by Mary Gentle
“Frederick’s surrendered. Everything from the Rhine to the sea is open to the Visigoth armies.” In an equally level tone, Robert Anselm added, “And Venice has been burned to the waterline. Churches, houses, warehouses, ships, canal-bridges, St Mark’s Basilica, the Doge’s palace, everything. A million, million ducats up in smoke.”
The silence became intense: mercenaries stunned at the waste of wealth, the two Visigoth men imbued with a silent confidence, being associated with the power to make such destruction.
Frederick of Hapsburg will have heard about Venice, Ash thought, stunned, hearing in her mind the dry, covetous voice of the Holy Roman Emperor; he’s decided not to risk the Germanies! And then, bringing her gaze snap into focus on the Visigoth soldier, brother or cousin of dead Asturio Lebrija, she realised, The Empire has surrendered and we’re caught on the wrong side. Every mercenary’s nightmare.
“I assume,” she said, “that a relieving force from the Visigoth army is now on its way here to Fernando?”
Her vision of where they are flips a hundred and eighty degrees. It’s no longer a matter of feeling herself safe behind town walls, soon to be safe behind the castle walls. Now the company’s caught in between the approaching Visigoth men-at-arms in the countryside beyond the town, and Fernando del Guiz’s knights and gunners up in the castle itself.
Daniel de Quesada spoke rustily. “Of course. Our allies must be helped.”
“Of course,” the brother or cousin of Lebrija echoed.
Quesada could not yet have told the qa’id of Lebrija’s death, might not know anything, Ash thought, and resolved to keep silent where speech could very likely get her into trouble.
“I’ll be interested to talk to your captain when he arrives,” Ash stated. She watched her own officers out of peripheral vision, seeing them draw strength from her confidence.
“Our commander arrives here by tomorrow,” the Visigoth soldier estimated. “We are most anxious to talk to you. The famous Ash. That’s why our commander is coming here, now.”
Sun gone out or not, Ash thought, I am not going to get the time I want to consider my decisions. Whether I like it or not, it’s happening now.
And then:
Sun gone out or not, Last Days or not, it is nothing to do with me: if I stand by my company, we’re strong enough to survive this. The metaphysics of it aren’t my problem.
“Right,” she said. “I’d better meet your commander and open negotiations.”
Rickard presented Bertrand, a possible half-brother of Philibert, at thirteen busy growing into a body far too large for him, managing simultaneously to be fat and gangling. They put Ash into her armour and brought Godluc in his best barding; the boys smear-eyed with lack of sleep, at an hour which might have been dawn, if this third day in Guizburg had had one.
“As far as I can tell, their commander’s personal name is actually the name of her rank,” Godfrey Maximillian said. “Faris.7 It means Captain-General, General of all their forces, something like that.”
“Her rank? A woman commander?” Ash remembered, then, Asturio Lebrija saying I have met women of war, and his sense of humour, which his cousin Sancho (Godfrey reporting the name and fact) did not possess at all. “And she’s here now? The boss of the whole damn invasion force?”
“Just down the road from Innsbruck.”
“Shit…”
Godfrey went to the door, calling a man in from the main room of the commandeered house. “Carracci, the boss wants to hear it herself.”
A man-at-arms with startling white-blond hair and high colour on his cheeks, who had stripped off all but a minimum of his shabby foot soldier’s kit to travel fast, came in and made a courtesy. “I got right up to their command tent! It’s a woman, boss. A woman leading their army; and you know how they’ve made her good? She’s got one of those Brazen Head machines of theirs, it does her thinking for her in battles – they say she hears its voice! She hears it talk!”
“If it’s a Brazen Head,8 of course she hears it talk!”
“No, boss. She doesn’t have it with her. She hears it in her head, like God speaking to a priest.”
Ash stared at the billman.
“She hears it like a saint’s voice, it tells her how to fight. That’s why a woman beat us.” Carracci suddenly stopped talking, lifted a shoulder, and at last gave a hopeful grin. “Oops. Sorry, boss?”
She hears it like a saint’s voice.
A pulse of coldness went through the pit of Ash’s stomach. She was aware that she blinked, stared, said nothing; chill with an as yet unidentifiable shock. She wet her lips.
