by Mary Gentle
“Why the fuck doesn’t it get light…?” Ash leaned out further from the broken frame, staring at the castle’s walls above the town. Angelotti’s bombard and trebuchet crews had done no more than knock patches of facing plaster off the curtain walls, exposing the grey masonry. She coughed, breathing air that smelled of burning timber, and pulled herself back into the room.
“The scouts are back,” Robert Anselm said laconically. “Cologne’s burning. Fires out of control. They say there’s plague. The court’s gone. I have thirty different reports about Frederick of Hapsburg. Euen’s lance picked up a couple of men from Berne. None of the passes south over the Alps are passable – either Visigoth armies or bad weather.”
Godfrey Maximillian momentarily stopped pacing and looked up from the pages of his book. “Those men Euen found were part of a procession from Berne to the shrine at St Walburga’s Abbey. Look at their backs. Those lacerations are from iron-tipped whips. They think flagellation will bring back the sun.”
What was similar between Robert Anselm and Godfrey Maximillian, the bald man and the bearded, was perhaps nothing more than breadth of chest, resonance of voice. Whether or not it came from recent sexual activity after long celibacy, Ash found herself aware now of difference, of maleness, in a way in which she was not used to thinking; as something pertaining to physicality rather than prejudice.
“I’ll see Quesada again,” she informed Anselm, and turned to Godfrey as the other man strode downstairs. “If not an eclipse, then some kind of black miracle—?”
Godfrey paused beside the trestle table, as if Angelotti’s astrological scribbles might touch somehow on his biblical readings. “No stars fell, the moon is not as red as blood. The sun isn’t darkened because of the smoke of the Pit. The third part of the sun should be smitten – that’s not what’s happening. There have been no Horsemen, no Seals broken. It is not the last days after which the sun shall be darkened.”3
“No, not the troubles before the Last Judgement,” Ash persisted, “but a punishment, a judgement, or an evil miracle?”
“Judgement for what? The princes of Christendom are wicked, but no more wicked than the generation before them. The common people are venal, weak, easily led, and often repentant; this is no alteration from how things have always been. There is distress of nations,4 but we have never lived in the Age of Gold!” His thick fingertips strayed over curlicued capitals, over painted saints in little illuminated shrines. “I don’t know.”
“Then bloody well pray for an answer!”
“Yes.” He folded the book shut over one finger. His eyes were amber, full of light in the room lit by lanterns and fires. “What use can I be to you without God’s help? All I do is puzzle it out from the Gospels, and I think I am more often wrong than right.”
“You were ordained, that’s good enough for me. You know it is.” Ash spoke crudely, knowing exactly why he had left after instruction. “Pray for grace for us.”
“Yes.”
A shouted challenge, and footsteps sounded on the stairs below.
Ash walked around and seated herself on the stool behind the trestle table. That put her with the Lion Azure standard, leaning on its staff against the wall, at her back. Sallet and gauntlets rested on the table, with her sword-belt, scabbard and sword. Her priest praying in the corner at his Green Shrine. Her master gunner calculating expenditure of powder. More than enough for effect, she calculated, and did not look up for a good thirty heartbeats after she heard Floria del Guiz and Daniel de Quesada enter the room.
De Quesada spoke first, quite rationally. “I shall construe this siege as an attack on the armies of the King-Caliph.”
Ash let him listen to the echo of his voice in silence. The lath and plaster walls muffled shouting and the infrequent small cannon fire. Finally she looked at him.
She suggested mildly, “Tell the Caliph’s representatives that Fernando del Guiz is my husband, that he is now under an act of attainder, that I am acting on my own behalf in recovering what is now my property since he was stripped of it by the Emperor Frederick.”
Daniel de Quesada’s face was crusted with healing scabs, where the hairs of his beard had been ripped out. His eyes were dull. His words came with an effort. “So you besiege your husband’s castle, with him in it, and he is now a sworn feudal subject of King-Caliph Theodoric – but that is not an act of aggression against us?”
