by Mary Gentle
Footsteps sounded outside on the deck. She recognised the sound: all her skin shivered. She lay back down on the mattress.
Fernando del Guiz pushed the curtain open, bawling something over his shoulder that made Matthias – a not-very-noble young male friend, Ash thought – howl with laughter. He let the curtain drop behind him, closing his eyes and swaying with the ship.
Ash stayed where she lay.
The curtain stayed undisturbed. No squire, no page; none of his court friends, young boisterous German knights. No very public aristocratic bridal customs? she wondered.
No – no, you won’t will you? Drag the sheets out of here and show there’s no virgin bloodstains? You won’t want to listen to people saying his wife’s a whore.
“Fernando—”
His large hands unbuttoned the front of his puff-sleeved satin doublet, and he shrugged it back off his shoulders. Fernando smiled a particularly knowing smile. “That’s ‘husband’ to you.”
Sweat stuck his yellow hair to his forehead. He struggled with the points at his waist, abandoned them halfway – cloth ripped as he tore his arm out of his shirt. Even rangy in build, with his body not yet filled out to his adult weight, Ash found him just plain big: male chest, male torso, the hard muscles of male thighs when the man is a knight and rides every day.
He didn’t bother to unlace his cod-flap, he reached in and hitched his stiffening cock out over the top of the fabric, clutching it in his hand; and clambered one-handed on to the tiny truckle-bed towards her. The yellow lantern light turned his skin into oiled gold. She inhaled. He smelled male, smelled also how linen shirts smell, when they are left to dry in the open air.
With her own hands she pulled up her shirt, under which she was naked.
He reached down and wrapped his hand around his thickening purple cock, lifted her hips with his other hand, guided his thrust with an inexpert shove.
More than ready – ready since the realisation that it was his footsteps outside – she received the whole thick length of him thrust into her; shivered, hot as fever. Impaled, she enclosed his solidity.
His face lowered, inches from hers. She saw, in his eyes, his realisation of her wetness. He murmured, “Whore…”
His thumb stroked her scarred cheekbones, an old scar at the base of her neck, a curve of black bruises where a blow at Neuss had driven her breastplate in under her arm. His slurred young voice mumbled, “You got a man’s body.”
The points of his hose at his waist, and at his cod-flap, pulled tight. The fine wool ripped down the inner seam, exposing the hard flesh of his thigh. His torso fell across her. His weight made her struggle to breathe. She dug her fingers into the big muscles of his upper arms, hard. His skin under her hand was velvet over hardness; silk over iron. Her head fell back on the silk pillows. She moaned in her throat.
The man thrust, two or three times. Her wet, pulsing cunt held him; a shiver of pre-sensation began to loosen her muscles; she felt herself opening, flesh unfolding.
He jerked twice, like a poacher’s rabbit from the killing blow; and his hot seed flooded her, copious, slicking down her thighs. His heavy body sprawled over her.
She smelled – almost tasted – thin German beer on his breath.
His cock slid out of her, limp.
“You’re drunk!” Ash said.
“No. You wish I was. I wish I was.” He looked down at her from a blurred face. “This is my duty and it’s done. And that’s it, madam wife. You’re mine now, sealed by blood—”
Ash said drily, “I don’t think so.”
His expression changed: she could not read it. Arrogance? Revulsion? Confusion? A simple, selfish desire not to be here, not to be on this barge, in this bed, with this problematical she-male?
If I was hiring him, I could read him. What’s the matter with me?
Fernando del Guiz rolled off her, sprawling face-down and semi-clothed on the mattress. Only his wet semen marked the linen. “You’ve been with men before. I hoped there was an outside chance it might be a rumour, that you weren’t really a whore. Like the French king’s maid. But you’re not a virgin.”
Ash shifted to face him. She merely blinked at him. Both her gaze and her voice were level, flat, very slightly tinged with black humour. “I haven’t been a virgin since I was six. I was raped for the first time when I was eight. Then I stayed alive by whoring.” Looking for comprehension in his expression, she saw none. “Have you ever had a little maid?”
