by Mary Gentle
She was touching warm flesh before she said, “What?”
Under his shirt, Ash’s fingers and palm cupped the full, rounded, firm breast of a woman.
Ash stared at his face. The dirty, unshakeable, pragmatic surgeon gripped her hand hard, and was plainly woman; plain as day, a tall woman in man’s dress.
Godfrey’s puzzled voice rumbled, “What—?”
“You’re a woman?” Ash stared at Florian.
Godfrey gaped at both of them.
“Why couldn’t you tell me?” Ash shouted. “Christ, I needed to know! You might have put the whole company in danger!”
The page Philibert put his head back through the tent-flap. Ash snatched her hand away.
The boy looked from one to the other: surgeon, field priest, captain. “Ash!”
He feels the tension, Ash thought, and then: No, I’m wrong. He’s too wrapped up in what he’s got to say to notice anything else.
The boy squealed, “They’re not playing football. The men. Everybody. They won’t! They’re all together, and they say they’re not doing anything until you come and speak to them!”
“Here we go,” Ash muttered. She glanced back at Florian, at Godfrey. “Go and tell them I’m on my way. Now.” And, as the boy Philibert ran out, “It won’t wait. They won’t wait. Not now. Florian – no – what is your name?”
“Floria.”
“‘Floria’…”
“I don’t understand,” Godfrey said frankly.
The tall woman retied the neck-string of her shirt. “My name is Floria del Guiz. I’m not Fernando’s half-brother, he has no brothers. I’m his half-sister. This is the only way I can ever practise as a surgeon, and no, my family is not about to welcome me back, not in Burgundy, and certainly not into the Imperial German branch of the del Guizes.”
The priest stared. “You’re a woman!”
Ash muttered, “That’s why I keep you on the company books, Godfrey. Your acumen. Your intelligence. The rapidity with which you penetrate to the heart of the matter.” She shot a look at the lantern and its marked hour-candle, burning steadily where it sat on the trestle table. “It’s nearly Nones.17 Godfrey, go and give that unruly mob out there a field-mass. Do it! I need time.”
She caught the brown sleeve of his robe as he moved towards the tent-flap. “Don’t mention Florian. I mean Floria. You heard it Under the Tree. And get me enough time to arm up.”
Godfrey looked at her for a long minute before he nodded.
Ash stared after his departing back as Godfrey stepped out across the rain-wet earth that steamed, now, in the afternoon sun. “Shit on a stick…”
“When do I leave?” Floria del Guiz said, behind her.
Ash pressed both index fingers down hard on the bridge of her nose. She shut her eyes. The darkness behind her eyelids speckled with light.
“I’ll be lucky if I don’t lose half the company, never mind you.” She opened her eyes again; dropped her hands to her sides. “You’ve slept in my tent. I’ve seen you rat-arsed and throwing up. I’ve seen you piss!”
“No. You’re merely under the impression that you have. I’ve been doing this since I was thirteen.” Floria appeared in Ash’s peripheral vision, wine cup trailing from her long fingers. “Salerno now trains no Jews, no black Libyans, and no women. I’ve passed as a man since then. Padua, Constantinople, Iberia. Army doctoring, because nobody cares who you are. You and these men… This past five years is the longest I’ve been able to stay anywhere.”
Ash leaned out of the tent and bawled, “Philibert! Rickard! Get in here! – I can’t make a hasty decision, Florian. Floria.”
“Stick with Florian. It’s safer. It’s safer for me.”
That rueful tone penetrated Ash’s daze. She looked straight at the woman. “I’m female. The world puts up with me. Why shouldn’t it put up with you?”
Florian ticked off on her fingers: “You’re a mercenary. You’re a peasant. You’re human cattle. You don’t have an influential rich family. I am a del Guiz. I matter. I’m a threat. If nothing else, I’m the elder: I could inherit at least the estate in Burgundy… All this outrage comes down to property in the end.”
“They wouldn’t burn you.” Ash did not sound certain. “Maybe they’d only lock you up and beat you.”
