by Mary Gentle
Why am I trying to persuade them we should go through with this?
I can’t do it.
Not for the world, never mind a poxy little Bavarian estate—
Geraint ab Morgan pushed his way to the front. Ash saw her sergeant of archers look at Florian, and at the priest, as if questioning why they didn’t speak.
Geraint yelled, “Boss, it’s fucking obvious someone’s landed this one on us because they don’t like mercenaries. Remember the Italians, after Héricourt?19 We can’t afford to have Frederick fucked off with us. You’re going to have to do this, Captain.”
“But she can’t!” Ludmilla Rostovnaya shouted into his face. There was a rising noise of talk, not everyone being able to hear the quarrel at the front of the crowd. Ludmilla’s voice rose clearly over it. “If she marries a man, her property becomes his. Not the other way around! If she marries him, this company’s contract will belong to the del Guiz family! And del Guiz belongs to the Emperor! Frederick just got himself a mercenary company for nothing!”
The words went out to the back of the crowd, you could see the intelligence pass.
Ash looked down at the eastern woman, always reassured, even in crisis and panic, to see another fighting woman. This one, in her brown padded jack and red hose, with poleyns strapped on her knees, and a sunburned fair-skinned face, now flung up an arm and pointed it at her. “Tell us you’ve thought about this one, boss!”
Her property becomes his—
Frederick is Fernando’s feudal lord – we become feudal property. Sweet pity of Christ, this just gets worse!
Why didn’t I think of this?
Because you’re still thinking like a man.
Ash couldn’t speak. Armour demands an upright posture or she would have slumped; as it was, she could only look out at the familiar faces.
Their voices died down. Only children, running and screaming at the edge of the crowd, made any noise. Ash swept her gaze over them, seeing one man with a meat-bone paused halfway to his mouth, another with wine running unnoticed from a wineskin to the earth. The sub-captains were being drawn out of their knot, their men crowding close to ask urgent questions.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t think about that.”
Robert Anselm warned, “That boy won’t let you stay in command. You marry Fernando del Guiz, we’ve lost you.”
“Shit!” said a man-at-arms. “She can’t marry him!”
“But you fuck off the Emperor and we’re fucked.” Geraint’s bloodshot eyes seemed to vanish into his stubbled cheeks as he squinted up at Ash.
She grabbed at a first thought. “There are other employers.”
“Yeah, and they’re all his second cousins or whatever!” Geraint coughed and spat phlegm. “You know the royal Princes of Christendom. Incest is their middle name. We’ll end up only being hired by arseholes who call themselves ‘noble’ because some lord once fucked their grandmother. We can forget being paid in gold!”
A different man-at-arms said, “We can always split up, hire out to other companies.”
His lance-companion, Pieter Tyrrell, yelled, “Yeah, we can go with some stupid fuck who’ll get us all killed. Ash knows what she’s doing when she fights!”
“Pity she knows fuck-all about anything else!”
Ash turned her head, unobtrusively checking to see where her battle police were, where the gate-guards were, and what the faces of the cooks and the women who washed and mended looked like. A horse neighed. The sky was momentarily full of starlings, moving to another patch of wet, worm-filled earth.
Godfrey Maximillian said quietly, “They don’t want to lose you.”
“That’s because I get them through battles, and I win.” Her mouth dried. “Whatever I do here, now, I lose.”
“It’s a different game. You’re wearing petticoats now.”
Florian – Floria – growled, “Nine-tenths of them know they couldn’t run this company the way you do. The one-tenth that think they can are wrong. Let them talk it out until they remember that.”
Ash, stifled, nodded. She raised her voice to battlefield pitch. “Listen up! I’m giving you until Compline.20 Come here for Father Godfrey’s evening service. Then I’ll hear what you decide.”
She ducked down from the cart. Florian fell into step beside her. The surgeon even walked like a man, Ash noticed, moving from the shoulders and not the hip. She was dirty enough that you could not see she had no need to shave.
The tall woman said nothing. Ash was grateful.