His fair skin flushed, and he coloured pink from cheeks to brow to the back of his neck. “I have not!”
“A little girl of nine or ten? You’d be surprised how many men want that. Although, to be fair, some of them didn’t care whether it was woman, child, man or sheep, so long as they got to stick their cocks in something warm and wet—”
“God and His angels!” Sheer, appalled shock. “Shut up!”
She felt the whisper of air as his fist moved; her own arm came up by reflex, and the blow was all but absorbed by the fleshy part of her forearm. She is muscular there. Only his knuckles brush her scarred cheek. That touch jolts her head back.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up—”
“Whoa!”
Panting, with bright unspilled tears in her eyes, Ash shifted her body back from him. Back from warm, silken skin over hard muscle: from the body that she longs to wrap herself around.
Bitter, all feudal privilege now, he spat, “How could you do all that?”
“Easily.” Again, it is the commander’s voice: acerbic, pragmatic, and with a conscious humour. Ash shook her head to clear it. “I’d rather have had my life as a whore than be the kind of virgin you were hoping for. When you understand why, we might have something to talk about.”
“Talk? To a woman?”
She might have forgiven him if he had said ‘to you’, even in that tone of voice, but the way that he said ‘woman’ made her mouth curl up at one corner, without humour.
“You forget who I am. I’m Ash. I’m the Lion Azure.”
“You were.”
Ash shook her head. “Well, fuck me. This is some wedding night.”
She thought she had him, swore she came within a bowstring’s width of Fernando bursting out laughing – of seeing that generous, acknowledging grin she had seen at Neuss – but he threw himself back across the truckle-bed, limbs sprawling, one arm over his eyes, and exclaimed, “Christus Imperator! They made me one flesh with this.”
Ash sat up, cross-legged on the palliasse, easily limber. She was entirely unconscious of being naked while he was still partly clothed, until the sight of him sprawled out in front of her, and his naked thigh and belly and cock in the lantern light, made a hot wetness grow in her cunt, and she coloured, and shifted to sit differently. She put her hands down in front of her, the unsatisfied ache hot in her vagina.
“Fucking peasant bitch!” he exclaimed. “Bitch on heat! I was right the first time I met you.”
“Oh, bloody hell…” Her face flamed. She put her hands over her cheeks, and her fingertips felt that even her ears were hot. She said hurriedly, “Never mind that.”
Without taking his arm away from his face, he groped and pulled a blanket half over his body. She could feel the skin of her face heating. She locked her hands about her own ankles, to keep from reaching out to touch the hard velvet of his skin.
Fernando’s breathing shifted to a snore. His heavy sweating body slumped further down in the bed, deeply and instantly asleep.
After a while she wrapped her hand around the saint’s medallion at her throat, and held it. Her thumb caressed the image of St George on one side, the ash-rune on the other.
Her body screamed at her.
She did not sleep.
Yes, I am probably going to have to have him killed.
It’s no different from killing on the field of battle. I don’t even like him. I just want to fuck him.
More hours later than a marked candle could count, she saw summer light arou
nd the edges of the tapestry curtain. Dawn began to lighten the Rhine river valley, and the cavalcade of ships moving upstream.
“So what are you going to do?” She said it quietly and rhetorically to herself.
She lay, naked, face-down on the pallet, reaching out for her belt where it lay on her piled doublet and hose. The sheath of her knife came easily to her hand. Her thumb stroked the rounded hilt of the bollock dagger, slipped down to press it an inch or so out of the scabbard. A grey metal blade, with harsh silver lines on the much-sharpened edge.
He’s asleep.
He didn’t even bring a page in with him, never mind a squire or a guard.
There’s no one to shout an alarm, never mind defend him!
Something about this sheer depth of ignorance, his inability to even conceive that a woman might kill a feudal knight – Green Christ, hasn’t he ever thought he might be knifed by a whore? – and his forgetfulness in merely falling asleep, as if this were any night between a married pair: something in that touched her, despite him.