“I don’t have your facility for being hit without minding it.” Florian’s fair eyebrows quirked up. “Ash, are you so sure they tolerate you? This idea of a marriage didn’t come out of nowhere. Somebody’s put Frederick up to it.”
“Shit. Marriage.” Ash moved back across the tent and lifted her sword up out of the rushes. Apparently absently, she said, “I heard, in Cologne, that the Emperor’s knighted Gustav Schongauer. Remember him and his guys two years ago at Héricourt?”18
“Schongauer? Knighted?” Florian, briefly distracted by outrage, glared at her. “They were bandits! He spent most of that autumn destroying Tyrolese farms and villages! How could Frederick ennoble him?”
“Because there’s no such thing as legitimate authority or illegitimate authority. There is only authority.” Ash faced the man who was a woman, still holding her scabbarded sword between two hands. “If you can control a lot of fighting men – you will. And you’ll be recognised and ratified by other controllers. Like I need to be. Except that no king or nobleman is going to knight me.”
“Knighthood? Boy’s games! But if a murdering rapist can end up as a Graf—!”
Ash waved Florian’s shock away. “Yeah, you are noble… How do you think we get new nobles in the first place? The other Grafs are scared of him. The Emperor too, for that matter. So they make him one of them. If he gets too scary, they’ll band together and have him killed. That’s the balancing act.”
She took the wine cup out of Florian’s fingers and drained it. The buzz was enough to loosen her up, not enough to make her light-headed.
“It’s the law by which chivalry operates,” Ash looked down into the empty cup. “It doesn’t matter how generous and virtuous you are. Or how brutal. If you have no powerbase, you’ll be treated with disrespect; and if you do have a powerbase, everyone will come to you in preference to anyone else. And power comes from the ability to make armed men fight for you. To reward them with money, yes, but more – with titles and marriages and land. I can’t do that. I need to. This marriage—”
Ash abruptly reddened. She scrutinised Floria’s face, weighing up secrets known, and past confidences not betrayed. Floria, so like the Florian who had shared her tent on many nights, talking into the small hours.
“You don’t go, Florian. Unless you want to.” She met Floria’s gaze, smiled wryly. “You’re too good a surgeon, if nothing else. And … we’ve known each other too long. If I trust you to horse-doctor me, I can’t stop trusting you now!”
A little shaken, the tall woman said, “I’ll stay. How will you manage it?”
“Don’t ask me. I’ll work something out… Sweet Christ, I can’t marry that man.!”
A distant babble of voices became plainly audible outside.
“What are you going to tell them, Ash?”
“I don’t know. But they won’t wait. Let’s move it!”
Ash waited only long enough for Philibert and Rickard to get her undressed and into her arming doublet and hose, and armour, and belt her sword around her waist, gilded sword-pommel catching the canvas-filtered light. The boys did it with never a fumble, rapid fingers tying points, buckling straps, pushing her body and limbs to where would best help them fasten her into her steel shell, all with the ease of practice. Full Milanese harness.
“I have to talk to them,” Ash added, her tone somewhere between cynicism and self-mockery. “After all – they’re the reason why the Holy Roman Emperor calls me ‘Captain’. And the reason why I can walk through a camp full of armed men without being bush-whacked.”
Florian del Guiz prompted: “And?”
“‘And’ what?” Ash left her helmet off, carrying it reversed under her arm, w
ith her gauntlets slung into it.
“Ash. I may be a woman. I’ve still known you for five years. You have to talk to them because you rely on them – and?”
“And… I’m the reason they don’t go back to being tanners or shepherds or clerks or goodwives. So I’d better see they don’t starve.”
Florian del Guiz chuckled. “That’s my girl!”
At the tent-flap, leaving, Ash said, “Florian, it’s the Emperor’s marriage – I’m finished if I don’t go through with it. And damned if I do.”
III
A brisk stride took Ash into the central clear ground under the Blue Lion standard. She vaulted up on to the back of an open cart and gazed round at the men variously sitting on barrels and straw bales and wet ground, and standing with their arms folded, faces upturned grimly to hers.