“Why should it be? These are my lands.” Ash leaned forward over linked hands. “I’m a mercenary. The world’s gone crazy. I want my company inside stone walls. Then I’ll think about who’s going to hire me.”
De Quesada still had a febrile nervousness, despite Floria’s opiates and restraining hand on his arm. The doublet and hose and rolled chaperon hat he had been given sat awkwardly on him; you could see he was not used to moving in such clothes.
“We can’t lose,” he said.
“I usually find myself on the winning side.” That was ambiguous enough for Ash to let it rest. “I’ll give you an escort, Ambassador. I’m sending you back to your people.”
“I thought I was a prisoner!”
“I’m not Frederick. I’m not a subject of Frederick.” Ash gave a nod, dismissing him. “Wait over there a minute. Florian, I want to speak with you.”
Daniel de Quesada looked around the room, then walked across the uneven floorboards as if across the uncertain deck of a ship, hesitating at the door, finally moving to stand in a corner farthest from the windows.
Ash stood up and poured wine into a wooden goblet and offered it to Floria. She spoke briefly in English – it being the language of a small, barbaric, unknown island, there was a sporting chance the Visigoth diplomat might not understand it. “How mad is he? What can I ask him about this darkness?”
“Barking. I don’t know!” The surgeon hitched one hip up on to the trestle table and sat, long leg swinging. “They may be used to their ambassadors coming back God-struck, if they send them out with messages about signs and portents. He’s probably functional. I can’t promise he’ll stay that way if you start asking him questions.”
“Tough. We need to know.” She signalled the Visigoth. He came forward again. “Master Ambassador, one other thing. I want to know when it’s going to get light again.”
“Light?”
“When the sun’s going to rise. When it’s going to stop being dark!”
“The sun…” Daniel de Quesada shivered, not turning his head towards the window. “Is there fog outside?”
“How would I know? It’s black as your hat out there!” Ash sighed. Evidently I can forget a sensible answer from this one. “No, master Ambassador. It’s dark. Not foggy.”
He huddled his arms around himself. Something about the shape of his mouth made Ash shiver: adult men in their right minds do not look like this.
“We were separated. Almost at the top – there was fog. I climbed.” Quesada’s staccato Carthaginian Gothic was barely comprehensible. “Up, up, up. A winding road, in snow. Ice. Climbing for ever, until I could only crawl. Then a great wind came; the sky was purple above me. Purple, and all the white peaks, so high above— Mountains. I cling. There is only air. The rock makes my hands bleed—”
Ash, with her own memory of a sky so dark blue it burns, and thin air that hurts the chest, said to Floria, “He’s talking about the Gotthard Pass, now. Where the monks found him.”
Floria put a firm hand on the man’s arm. “Let’s get you back to the infirmary, Ambassador.”
Half-alert, Daniel de Quesada met Ash’s gaze.
“The fog – went.” He moved his hands apart, like a man opening a curtain.
Ash said, “It was clear a month ago, when we crossed the pass with Fernando. Snow on the rocks either side, but the road was clear. I know where they must have found you, Ambassador. I’ve stood there. You can stand and look straight down into Italy. Straight down, seven thousand feet.”
The wagons creak, horses straining against the ascent; the breath of
the men-at-arms streams on the air; and she stands, the cold striking up through the soles of her boots, and peers down a mottled green-and-white cliff face, funnelling down towards the foothills. But it seems puny to call it a cliff, this southern side of the saddle-pass across the Alps; the mountains rise up in a half-circle that is miles across.
And it is almost a mile and a half straight down.
Sheer rock, moss and ice, and a vastness of empty air so big and deep that it hurts the mind to look at it.
She finished quietly, “If you fell, you’d never touch the earth until you hit bottom.”
“Straight down!” Daniel de Quesada echoed. His eyes flashed. “I found I was looking— The road below me, winding down bend upon bend upon bend. There is a lake at the bottom. It is no larger than the nail upon my finger.”