She rolled over, drawing the dagger. Her thumb tested the edge. It proved keen enough to slice the first layers of dermis, at a touch, without penetrating to the red meat below.
What I ought to think is Died of arrogance, and kill him. If only because I might not get another chance.
I wouldn’t get away with it; naked and covered in blood, it’s going to be kind of obvious who did it—
No. That isn’t it.
I know damn well that once it was done, a fait accompli as Godfrey would call it, then my lads would tip the body over the side, shrug, and say, “Must’ve had a boating accident, my lord,” to anybody who asked; up to and including the Emperor. Once it’s done, it’s done; and they’d back me.
It’s doing it. That’s the objection I have.
Christ and His pity know why, but I don’t want to kill this man.
“I don’t even know you,” she whispered.
Fernando del Guiz slept on, his face in repose unprotected, vulnerable.
Not confrontation: compromise. Compromise. Christ, but don’t I spend half my life finding compromises so that eight hundred people can work together? No reason to leave my brains behind just because I’m in bed.
So:
We are a split company: the others are in Cologne: if I kill Frederick there’ll be someone who objects – there’s always someone who objects to anything – and if it were van Mander, for example, there’s another split: his lances maybe following him, not me. Because he likes del Guiz: he likes having a man, and a noble man, and a real live knight for a boss. Van Mander doesn’t much like women, even if they are as good on the field of battle as I am.
This can wait. This can wait until we’ve dumped the ambassadors in Genoa and got back to Cologne.
Genoa. Shit.
“Why did you do that?” She spoke in a whisper, lying down beside him, the electric velvet of his skin brushing hers. He shifted, rolling over, presenting her with a freckled back.
“Are you another one like Joscelyn – nothing I do will ever be enough, because I’m a woman? Because the one thing I can’t be is a man? Or is it because I can’t be a noble woman? One of your own kind?”
His soft breathing filled the tented cabin.
He rolled back again, restless, his body pressing up against hers. She lay still, half under the warm, damp, muscular bulk of him. With her free hand, she reached up to brush fine tendrils of hair out of his eyes.
I can’t remember what his face looked like then. I can only see in my mind what he looks like now.
The thought startled her: her eyes flicked open.
“I killed my first two men when I was eight,” she whispered, not disturbing his sleep. “When did you kill yours? What fields have you fought?”
I can’t kill a man while he’s sleeping.
Not out of—
The word eluded her. Godfrey or Anselm might have said pique, but both men were on other barges in the river-convoy; had found things to do that would take them as far from the command barge as possible, this first night after her wedding.
I need to think this through. Talk it through with them.
And I can’t split the company. Whatever we do will have to wait until we get back to the Germanies.
Ash’s hand, without her volition, stroked the sweat-damp strands of hair back from his brow.
Fernando del Guiz shifted in his sleep. The narrow bed necessarily threw their bodies together on the piled palliasses; skin against skin; warm, electric. Ash, without much thinking about it, leaned down and put her mouth to the back of his neck, her lips to his soft moist skin, breathing in the scent and feel of the finest hair at his nape. Vertebrae made hard lumps between his freckle-spotted shoulders.
With a great sigh he rolled over, put his arms around her waist, and drew her to his hot body. She pressed against him, breast and belly and thighs, and his cock hardened and jutted up between them. Still with his eyes shut, one of his narrow strong hands stroked her between the thighs, fingers dipping into her wet warm cleft, stroking her. The early light hazing the cabin illuminated his fair lashes, fine on his cheeks; so young, she thought, and then, aah!
One tilt of his hips put his swollen cock up inside her. He rested, still holding her close in his arms, and within minutes began rocking his body, pushing her up to a mild, unexpected, but completely pleasurable orgasm.
His head dipped, face coming to rest against her shoulder. She felt the brush of his lashes against her skin. Eyes still closed, half-asleep; he slid his hands over her shoulders, down her arms, around her back. A warm, valuing touch. Erotic, and kind.
