I can’t be fucked to bother about assassins now!

  I don’t care.

  The cold air hit her scalp. She scratched left-handed at her hair, ignoring the blood on her gauntlet; and caught sight of her face reflected in the sallet as Rickard held it. A strip of scalded flesh crossed her face, just at the level of her cheekbones, over her scars. Her lower eyelids were swelling. The strip of flesh across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose showed bright pink.

  I’m one of the ninety-two: and it’s little more than luck.

  Robert Anselm strode up, Richard Follo a few steps behind. The dusty Viscount-Mayor seemed dazed. He laughed, low and under his breath, sounding as if it were from pure joy.

  She knows the words that go with that laughter. We’re alive.

  The golden cloth snagged under her sabatons as she strode across it. Six or seven men sat at the long table: Leofric in the centre, Frederick of Hapsburg on his right hand; the French envoys and de Commines on his left; Lebrija, and another qa’id. Other men stood behind them, in coats of plate; one – youngish – with House Leofric’s features.

  She let her gaze go across them all – the Hapsburg Emperor smiling, slightly – and brought it back to the Carthaginian amir Leofric.

  “Not that crazy, are you?” she said in a philosophical tone. “I didn’t think so. Not after I talked to your daughter. Still, kept you alive, I suppose.”

  Now she is grinning, with shock and with exaltation. I should have got someone to sluice my armour down. Drying blood and tissue still cling to it, a stockyard-stink impregnating her clothes. Here she stands, strapped into metal plates: a woman with short, silver, blood-stained hair; ripped Lion livery; sword ba
nging at her hip; carrying a weight in one hand.

  She lifted the weighty object up and slammed it down on the table. Gelimer’s head. Drying liquid made the palm of her gauntlet sticky. The clotted hair pulled, adhering to her glove, yanking at her broken ring-finger. She swore.

  “There’s your fucking ex-Caliph!”

  His head seemed shrunken now: blood drying red-black, white knobs of bone visible in the trailing remnant of spine, a crescent of white under his half-shut lids.

  There was a silence as they looked at it.

  “I must sign the treaty of peace with the Duchess herself.” Leofric frowned. “Will you bring her out of the city?”

  “When we’ve—”

  A deep voice said, “Address the King-Caliph with respect, jund,” and she looked and saw Alderic behind his master; the ’arif not wounded, grinning through his now oiled and braided beard.

  She grinned back at him.

  “When we’ve talked, ‘my lord King-Caliph’,” she said. “When this peace is solid. The most important thing first. You know the Wild Machines. You know what they’re trying to do. I’m going to tell you why they haven’t done it, my lord … my lord Father. I’m going to tell you why the Duchess of Burgundy has to stay alive.”

  Between stopping the fights and fires, and bringing in supplies, almost four days passed. Ash sent riders to the east and the north. After that, she found herself and de la Marche and Lacombe dealing not just with negotiations for food and firewood, but attempting to fill trenches with the dead and the abbey with the casualties of the fighting.

  The ground, iron-hard, would not be dug for graves; Visigoth serfs piled the dead in great red-and-white heaps. If not for Visigoth army doctors, wounds and cold would have made the death total even higher.

  She visited her own injured men; wept with them.