“Bloody right you’re sorry…”
It was an automatic response. This billman, Carracci, had clearly not heard Ash hears saints’ voices? as a company rumour: most – especially those who had been with her for years – would have done.
Does she hear a saint, this Faris? Does she? Or does she only think it’s a useful rumour? Burned as a witch is no way to end…
“Thanks, Carracci,” she added absently. “Join the escort. Tell them we’re riding in five minutes.”
As Carracci left, she turned back to Godfrey. It’s difficult to feel vulnerable, laced and tied into steel. She put the billman’s words out of her mind. Her confidence came back with her stride across the small room, the trestle bare of waiting armour now, to the window, where she stood and looked out at Guizburg’s fires.
“I think you’re right, Godfrey. They’re going to offer us a contract.”
“I’ve talked to travellers from a number of monasteries this side of the mountains. As I said, I can’t get a real idea of their numbers, but there is at least one other Visigoth army fighting in Iberia.”
Ash kept her back to him. “Voices. They say she hears voices. That’s odd.”
“As a rumour, it has its uses.”
“Don’t I know it!”
“Saints are one thing,” Godfrey said. “Claiming a miracle voice from an engine, that’s another. She might be thought a demon. She might be a demon.”
“Yes.”
“Ash—”
“There isn’t the time to worry about this, okay?” She turned and glared at Godfrey. “Okay?”
He watched her, brown eyes calm. He did not nod.
Ash said, “We have to make our minds up fast, if the Visigoths do make us an offer. Fernando and his men are just waiting to find us caught between hammer and anvil. Then it’ll be up with his castle drawbridge, and sally out and take us right in the back. Yippee,” she said dourly, and then grinned over her armoured shoulder at the priest. “Won’t he be sick if we’re contracted to the same side? We’re mercenaries, but he’s an attainted traitor – I still reckon this castle’s mine.”
“Don’t count your castles before they’re stormed.”
“Should that be a proverb, do you think?” She sobered. “We are between hammer and anvil. Let’s hope they need us on their side more than they need to get rid of us. Otherwise I should have decided to move us out, not stay put. And it’s going to be very short and very bloody up here.”
The priest’s broad hand came down on her left pauldron. “It’s bloody where the Visigoths are fighting the Guilds, up near Lake Lucerne. Their commander will probably buy any fighting force they can get, especially one that’s got local knowledge.”
“And then put us in the front line to die, rather than their own men. I know how it goes.” She moved cautiously, turning; armour can be considered a weapon in itself, if you are only wearing a brown pleated woollen robe and sandals. Godfrey’s hand slid away from the sharp metal plates. She met his brown-eyed gaze.
“It’s remarkable what you can get used to. A week, ten days… The question no one wants to ask, of course, is – after the sun, what? What else can happen?” Ash knelt stiffly. “Bless me before I ride out. I’d like to be in good grace right now.”
His deep, familiar voice sang a blessing.
“Ride with me,” she directed, a heartbeat after he fi
nished, and made for the stairs. Godfrey followed her downstairs and out into the town.
Ash mounted and rode through the streets, with her officers and escort, men-at-arms and dogs. She reined Godluc in when a procession passed, jamming the narrow street, men and women wailing, their woollen doublets and kirtles deliberately slashed, faces streaked with ashes. Merchants and craftsmen. Bare, bloody-footed boys in white carried a Virgin between green wax candles. Town priests whipped them with steel-toothed whips. Ash took off her helmet and waited while the lamenting, praying crowd stumbled past.
When the noise level dropped to the point where she could be heard, she replaced her sallet and called, “On!”
She rode with fifty men, past bone-fires that burned the clock round now, out through the gates of Guizburg. They passed some of her own men coming in from expeditions to untouched forest, dragging loads of pine for torches. What she thought were silver pine-needles were, she saw as she rode close, pine-needles covered in frost. Frost. In July.