“Let me recap.” Her voice was not strained; she spoke distinctly and clearly, could see no one having trouble hearing her. “Two days ago we fought a skirmish with the Duke’s men. This wasn’t under orders from our employer. It was my call. It was rash, but we’re soldiers, we have to be rash. Sometimes.”
She dropped her voice on the last word, and got chuckles from a group of men-at-arms by the beer barrels: Jan-Jacob, Gustav, and Pieter; Flemish men from Paul di Conti’s lance.
“Our employer had two choices then. He could break our contract. In that case we’d go straight across to the other side and sign up with Charles of Burgundy.”
Thomas Rochester shouted up, “Maybe we should ask Duke Charles for a contract now, if it’s peace here. He’s always off fighting somewhere.”
“Maybe not quite yet.” Ash paused. “Maybe we’d better wait a day or two, until he forgets we almost killed him!”
Another laugh, louder; and van Mander’s boys joined in; crucial because they were known as hard and consequently respected.
“We’ll sort that out later.” Ash went on briskly. “We don’t care who’s bishop in Neuss, so Frederick knew we’d go if he said the word. That was his first choice, and he didn’t take it. Second – he could have paid us money.”
“Yeah!” Two female archers (who were known as ‘Geraint’s women’ only when they weren’t around to hear about it) raised a cheer.
Ash’s heart beat faster. She rested her left hand down on her sword-hilt, thumb stroking the ripped leather binding.
“Well, as you all know by now, we didn’t get money either.”
There were catcalls. The back of the crowd closed in; archers and crossbowmen, billmen and hackbutters; all shoulder to shoulder now and putting their attention on her.
“For those of you who were with me in the skirmish, by the way, well done. It was fucking amazing. Amazing.” Deliberate pause. “I’ve never seen an encounter won by anybody who did so many things wrong!”
Loud laughter. She spoke over it, picking out individual men. “Euen Huw, you do not get off to loot the bodies. Paul di Conti, you do not start a charge from so far away that your horse is on crutches by the time you finally get to the enemy! I’m surprised you didn’t get down and walk. And as for watching your commander for orders!” She let the comments die down. “I should add some remark about keeping your eye on the fucking standard at all times…” She cleared her throat.
Robert Anselm deliberately, and helpfully, made himself heard above the racket of several hundred voices. “Yes, you should!”
There was laughter and she knew the immediate crisis was over. Or holding, at any rate.
“So we’ll all be putting in lots of skirmish practice.” Ash looked out from the back of the cart. “What you guys did was fucking amazing. Tell your grandchildren. It wasn’t war. You just don’t see knight charging knight on the battlefields, because there’s all you nasty little fuckers with bows out there! Oh yeah – and the hackbutters.” A grin at what sounded like cheerful discontent from the gun-crews. “I wouldn’t recognise a battle without the happy sound of back-firing arquebuses!”
The redheaded man-at-arms from Aston’s lance yelled, “Get a fucking axe!” and the footmen took up the chant. The gunners responded variously and profanely. Ash nodded at Antonio Angelotti to quieten them down.
“Whatever it was, it was magnificent. Sadly, it hasn’t earned us anything. So the next time we get a chance to stick a lance up Charles of Burgundy’s ass, I’ll come back and ask if you’re going to be paid first.”
A voice at the back found a moment of silence to call, “Fuck Frederick of Hapsburg!”
“In your dreams!”
A roar of laughter.
Ash shifted her weight on to her other hip. The uncertain breeze blew tendrils of hair across her face. She smelled cooking fires, and horse manure, and the stink of eight hundred sweaty bodies packed close in a crowd. They were mostly bareheaded, being in camp and theoretically safe from attack; and their bills and halberds were piled in stacks a dozen to a tent.
Children ran around the edges, not able to pass through the packed mass made up of the men and women who fought. Most of the men and women who didn’t, the whores and cooks and washerwomen, were sitting up on the sides of wagons at the edge of the camp, listening. There were – as there always are – some men still intent on their games of dice, or dead-drunk asleep under wet canvas, or just off somewhere else, but she had the majority of her company in front of her.
