by Mary Gentle
“That’s all the guy told me, boss!”
Ash stuffed her gauntlets into her inverted helmet and tucked the helmet under her arm. “Okay. Rickard, get my command lance together. Fast. Master surgeon, let’s go. No.” She halted, boot-heels skidding on glassy summer grass. “Florian. You go and change out of those clothes!”
The surgeon looked amused. “And I suppose I’m the only one?”
Ash surveyed her armour. The shining metal was brown now with drying blood. “I can’t get out of harness in time. Rickard, get me a bucket!”
A few minutes saw her armour sluiced down, head to foot; the warm water, even the dampness of her soaked arming doublet, welcome in the noonday heat. Ash wrung out her thick, yard-long mane of hair between her hands, flung it dripping over her shoulder, and set off at a fast stride for the centre of the camp, her squire running back to the Lion Azure camp with her messages.
“You’re either up for a knighting,” Robert Anselm growled, as she arrived, “or an almighty bollocking. Look at ’em!”
“They’re here to watch something, all right…”
An unusually large crowd waited outside the Emperor’s four-chambered striped pavilion tent. Ash glanced around as she joined them. Noblemen. Young men in the V-fronted laced doublets of high fashion, with particoloured hose; bareheaded and with long curls. All wore breastplates at the least. The older men sweated in pleated full-length formal gowns and rolled hats. This square of grass in the camp centre was clear of horses, cattle, women, bare-arsed babies playing, and drunken soldiers. No one dared infringe the area around the yellow and black double-eagle standard. It smelled, nonetheless, pleasantly of war-horse droppings and sun-dried rushes.
Her officers arrived.
The sun dried her from her armour through to her arming doublet. Enclosed in form-fitting metal, she found the padded clothing underneath drank up all her sweat; left her not so much hot as unable to get air into her lungs. I would have had time to change. It’s always hurry-up-and-wait!
A broad, squarish, bearded man in his thirties strode up, brown robe flapping about his bare feet. “Sorry, Captain.”
“You’re late, Godfrey. You’re fired. I’m buying a better class of company clerk.”
“Of course. We grow on Trees, my child.” The company priest adjusted his cross. He was deep-chested, substantial; the skin around his eyes creased from far too many years spent under open skies. You would never have guessed from his deadpan expression how long Godfrey Maximillian had known her, or how well.
Ash caught his brown-eyed gaze, and tapped a bare fingernail on the helmet tucked under her arm. Metal clicked impatiently. “So what do your ‘contacts’ tell you – what’s Frederick thinking?”
The priest chuckled. “Tell me someone in the last thirty-two years who’s ever known that!”
“Okay, okay. Dumb question.” Ash planted her spurred and booted feet apart, surveying the Imperial nobles. A few of them greeted her. There was no movement from inside the tent.
Godfrey Maximillian added, “I understand there are six or seven fairly influential Imperial knights in there now, griping to him about Ash always thinking she can attack without orders.”
“If I hadn’t attacked, they’d be griping about contract soldiers who take the money but won’t risk their lives in a fight.” Ash added, under her breath, nodding to the only other contract commander outside the Emperor’s tent, the Italian Jacobo Rossano, “Who’d be a mercenary captain?”
“You would, madonna,” her Italian master gunner, Antonio Angelotti, said. His startlingly fair curls and clear-skinned face made Angelotti stand out in any crowd, and not just for his proficiency with cannon.
“That was a rhetorical question!” She glared at him. “You know what a mercenary company is, Angelotti?”
Her master gunner was interrupted by the arrival of an only-slightly cleaner and better dressed Florian de Lacey, on the heels of Ash’s remark.
“Mercenary company? Hmm.” Florian offered, “A troop of loyal but dim psychopaths with the ability to beat up every other thick psychopath in sight?”
Ash raised her brows at him. “Five years, and you still haven’t got the hang of being a soldier!”
The surgeon chuckled. “I doubt I ever will.”
“I’ll tell you what a mercenary company is.” Ash jabbed her finger at Florian. “A mercenary company is an immense machine that takes in bread, milk, meat and wine, tentage, cordage and cloth at one end, and gives out shit, dirty washing, horse manure, trashed property, drunken vomit and broken kit at the other end. The fact that they sometimes do some fighting is entirely incidental!”