Ash did her rounds, checking the hay and oats for the long lines of horses, and the herb-gatherers who collected equally for Wat Rodway and Florian’s pharmacy. She checked the water and sand tubs that stood in the open lanes, between tents that might go up like tinder in the brittle summer night. She swore at a seamstress who sat in a wagon with an unshielded candle, until the weeping woman fetched a lamp instead. She checked piled bills and the stock of arrow-heads in the armourer’s tents, and the repairs waiting to be done: sword blades to be sharpened, armour to be hammered back into shape.
Florian put a hand on her steel shoulder. “Boss, stop making a frigging nuisance of yourself!”
“Oh. Yeah. All right.” Ash let riveted links of mail trail out of her fingers. She nodded to the armourer and left his tents. Outside, she scanned the darkening sky. “I don’t think these sorry shites know any more about politics than I do. Why am I letting them decide this?”
“Because you can’t. Or won’t. Or daren’t.”
“Thanks for nothing!”
Ash strode back to the central open area under the standard as lanterns were lit and hung, and the end of Godfrey Maximillian’s sung Vespers echoed across the tents. She made her way between the men and women sitting on the chilling earth.
Reaching the standard, under the Blue Lion, she faced about. “Come on, then. This is a company decision? This is all of you?”
“Yeah.” Geraint ab Morgan got to his feet, seeming wary of the attention focused on him as spokesman. Ash glanced at Robert Anselm. Her first sergeant was standing in the dark between two lanterns. His face was not visible.
“Lots counted,” he called. “It’s legit, Ash.”
Geraint said in a rush, “It’s too big a risk, pissing off our employer. We vote for you to get married.”
“What?”
“We trust you, boss.” The big, russet-haired Sergeant of Archers scratched his buttocks unselfconsciously. “We trust you – you can think of some way out of this before it happens! It’s up to you, boss. Sort it out before they get the wedding preparations finished. There’s no way we’re letting them get rid of our captain!”
Fear wiped out thought. She stared around in lantern light at their faces.
“Fucking hell. Fuck the lot of you!”
Ash stormed off.
If I marry him, he gets the company.
She lay on her back on the hard pallet, one arm under her head, staring up into the roof of the tent. Shadows moved with the shifting evening air. The rope-tied bed frame creaked. Something smelled sweet above the warm body-scent of her own sweat – bunches of camomile, and Lady’s Mantle and Self-Heal for wounds, she realised, where they hung tied to the massive struts jutting out from the tent pole. Up among the weapons. It is always easier to lay poleaxes and swords up across the struts rather than lose them in the damp rushes. Camp life means everything goes up out of the mud.
If I marry him, I get a boy who may or may not remember that he’s treated me worse than a dockside whore.
The stuffed cloth pallet was hard under her shoulders. She shifted onto fleeces. No better. The air felt damp, but warm. She lay and picked at the metal-tipped points that tied her sleeves into her doublet, until she got them undone and pulled the sleeves off, and lay back again, cooler.
Christ’s pity! – I’m in it, and it just keeps on getting deeper—!
Her Milanese harness glinted on its body stand, all rounded silver curves. She massaged flesh where str
aps had bit in. There might be rust starting up on the tassets, it wasn’t clear in the clay oil lamp’s light. Phili would have to scour them with sand again before it bit in, and needed taking to the armourer’s to be reground. The armourer would bitch at her if she let it get into that condition.
Ash reached down and rubbed her inner thigh muscles, still aching from the ride back from Cologne.
Striped canvas walls moved in and out with the night air, as if the tent breathed like an animal. She heard occasional voices beyond the walls’ illusory security. Enough to let her know there still were guards outside: half a dozen men with crossbows, and a leash of mastiffs apiece, in case someone from the Burgundian camp decided to sneak over and take out a mercenary commander.
She dragged each ankle-high boot off by the heel. They thudded on rushes. She flexed bare feet on the cotton pallet, then loosened the drawstring neck of her shirt. Sometimes she is just extremely conscious of her body, of muscles knotting with tiredness, of bones, of the weight and solidity of torso, arms and legs, in their linen and wool garments. She eased her wooden-handled knife out of its sheath and turned the blade to catch the light, feeling with the edge of a fingernail for nicks. Some knives sit in the hand as if they are born to it.