Seeing so many faces that she knew, she thought: The best thing I have on my side is that they want to hear me. They want me to tell them what to do. Mostly they’re on my side. But they’re all my responsibility.
On the other hand, there are always other companies they can get employment with.
They went quiet, waiting for her. A word here and there, between mates. There was a lot of shifting of boots on wet ground, and people watching her, not commenting.
“A lot of you have been with me since I formed the company three years ago. Some of you were with me before that, when I raised men for the Griffin-in-Gold, and the Company of the Boar. Look around you. You’re a lot of mad bastards, and the chances are you’re standing next to some other mad bastards! You have to be mad to follow me – but if you do,” she increased voice-projection: “if you do, you’ve always come out of it alive – and with a hell of a reputation – and paid.”
She held up an armoured arm, before the level of talk could rise. “And we will this time. Even if we’re being paid with a marriage! I suppose there’s a first time for everything. Trust Frederick to find it.”
She gazed down at her sub-captains, who stood in a tight little knot, exchanging comments and watching her.
“During the last few days I’ve been taking chances. It’s my job. But it’s your future too. We’ve always discussed in open meeting what contracts we’ll take or not take. So now we’re going to discuss this marriage.”
The words came as fluently as ever. She never had problems talking to them. Behind the fluency, something tightened and thinned her voice. Ash became aware that her bare hands were clenched, knuckles straining.
What can I tell them? That we have to do this, but I can’t do this?
“And after we’ve discussed it,” Ash went on, “then we’re going to vote on it.”
“Vote?” Geraint ab Morgan yelled. “You mean a real vote?”
Somebody quite audibly said, “Democracy means doing what boss tells you!”
“Yes, a real vote. Because if we take this offer, it’s company lands and company revenues. And if we don’t take it – about the only excuse the Emperor Frederick is going to accept from me,” Ash said, “is ‘my company won’t let me’!”
She didn’t let them think closely about that, but carried on:
“You’ve been with me, and you’ve been with mercenary companies that don’t hold together through a season, never mind years. I’ve always put you in the way of enough loot to keep armour on your backs.”
The clouds, shifting, let sunlight sweep across the wet earth, and flash from her Milanese plate armour. It was so pat that she spared
a suspicious glance for Godfrey, who stood at the foot of the cart with his hands clasped about his Briar Cross.
The bearded man raised his eyes to the heavens and smiled absently; and followed that with a swift, satisfied glance at the picture she made, standing higher than her men, in bright armour, the Lion Azure a blaze across the sky above her. A very minor miracle.
Ash stood without speaking for a moment to let them notice her armour: its expense and therefore its implications. I can afford this, therefore I’m good. You really want to be employed by me: honest, guv…
Ash spoke. “If I get married to this man, we can have our own land to go back to in the winter. We can have its crops and timber and wool to sell. We can,” she added thinly, “stop taking suicide contracts just to get the money to re-equip ourselves every year.”
A man with lank, dark hair and wearing a green brigandine called out, “And what happens next year if we get offered a contract to fight against the Emperor?”
“He knows we’re mercenaries, for fuck’s sake.”
A woman archer got her way to the front of the crowd with her elbows. “But that’s now, when you’re under contract to him. That’s not when you’re married to one of his feudal subjects.” She craned her head back to look up at Ash. “Won’t he expect you to be loyal to the Holy Roman Empire, Captain?”
“If I wanted to be told who to fight for,” a hackbutter shouted, “I’d have joined the feudal levy!”
Geraint ab Morgan growled, “Too late to worry about that, the offer’s been made. I vote we join the property game, and don’t piss off the Emperor.”
Ash looked down from the cart. “I assume we’ll just carry on as we are.”
A rumble of complaint made itself heard across the field. The archer spun round on her heel. “Can’t you motherfuckers give her a chance? Captain Ash, you’ll be married.”
Ash recognised her now, the fair-haired woman with an odd name: Ludmilla Rostovnaya. She had the crank of a crossbow hanging from her belt. Crossbowmen from Genoa, Ash thought, and put both her hands on the side of the cart, dizzy and sick.