She stopped for breath and to lower her voice. Her eyes gazed around the men there as she spoke, picking out liveries, identifying noble lords, potential friends, known enemies.
Still nothing from the Emperor’s tent.
“They’re a gaping maw that I have to shove provisions into, each day and every day; a company is always two meals from dissolution. And money. Let’s not forget money. And when they do fight, they produce wounded and sick men who have to be looked after. And they don’t do anything useful while they’re getting well! And when they are well, they’re an ill-disciplined rabble who beat up the local peasantry. Argghhhh!”
Florian offered his costrel again. “That’s what you get for paying eight hundred men to follow you.”
“They don’t follow me. They allow me to lead them. It’s not the same thing at all.”
In quite a different tone, Florian de Lacey said quietly, “They’ll be fine, Ash. Our esteemed Emperor won’t want to lose a sizeable mercenary contingent of his army.”
“I just hope you’re right.”
A voice not many feet behind her said, completely unselfconsciously, “No, my lord, Captain Ash isn’t here yet. I’ve seen her – a butch, mannish creature; bigger than a man, in fact. She had a waif of a girl with her, when I saw her in the north-west quarter of our camp – one of her ‘baggage train’ – whom she caressed, quite disgustingly! The girl was shrinking from her touch. That is your ‘woman-soldier’ commander for you.”
Ash opened her mouth to speak, registered Florian de Lacey’s raised eyebrows, and did not turn to correct the unknown knight. She moved a few steps away, towards one of the older Imperial captains in yellow and black livery.
Gottfried of Innsbruck inclined his head to Ash. “Good skirmish.”
“Hoped we might get reinforced from the town.” Ash shrugged. “But I guess Hermann of Hesse is not coming out to attack.”
The Imperial knight Gottfried talked with his eyes on the entrance to the Emperor’s pavilion. “Why should he? He’s held out eight months without our help, when I wouldn’t have given him eight days. Not a little free city, against the Burgundians.”
“A little free city that’s rebelling against its ‘rightful ruler’, Archbishop Ruprecht,” Ash said, allowing a large degree of scepticism into her tone.
Gottfried chuckled loudly. “Archbishop Ruprecht is Duke Charles’s man, Burgundian to the core. That’s why the Burgundians want to put him back in control of Neuss. Here, Captain Ash, you might like this one – Ruprecht was this Duke’s father’s candidate for the archbishopric; you know what Ruprecht sent the late Duke Philip of Burgundy as a gift of gratitude when he got the job? A lion! A real live lion!”
“But not a blue one,” a light tenor voice interrupted. “They say he sleeps like a lion, their Duke Charles, with his eyes open.”
Turning to look at the young knight who had spoken, formulating an answer, she suddenly thought, Don’t I know you from somewhere?
It would not be unusual to recognise a German knight from some other camp, some other campaigning season. She took him in superficially in a glance: a very young man, hardly more than her own age; long-legged and rangy, with a width to his shoulders that would fill out in a year or two. He was wearing a Gothic sallet, which even with the visor up hid most of his face; leaving her to price rich doublet and hose pied
in green-and-white, high leather riding boots pointed up under the skirts of his doublet, and a knight’s spurs.
And a very fancy fluted Gothic breastplate for a man who hadn’t been in any skirmishes today.
Two or three hard young men-at-arms with him wore a green livery. Mecklenburg? Scharnscott? Ash ran through heraldry in her mind without success.
She said lightly, “I hear Duke Charles sleeps upright in a wooden chair, with all his armour on. In case we take him by surprise. Which some of us are more likely to do than others…”
Under his sallet’s raised visor, the German knight’s expression chilled.
“Bitch in men’s clothing,” he said. “One day, Captain, you really must tell us what use you have for your cod-flap.”
Robert Anselm and Angelotti and half a dozen of Ash’s sub-captains moved up so that their armoured shoulders touched hers. She thought resignedly, Oh well…
Ash looked deliberately down between her tassets, at the codpiece on the front of her hose. “It gives me somewhere to carry a spare pair of gloves. I imagine you use yours for the same thing.”