He is the first man my age to touch me kindly, she realised; and as Ash opened her eyes, taken equally by surprise to find herself smiling at him, he thrust harder and deeper and came, and sank back from his peak into deeper sleep.
“What?” she leaned down, hearing him mumble.
He said it again, slipping down into an exhausted sleep, too unconscious to be reached again.
What she thought she heard was, “They have married me to the lion’s whelp.”
There were tears of humiliation, bright and wet, standing on his lashes. Ash, waking again an hour later, found herself in an empty bed.
Fifteen days later – fifteen nights of empty beds – on the feast-day of St Swithun,2 they arrived within five miles of Genoa.
II
Ash thumbed up the visor of her sallet, in the dew-wet early morning. The sun was not a finger’s breadth above the horizon. Some coolness was still in the air. Around her, men walked and rode, wagons creaked; a wind blew her the noise of a shepherd on a distant hillside, singing as he surely would not if the country was not peaceable.
Robert Anselm rode up, past the wagons and horsemen, from the rear of the column; his open-faced sallet lodged in the crook of his arm. The southern sun had reddened his bald scalp. One of the men walking with a bill over his shoulder whistled like a blackbird, and shifted into the opening bars of Curly Locks, Curly Locks, wilt thou be mine? as Anselm trotted past, only apparently oblivious. Ash felt a smile tug at her mouth: the first for over a fortnight.
“Okay?”
“I found four of these assholes dead-drunk in the steward’s wagon this morning. They didn’t even get out to sleep it off somewhere else in the camp!” Anselm squinted against the morning sun, riding knee to knee with her. “I’ve got the provosts disciplining them now.”
“And the thefts?”
“Complaints, again. Three different lances: Euen Huw, Thomas Rochester, Geraint ab Morgan before we left Cologne—”
“If Geraint had more complaints about this before we left Cologne, why didn’t he take action?”
Ash looked keenly at her second-in-command.
“How’s Geraint Morgan working out?”
The big man shrugged.
“Geraint’s not keen on discipline himself.”
“Did we know that when we took him on?” Ash frowned at the th
ickening dawn mist. “Euen Huw vouched for him…”
“I know he got slung out of King Henry’s household after Tewkesbury. Drunk in charge of a unit of archers – on the field. Went back into the family wool business, couldn’t settle, ended up a contract soldier.”
“We didn’t hire him just because he’s an old Lancastrian, Roberto! He has to pull his weight, same as everyone else.”
“Geraint’s no Lancastrian. He fought with the Earl of Salisbury at Ludlow – for the Yorkists, in fifty-nine,” Anselm added, apparently none too confident of his captain’s intricate knowledge of rosbif dynastic struggles.
“Green Christ, he started young!”
“He’s not the only one…”
“Yeah, yeah.” Ash shifted her weight, bringing her horse back towards Roberto’s flea-bitten grey. “Geraint’s a violent, lascivious, drunken son-of-a-bitch—”
“He’s an archer,” Anselm said, as if it were self-evident.
“—and worst of all, he’s a mate of Euen Huw,” Ash continued. Her twinkle died. “He’s shit-hot on the field. But he gets a grip, or he goes. Damn. Well, at least I’ve left him in joint command with Angelotti… Come on then, Robert. What about this thief?”
Robert Anselm squinted up at the obscuring sky, then back at her. “I’ve got him, Captain. It’s Luke Saddler.”
Ash recalled to her mind his face: a boy not yet fourteen, mostly seen around the camp flushed with ale, wet-nosed and avoided by the other pages; Philibert had had tales to tell of twisted arms, hands touching cods. “I know him. Aston’s page. What’s he taking?”
“Purses, daggers; someone’s saddle, for Christ’s pity’s sake,” Anselm remarked. “He tried to sell that. He’s in and out of the quartermaster’s all the time, Brant says; but it’s mostly the lads’ personal kit.”