The wheel of the mill was silent, above where they splashed across the ford; and in the darkness she could just see cows straying, not knowing when to come in to be milked. An odd half-song came from copses, birds uncertain whether to sleep or to claim territory. Oppressiveness prickled her spine, under the pinked silk lining of her arming doublet, and made her sweat; all this before she saw a thousand torches down the shallow valley, and the silver eagle Visigoth standards, and heard drums.
Joscelyn van Mander demanded reassurance, his eyes on the spearmen and bowmen down the slope. “I never fought Visigoths, what’s it like?”
Ash leaned her upright lance back against her armoured shoulder. Its foxtail pennant hung in the still air. Godluc frisked, his tail bound up with a chaplet of oak-leaves and folly-bells. “Angelotti?”
Antonio Angelotti rode beside her, armoured, a Saint Barbara medal knotted around the cuff of his gauntlet. “When I was with the Lord-Amir Childeric, we put down a local rebellion. I had captaincy of the English hackbutters.9 The Visigoths are raiders. Karr wa farr: repeated attack and retreat. Hit and run, cut your supply lines, deny you the fords, indifferent sieges for a year or three, then take the city by storm. I have not known them seek out the enemy army for a pitched battle. They’ve changed tactics.”
“Evidently.” There was a strong smell of unwatered beer from van Mander.
Ash checked back, twisting in the high, upright war saddle. Apart from the usual command officers, she had brought Euen Huw and his lance; Jan-Jacob Clovet and thirty bowmen; ten men picked from van Mander’s band, and her steward Henri Brant – torso swathed in bandages – to oversee on behalf of the non-combatants. A majority of her riders carried torches.
Angelotti said, “You should have let my bombards open up the Guizburg keep. It would be much harder to get us out of that, madonna.”
“Try not to think of it as a pile of rubble, but as our pile of rubble. I’d like it kept in one piece!”
Confident of the number and disposition of this part of the Visigoth forces at least, the company’s scouts being reliable, Ash rode on down the slope between neatly sectioned fields and wattle-fenced animal pens. The company standard and her personal banner rode in the mass of men, dark against the unnatural dark sky, among the jolting, flaring torches.
They topped a slight rise. Ash kept Godluc moving forward when he would have responded to the shift in her weight as she saw what lay a little distance off. It is one thing to be reliably informed that there is a division of an army, eight or nine thousand men plus baggage train, encamped just off the Innsbruck road. It is another to see a hundred thousand torches, bright bonfires, hear the whickering and stamping from the horse lines, and the shouting of guards; glimpse, in the lightless day, the vast wheel of tents, spidered with guy-ropes, thronging with armed men and circled with wagons, that is that army in the flesh.
Ash drew rein at the appointed rendezvous, a crossroads milestone, and thumbed her sallet’s visor up. All her party rode in full armour, by her orders; horses fully barded and caparisoned; coloured silk scarves twisted around helmets, plume-holders on sallets and armets frothing with white ostrich feathers. The mounted crossbowmen had their weapons out of their cases, and bolts close to hand.
“There,” she said, straining to see through the darkness.
A rider with a white lance pennant rode up from the Visigoth encampment. After a while she managed to distinguish European armour, the rounded curves of Milanese plate, and a straggle of black hair curling out from under the neck of his armet. “It’s Agnes!”
Robert Anselm growled, “Jammy sod. Trust Lamb to get hired.”
“In the middle of a fucking battle! He must have signed a contract while they were still having that skirmish.” In so far as her armour allowed it, Ash shook her head ruefully. “Don’t you just love Italian mercenaries?”
They met in the stink of smoking pine torches. Lamb carefully unpinned the visor of his armet, showing his tanned face. “Planning a quick getaway, are we?”
“Unless the whole Visigoth army down there comes after us, we’d make it back through the town gates.” Ash slotted her lance into its saddle holster to give her hands freedom. She spoke mainly for the benefit of her officers. “And unless your employer really wants to be sitting in front of one tiny Bavarian castle for the next twelve weeks, I don’t think she’ll be too interested in trying to prise us out of Guizburg.”
“Perhaps.” Ambiguous.
“Tell your general that we’re understandably not keen about riding into her camp, but if she wants to ride up here, we’ll negotiate.”