Cynically, she murmured aloud, “I’m being robbed. Legally. What do I do about that}”
The voice that shared her soul sounded dispassionate:
‘Not an appropriate tactical problem.’
“No shit?” She slid the knife back into its sheath and unbuckled knife, purse and belt all in one heap, shoving up her hips to pull the leather strap out from underneath her. “Tell me about it!”
The clay oil lamp’s flame dipped.
She shifted up on one elbow, knowing someone had entered the main part of the tent, beyond the tapestry that curtained off the sleeping area.
In wet summers she put handspan-high raised planking down to floor the tent. The planks shift and creak under footsteps – if the boys were asleep or elsewhere, and the tent’s guards gone, she would still be woken up, not taken in her sleep. Rushes are quieter.
“It’s me,” a voice warned pragmatically, before it approached the tapestry. She lay back down on the pallet. Robert Anselm pushed the hangings aside and stepped in.
She rolled over on to one elbow and looked up. “They send you because you’re the most likely to persuade me?”
“They sent me because you’re least likely to take my head off.” He seated himself with a thump on one of the two massive wooden chests beside her pallet; heavy German chests with locks that take up all the inside of their lids, that she kept chained around the eight-inch tent pole for security.
“Who is this ‘they’, exactly?”
“Godfrey, Florian, Antonio. We played cards, and I lost.”
“You didn’t!” She fell back on to her back. “You didn’t. Motherfucker!”
Robert Anselm laughed. His bald head gave him a face all eyes and ears. His stained shirt hung out of the front of his hose and doublet. He had the beginnings of a belly on him now, and he smelled sweetly warm, of sweat, and open air, and wood smoke. There was stubble on his face. One never noticed, looking no further than his cropped scalp and broad shoulders, how his lashes were long and fine as a girl’s.
He dropped a hand down and began to massage her shoulder, under the linen and fine wool. His fingers were firm. She arched up into them, shutting her eyes for a second. When his hand slid around to the front of her shirt, she opened her eyes.
“You don’t like that, do you?” A rhetorical question. “But you like this.” He moved his hand back to her shoulders.
She moved over so that he could dig down into the rock-hard muscles. “I learned the reasons for not sleeping with my sub-commanders from you. Made a mess of that whole summer.”
“Why don’t you have it written up somewhere: I don’t know everything, I can make mistakes.”
“I can’t make mistakes. There’s always someone waiting to take advantage.”
“I know that.”
His thumbs pressed hard into the knobs of her vertebrae. A sharp click cracked through the tent, ligament sliding over bone. His hands stopped moving. “You okay?”
“What the hell do you think?”
“In the last two hours I’ve had a hundred and fifty people come and ask to speak with you. Baldina, from the wagons. Harry, Euen, Tobias, Thomas, Pieter. Matilda’s people; Anna, Ludmilla…”
“Joscelyn van Mander.”
“No.” He sounded reluctant. “None of the van Manders.”
“Uh huh. Right!” She sat up.
Robert Anselm’s hands moved away.
“Joscelyn thinks because he raised thirteen lances for me this season, he has more say in what we do than I have! I knew we were going to have trouble there. I may just pay off his contract and send him over to Jacobo Rossano, make it his problem. Okay, okay.” She held up both hands, palms out, realising his reluctance to tell her had been entirely feigned. “Yeah, okay. All right! Yes!”
She is conscious of the whole vast engine that is the company, ticking over outside. Rush and hurry around the cook’s wagons, the eternal oat-porridge stewing in iron cauldrons. Men on fire-watch. Men taking their horses out to graze on what grass has been left on the banks of the Erft. Men drilling with swords, with bills, with spiked axes. Men fucking the whores that they hold in common. Men with their clothes being sewn by their wives (sometimes the same women, at a later date in those women’s lives). Lantern light and camp fire light, and the scream of some animal baited for sport. And the sky coursing with stars, over it all.