Ash remembers the interminable straining fear of the descent, and how the lake, when they got down to it, was quite large, and nestled in foothills: they were not off the mountain even then.
“The fog cleared and I was looking down.”
All the room was silent. After a minute, it became apparent to Ash that there was to be no more from him. De Quesada stared with unseeing eyes at the shifting shadows.
As Floria was handing the Visigoth over to one of her aides, Angelotti said, “I’ve known men blindfold themselves going over the alpine passes, afraid of going mad.5 I didn’t think I should meet one, madonna.”
“I think you just have.” Ash looked after de Quesada grimly. “Well, picking him up in the riots in the hope he’d be some use wasn’t one of my better ideas. I’d hoped he’d negotiate with del Guiz when we got here.”
“He’s away with the fairies,” Floria remarked. “If you want my medical opinion. Not the best qualification for a herald.”
Ash snorted. “I don’t care if he’s nuts. I want answers. I don’t like this darkness!”
“Who does?” Floria inquired rhetorically. She snorted. “You want to know how many of your men have developed acute attacks of coward’s belly?”
“No. Why do you think I want to keep them busy with a siege? They’re used to tunnelling petards and banging away with cannon, it reassures them… That’s why the men-at-arms are going through this town street by street commandeering supplies – if they’re going to loot the place, it might as well be organised looting.”
This appeal to her cynicism made Floria chuckle, as Ash had known it would. There was so little difference between Floria and ‘Florian’, even down to the gallantry with which the tall woman offered now to pour wine for Ash herself.
“It’s no different from night attacks,” Ash added, refusing wine, “which are, God knows, a bitch, but possible. I want this castle opened up by treachery, not damaged by us having to storm it. Speaking of which—” the restlessness that came with her failure to interrogate de Quesada impelled her to action “—you come with me and look at this. Angelotti!”
They left the room, the gunner with them; Ash glancing back to see Godfrey Maximillian, broad shoulders bowed, still at prayer. Outside – walking into a wall of darkness, pitch-black down in the streets – they silently stood for some minutes, waiting for night vision, before stumbling towards the bonfire-lights.
The town blacksmith’s had been taken over by the company armourers, a perpetually black-handed group of men with straggling hair, hatless, in pourpoints6 and leather aprons and no shirts, sweating from the forge, half-deaf from the ceaseless ringing of hammers. They made way good-naturedly for Ash, her surgeon, and her escort of half a dozen men and dogs. No commander was ever more than means to an end for them, this she knew. The latest project was difficult, welcome because of that, welcome because unusual.
“A twelve-foot pair of bolt-cutters?” Floria surmised, studying vast steel handles.
“It’s getting the blades right?” The company’s head armourer, Dickon Stour, habitually ended on a note of query, even when not speaking his native English. “To withstand the pressure, and to cut iron?”
“And those are scaling ladders,” Ash said. She pointed at stout wooden poles with steel hooks on the end, and a mess of spars attached. Hook it over a wall, tug ropes, and a ladder will unfold from the mess. “I’m going to send people in secretly with black wool over their armour, to cut the big bars on the postern gate from the inside. I would say, at night, but in this darkness—” A shrug and grin. “Stealth knights…”
“You’re mad. They’re mad. I want to talk to you!” Floria scowled at the noise from the anvils and pointed, silently, at the street. Ash shook hands, thumped shoulders, left with her escort. Angelotti stayed, discussing metallurgy.
Ash caught up with the surgeon a few yards away, staring up from the cobbled street that ran up the hill, to the shadowy machicolations and timber-works of the castle crowning the heights.
Floria walked fast, a few paces ahead of the men-at-arms and hounds. “Are you really going to try that?”
“We did it before. Two years back, in – where was it?” Ash thought. “Somewhere in southern France?”