“Cunt!”
“Really?” Ash inspected his green and white particoloured bulge with visible care. “It doesn’t look like one – but I dare say you know best.”
Any man drawing his sword among the Emperor’s guard is looking to be cut down where he stands: she was not surprised to see the young German knight keep his hand off his sword-hilt. What startled her was the sudden flash of his appreciative grin. The smile of a young man who has the strength to take a joke against himself.
He turned his back, speaking to his noble friends as if she had said nothing at all, pointing with one gauntlet at the pine hills miles to the east. “Tomorrow, then! A hunt. There’s a he-boar out there stands high as my bay mare’s shoulder—”
“You didn’t have to make another enemy,” Godfrey muttered despairingly at her ear. Heat or strain whitened his face above the dense beard.
“It’s compulsory when they’re assholes. I get this all the time.” Ash grinned at her company priest. “Godfrey, whoever he is, he’s just another feudal lord. We’re soldiers. I’ve got ‘Deus Vult’ engraved on my sword – his has ‘Sharp End Towards Enemy’.”10
Her officers laughed. A flutter of wind picked up the Imperial standard, so that for a second the sun blazed above her through yellow and black cloth. Smells of roasting beef drifted up from the long tent-lined lanes of the camp. Someone was singing something appallingly badly, not drowned out by a flute now playing in the Emperor Frederick’s pavilion.
“I’ve worked for this. We’ve worked for this. It’s how the rules of power operate. You’re either on your way up or your way down. There’s never a place to rest.”
She watched the faces of her escort, troops in their twenties for the most part; then her officers, Angelotti and Florian and Godfrey and Robert Anselm as familiar as her own scarred face; the rest new this season. The usual mix of lance-leaders: the sceptics, the over-devoted, the crawlers, and the competent. Three months in the field, she knows most of their men by name now.
Two guards in black and yellow left the tent.
“And I could do with dinner.” Ash felt her hair. They had been standing waiting long enough for the last silver curls to dry after her hasty ablutions. The weight of her hair pulled at her when she turned her head, and the flowing thick skeins caught between the plates of her armour: she risked it, for the picture she knew she made.
“And—” Ash glanced about for Florian de Lacey and found the surgeon’s face was now missing from the command group. “Fuck it. Where’s Florian? He’s not pissed again—?”
All talk was silenced by a trumpeter. A handful of guards and six of the more influential nobles of Frederick’s court came out of the tent with the Emperor himself. Ash straightened up in the blazing heat. She saw the southern foreigner again – a military observer? – still blindfolded with translucent strips of cloth, but walking unerringly in Frederick’s footsteps, precisely avoiding the guy-ropes of the pavilion.
“Captain Ash,” the Emperor Frederick said.
She went down on one knee, carefully since she was in armour, in front of the older man.
“This sixteenth day of June, Year of Our Lord 1476,”11 the Emperor said, “it pleases me to raise you to some mark of distinction, for your valiant service in the field against our enemy, the noble Duke of Burgundy. Therefore I have bethought me much what would be fitting for a mercenary soldier in our employ.”
“Money,” a pragmatic voice said, behind Ash. She dared not look away from Frederick to glare Angelotti into silence.
The skin at the edges of Frederick’s pale eyes crinkled. The little fair-haired man, now in blue and gold pleated robes, put his ringed hands together and gazed down at her.
“Not gold,” Frederick said, “because I have none to spare. And not estates, because it would not be fitting to give them to a woman with no man to defend them for her.”
Ash looked up in plain, utter amazement and forgot propriety. “Do I look like I need defending?”
She tried to swallow the words even as she was saying them. The dry voice overrode her:
“Nor may I knight you, because you are a woman. But I will reward you with estates, albeit at second-hand. You shall marry, Ash. You shall marry my noble lord here – I promised his mother, who is my cousin in the fourth degree, that I would arrange a marriage for him. And now I do. This is your betrothed, the Lord Fernando del Guiz.”
Ash looked where the Emperor indicated. There was no one there but the young knight in pied green-and-white hose, and fluted Gothic breastplate. The Emperor smiled encouragingly.