“I’m good on the battlefield. I don’t know politics. I should have known I didn’t know politics.” She met his eyes. “I thought I was beating them at their own game. I don’t know how I could have been this stupid.”
Anselm clumsily ruffled her silver hair. “Fuck it.”
“Yeah. Fuck it all.”
Two sentries exchange the day’s word outside the tent, giving way to two others. She hears them talking. Without knowing their names, she knows they have unwillingly scoured-clean bodies, full stomachs, swords with nicks carefully sharpened out, shirts on their backs, some kind of body protection (however cheap the armour); the Lion Azure sewn to their tabards. There are men like this all over Frederick III’s great military camp tonight, but in this area there would not be, not these particular men – if not for her. However temporary it is, however mercenary they are, she is what holds them together.
Ash got to her feet. “Look, I’ll tell you about … the del Guiz family, Robert. Then you tell me what I can do. Because I don’t know.”
Four days after both Charles the Bold of Burgundy’s troops and the men of the Emperor Frederick III pulled back from Neuss, effectively ending the siege,21 Ash stood in the great Green Cathedral at Cologne.
Too many people crowded into the body of the cathedral for the human eye to take in. All shoulder to shoulder, men in pleated gowns of blue velvet and scarlet wool, silver-linked chains around their necks, purses and daggers at their belts, and flamboyant rolled chaperon hats with tails hanging down past their shoulders. The court of the Emperor.
A thousand faces dappled with the light slanting from red and blue glass, falling from lancet windows a bowel-twisting height above the tiled floor. Thin stone columns pierced a frightening amount of air, too fragile to support their vaulted roof above. And around the bases of those pillars, men with gold-leaf on their dagger pommels, and plenty of flesh on their jowls, stood talking in voices that rose in volume now.
“He’s going to be late. He is late.” Ash swallowed. The pit of her bowels shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t believe it. He’s standing me up!”
“Can’t be. You should be so lucky,” Anselm hissed, “Ash, you have to do something!”
“Tell me what! If we haven’t come up with it in four days, I’m not going to think of it now!”
How many minutes before the power to contract the comp
any passes from wife to husband? All other means exhausted, the only remaining way out of this wedding is for her to walk out of the building. Now.
In front of the Emperor’s court.
And they’re right, Ash thought. Half the royal families of Christendom are married to the other half; we wouldn’t get another contract from anyone until they’d calmed down. Not until next year, maybe. I don’t have enough money put by to feed us if we don’t have an employer for that long. Nothing like enough.
Robert Anselm looked past her, behind her head, at Father Godfrey Maximillian. “We could do with a prayer for grace, Father.”
The bearded man nodded.
“Not that it matters now, but have you found out who set me up for this?” Ash demanded, quietly enough to be heard only by her supporters.
Godfrey, standing on her right, replied equally quietly. “Sigismund of the Tyrol.”
“Goddamn. Sigismund? What have we— That man’s got a long memory. This is because we fought on the other side at Héricourt?”
Godfrey inclined his head. “Sigismund of the Tyrol is far too rich for Frederick to offend him by refusing a useful suggestion. I’m told Sigismund doesn’t like ‘mercenaries with more than fifty lances’. Apparently he finds them a threat. To the purity of noble warfare.”
“‘Purity’ of war? In his fucking dreams.”
The bearded priest smiled crookedly. “You mauled his household troops, as I recall.”
“I was paid to. Christ. It’s petty, to give us this much trouble for it!”
Ash looked over her shoulder. The back of the cathedral was also packed with standing men, merchant from Cologne in rich gear, her own lance-leaders who outshone them, and a gaggle of mercenaries who had been made to leave their weapons outside the cathedral, and consequently didn’t outshine anyone.
There were none of the bawdy remarks and cheerful grins you would have had with one of her men-at-arms being wedded. Quite apart from endangering their future, she saw how it made them look at her and see a woman, in a city, at peace, where before they had seen a mercenary, in the field, at war, and could therefore avoid considering her sex.