“That is my brother in there.” The woman’s voice came masculine out of the dusk, a breathy drop into lower registers that never relaxed, whether the command escort could hear her or not. “Granted I haven’t seen him since he was ten. Granted he was a brat. And now he’s a shit. But blood’s blood. He is family.”
“Family. Yeah. Tell me how much I care about family.”
Floria began, “What—?”
“What? Will I give orders for him to be taken prisoner, not killed? Will I let him run, go off and raise men somewhere else to come back and fight me? Will I have him killed? What?”
“All of those.”
“It seems unreal.” Unreal, when I have had his body inside me, to believe that he could die with an arrow through the throat, a billhook slashing his gut; that someone with a bollock dagger and my express order could make him not be.
“Damn it, you can’t go on ignoring this, girl! You fucked him. You married him. He’s your flesh in the sight of God.”
“That’s a dumb thing to say. You don’t believe in God.” Ash could, in the torchlit streets, make out the sudden strain etching itself into the woman’s face. “Florian, I’m not likely to go around denouncing you to the local bishop, am I! Soldiers either believe completely, or not at all, and I’ve got both sorts in the company.”
The tall woman continued walking down the cobblestones beside her, all her balance in her shoulders: gangling and masculine. She made an irritated motion that might have been a shrug or a flinch as Angelotti’s siege cannon crashed out smoke and flame, two streets away. “You’re married!.”
“Time enough to decide what to do about Fernando when I’ve got him and his garrison out of that castle.” Ash shook her head as if she could clear it, somehow; clear the oppressive, unnatural darkness out of her skull.
She called the commander of the escort to her as she reached the commandeered town house again, ordering a brazier and food for his men in the street; and then clumped back up the stairs, Floria at her shoulder, only to walk into what seemed an entire company of people crammed between narrow white walls, helmet-plumes rubbing the candle-stained ceiling, voices raised.
“Quiet!”
That got silence.
She gazed around.
Joscelyn van Mander, his red-cheeked intense face framed by the brilliance of his steel sallet; two of his men; then Robert Anselm; Godfrey rising from his knees and disrupted prayer; Daniel de Quesada in his badly fitting European clothes – and a new man in white tunic and trousers and riveted mail hauberk, no weapons.
A Visigoth, with leather rank badges laced to his mail shoulders. Qa’id, she dredged up out of her memory of campaigns in Iberia: an officer set over a thousand. Roughly the equivalent of her own command.
“Well?” she said, reclaiming her place behind the table, and sitting. Rickard appeared and poured heavily watered wine for her. She dropped without thought into the dialect she had l
earned around Tunisian soldiers; something as automatic to her as calling a hackbutter an arquebusier in the French king’s lands, or a poleaxe der Axst here and l’azza to Angelotti. “What’s your business, Qa’id?”
“Captain.” The Visigoth soldier touched his fingers to his forehead. “I met my countryman de Quesada and your escort, on the road. He decided to return here with me, to speak to you. I bring news to you.”
The Visigoth soldier was small, fair-skinned, hardly taller than Rickard; with the palest blue eyes, and something about him that was undeniably familiar. Ash said, “Is your family name Lebrija?”
He seemed startled. “Yes.”
“Continue. What news?”
“There will be other messengers, of your own people—”
Ash’s gaze flicked to Anselm, who nodded, confirming: “Yes. I met them. I was on my way here when Joscelyn came in.”
“You may have the honour of telling me,” Ash told the Visigoth qa’id mildly, hating to hear news unprepared; hating not to have the few minutes’ warning she would have had if Robert had been the one to tell her. Since Joscelyn van Mander seemed intensely worried, she switched back to German. “What’s happened?”
“Frederick of Hapsburg has sued for terms.”
There was a little silence, essentially undisturbed by Floria muttering “Fuck,” and Joscelyn van Mander’s demand: “Captain, what does he mean?”
“I think he means that the territories of the Holy Roman Emperor have surrendered.” Ash linked her hands in front of her. “Master Anselm, is that what our messengers say?”