“That’s the word I wanted to hear.” Lamb wheeled his lean, bony roan gelding, held up his lance, and dipped the white pennant to the dirt. Another group of riders moved out from the wagon-fort, perhaps forty strong. Too far away in the darkness to see detail, they could be any group of armed men.
“So how much extra did you get paid for riding up here on your own?”
“Enough. But I’m told you treat hostages well.” A flirtatious curve of the lips; Agnus Dei’s religious convictions not (by common rumour) extending as far as celibacy. Ash smiled back, thinking of Daniel de Quesada and Sancho Lebrija, now being compulsorily entertained in Guizburg until she should return unhurt.
“Nothing in the city states is holding out now except Milano,” Lamb added, ignoring Antonio Angelotti’s sudden obscenity; “and of the Swiss cantons, only Berne.”
“They fucked the Swiss?” Ash was stunned into momentary silence. “Their lines of supply go back clear across the Mediterranean; they can keep armies like this in the field, and still push on north? And hold down territory behind them?”
It was very inelegant fishing for information, or rather, a restating of information that her sources informed her was true. Ash’s attention fixed on the approaching riders.
Lamb proved close-mouthed. “Twenty years of preparation helps, I think, madonna Ash.”
“Twenty years. I find it hard to imagine. That’s as long as I’ve been alive.” The mention of her youth was entirely malicious, Lamb being in his early thirties. So young, so famous; better not to be over-confident as well, she concluded, and waited for the riders to come up the slope. A wind swept over the dark grass, rustling the pine forests in the distance. There was a sense in her, almost physical, like the sensation of successfully riding a mettlesome horse of which one is barely in control.
“Sweet Christ,” she murmured joyfully, almost to herself, “it’s Armageddon. Everything’s changing. Christendom being turned upside-down. Who’d be a peasant now?”
“Or a merchant. Or a lord.” Lamb drew in his reins. “This is the only trade to be in, cara.”
“You think so? Fighting’s all I can do.” A rare moment: she and the straggle-haired man apprehended each other very clearly. Ash said, “Stay in the fighting line until you’re thirty and you die, so I command. Stay in command until you’re old, forty or so, and you die. Hence—” A wave of her armoured
hand back at Guizburg. “The game of princes.”
“Mmm?” Lamb turned both body and head, in his plate harness, so that he could look directly at her. “Oh yes, cara. I heard rumours that half your trouble was, you wanted an estate and title. As for myself—” He sighed, with some degree of content. “I have my money for the last two campaigns invested in the English wool trade.”
“Invested?” Ash stared at him.
“And I own a dye-works in Bruges now. Very comfortable.”
Ash became aware that her mouth was open. She shut it.
“So who needs land?” Agnus Dei concluded.
“Uh … yeah.” Ash switched her attention back to the Visigoths. “You’ve been with them, what, two weeks or more? Lamb, what’s the deal here?”
The Italian mercenary touched the lamb on his surcoat. “Ask yourself if you have a choice, madonna, and if not, what does my answer matter?”
“She’s good.” Ash watched the torchlit procession coming closer. Close enough to see the outriders, four robed and veiled men on mules, with what looked like open-frame octagonal barrels resting on their saddles in front of them. Something wrong about the size of the men’s heads and bodies. She identified them as dwarfs, a moment after she realised the red and gilded leather sides of the barrels were being struck with sticks; were, in fact, war-drums. The growing vibration made Godluc’s ears go back.
Ash said, in a rush, “She kicked our asses at Genoa. You believe all this stuff about a brazen head machine telling her what to do? Have you seen it?”
“No. Her men say the brazen head, that they call her ‘Stone Golem’, isn’t here with her. It’s in Carthage.”
“But the time you’d spend waiting for an answer – messages, riders on post-horses, pigeons – then she can’t be using it in the field. Not in real-time combat.”
“But her men say she does. They say she hears it at the same time as it speaks in the Citadel, in Carthage.” He paused. “I don’t know, madonna. They say she’s a woman, so she can only be this good if it’s voices.”
Lamb’s sly comment stung. Ash momentarily ignored him, caught up in an idea of what it might mean if one could be in constant real-time communication with one’s home city and commanders, thousands of miles away.