Her breath sucked in, involuntarily. What little she could see of the young man’s face was utterly still, under his steel visor, and so white that she could see now that he had freckles across his cheekbones.
“Marry?” Ash stared, dazed. She heard herself say, “Him?”
“Does that please you, Captain?”
Sweet Christ! Ash thought. I am in the middle of the camp of His Grace the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III. The second most powerful ruler in Christendom. In open court. These are his most powerful subjects. They’re all looking at me. I can’t refuse. But marriage? I never even thought about marriage!
She was aware of the strap of her poleyn cutting into the back of her knee as she knelt; and jewelled, armoured, powerful men all looking at her. Her bare hands where they rested together on her thigh armour appeared rough, red stains under her nails. The pommel of her sword tapped against her breastplate. Only then did she realise that she was shaking; Shit, girl! You forget. You really do forget that you’re a woman. And they never do. And now it’s yes or no.
She did the thing that put it all – fear, humiliation, dread – outside herself.
Ash raised her bowed head, looking fearlessly up; perfectly aware of the picture that she made. A young woman, bareheaded, her cheekbones slashed with the fine white lines of three old scars, her silver hair tumbling gloriously about her armoured shoulders and flowing like a cloak to her thighs.
“I can say nothing, Your Imperial Majesty. Such recognition, and such generosity, and such honour – they are beyond anything I had expected, and anything I could deserve.”
“Rise.” Frederick took her hand. She knew he must feel her palm sweat. There might have been an amused movement made by those thin lips. He held out his other hand commandingly, took the much fairer hand of the young man, and placed it over Ash’s. “Now let no one gainsay this, they shall be man and wife!”
Deafened by tumultuous and sycophantic applause, and with warm, damp male fingers resting on hers, Ash looked back at her company officers.
What the fuck do I do now?
II
Outside the window of the Imperial palace room in Cologne, rain poured in torrents from gutters and gargoyles to the cobblestones below. It battered loudly, irregular as arquebus12-fire, against the expensive glass wi
ndows. Biscuit-coloured stone finials gleamed with every break in the high cloud.
Inside the room, Ash faced her soon-to-be mother-in-law.
“This is – all – very – well—” Ash protested through a faceful of azure velvet. She shook herself free of it. “—but I have to get back to my company! I got escorted out of Neuss so fast yesterday, I haven’t had a chance to talk to my officers yet!”
“You must have women’s clothing for the bridal,” Constanza del Guiz said sharply, stumbling over the last word.
“With respect, madam – I have upwards of eight hundred men and women under contract to me, back at Neuss. They’re used to being paid! I have to go back and explain how this marriage is going to benefit them.”
“Yes, yes…” Constanza del Guiz had fair hair and lazy good looks, but not her son’s rangy build. She was tiny. A soft pink velvet gown fitted tightly around her small bosom, and then flared from her hips to drape voluminously to her satin slippers. She wore a red and silver brocade undergown. Rubies and emeralds ornamented both her padded headdress and the gold belt that hung down in a V from her hips. A purse and keys hung pendant from the belt-chain.
“My tailor can’t work if you keep moving,” Constanza pleaded. “Please, stand still.”
The padded roll of Ash’s headdress sat on her braided hair like a small but heavy animal.
“I can do this later. I have to go and sort the company out now!”
“Sweet child, how do you expect me to get a wedding arranged at a week’s notice? I could kill Frederick!” Reproachful, Constanza del Guiz looked up at Ash with brimming blue eyes. Ash noted the Frederick. “And you don’t help, child. First you want to get married in your armour…”
Ash looked down at the tailor kneeling with pins and shears at her hem. “This is a robe, ain’t it?”
“An underrobe. In your ‘livery colours’.” The old woman – fifty, perhaps – put her fingers to her shaking lips, on the verge of tears. “It’s taken me all of today to persuade you out of doublet and hose!”
A knock sounded on the door. A square-built, bearded man was admitted by the serving women. Ash turned towards Father Godfrey Maximillian and caught her foot in the sheer linen chemise that tangled her ankles, under her full-length silk kirtle. She stumbled. “Fuck!”
