by Mary Gentle
“I was twelve when I was taken.” The long-lashed lids lifted. Angelotti looked her in the face. “The Turks took me off a galley near Naples. Their warship was taken by Visigoths. I spent three years in Carthage.”
Ash did not have the nerve to ask him more about that time than he seemed disposed to volunteer now. It was more than he had said to her in four years. She wondered if he had wished, then, that he had not been quite so beautiful.
“I learned it in bed,” Angelotti said smoothly, with a humorous twist to his mouth that made it clear her thinking was transparent to him. “With one of their amirs,12 their scientist-magi. Lord-Amir Childeric. Who taught me trajectories for cannon, and navigation, and astrology.”
Ash, used to seeing Angelotti always clean (if somewhat singed), and neat, itself a miracle in the mud and dust of the camp, and, above all, private – Ash thought, How badly does he think he needs to break through to me, to tell me this?
She spoke hurriedly. “Roberto could be right, this could be their twilight … spreading. Godfrey would call it an Infernal contagion.”
“He would not. He respects their amirs, as I do.”
“What is it you want to say to me?”
Angelotti undid his cord cloak ties. The red wool cloth slid down his back, to the table, and bunched there. “My gunners are mutinous. They don’t like it that you called off the siege of Guizburg. They’re saying it’s because del Guiz is your husband. That you no longer have the smile of Fortune.”
“O Fortuna!” Ash grinned. “Fickle as a woman, isn’t that what they’re saying? All right, I’ll talk to them. Pay them more. I know why they’re mad. They had galleries dug in almost to the castle gate. I know they were really looking forward to blowing it sky-high…!”
“And so they feel cheated.” Angelotti appeared extremely relieved. “If you’ll talk to them … good.”
“Is that all?”
“Are your voices the same as hers?”
The slightest tap will shatter pottery, given in the right place. Ash felt cracks crazing out from his question. She sprang to her feet in the cramped pavilion.
“You mean, is my saint nothing? Is the Lion nothing? Is it a demon speaking to me? Am I hearing a machine’s voice, the way they say she does? I don’t know.” Breathing hard, Ash realised the fingers of her left hand had cramped around the scabbard of her sword. Knuckles whitened. “Can she do what they say she does? Can she hear some, some device, halfway across the middle sea? You’ve been there, you tell me!”
“It could be just a rumour. A complete lie.”
“I don’t know!” Ash unclamped her fingers, slowly. Mutinous or not, she could hear the gunners celebrating one of their obscure saint’s days feasts outside;13 someone was singing something very loud and coarse about a bull being taken to a cow. She realised that the song was calling the bull Fernando. One of her dark brows went up. Maybe not so far from mutiny after all.
“The Faris’s men have been building brick observation posts all down the roads, on the march.” Angelotti spoke loudly over the embarrassing chorus.
“They’re nailing this country down.” Ash had a moment’s sheer panic thinking But where are we? Fear vanished as the memories of the last few days welled up obediently in her mind. “I guess that’s why they want to crown this Visigoth ‘Viceroy’ of theirs in Aachen.”14
“The weather’s bad. You said they’d have to settle for somewhere closer, and you were right, madonna.”
In the moment’s silence, Ash heard dogs bark, and friendly greetings from the guards; and Godfrey Maximillian walked in, stripping off sheepskin mittens, with Floria behind him. The surgeon pointed, and the boy Bertrand, with a brazier, cleared a space in the tent to put it down, and heaped on more hot coals. At a nod from Angelotti, he clumsily served small beer, and butter and two-day-old bread, before leaving.
“I hate bad preaching.” Godfrey sat on another wooden chest. “I’ve just been giving them Exodus chapter ten, verse twenty-two, where Moses calls down a thick darkness from heaven over Egypt. Someone who knows is bound to ask why that only lasted three days, and this has gone on for three weeks.”
The priest drank, and wiped his beard. Ash carefully checked the distance between the various chests and flasks of powder and the brazier’s burning coals. Probably okay, she thought, having no great faith in Angelotti’s good sense about gunpowder.
Floria warmed her hands at the brazier. “Robert’s on his way here.”
This is a meeting convened without my consent, Ash realised. And my bet is that they’ve been waiting five days to do it. She took a thoughtful bite out of the bread, and chewed.
Anselm’s voice barked outside. He ducked hurriedly in through the tent-flap. “Can’t stay, got to go and sort out the gate-guards for tonight – for today.” He hauled his velvet bonnet off, seeing Ash. Candlelight shone on his shaven skull, and on the pewter Lion livery badge fixed to his hat. “You’re back, then.”
The odd thing, perhaps, was that no one questioned his choice of words. They turned their faces to her, Angelotti’s altar-painting features, Godfrey’s crumb-strewn beard, Floria with her expression utterly closed.
“Where’s Agnes?” Ash demanded suddenly. “Where’s Lamb?”
“Half a mile to the north-east of us, camped, with fifty lances.” Robert Anselm hitched his scabbard out of the way and stood beside Floria at the iron brazier. He would move entirely differently, Ash suddenly thought, if he realised Florian wasn’t a man.
“Lamb knew,” Ash snarled. “Motherfucker! He must have known, as soon as he saw her – their general. And he let me walk into that without a word of warning!”
“He let their general walk into it, too,” Godfrey pointed out.
“And she hasn’t hanged him yet?”
“I’m told he claims he never realised how close the resemblance was. Apparently the Faris believes him.”
“Bloody hell.” Ash seated herself on the edge of the trestle table, beside Angelotti. “I’ll send Rickard over with a challenge to a personal duel.”
“Not many people know what he did, if indeed he did, and it wasn’t just a sin of omission.” Godfrey licked butter from his white fingertips, his dark eyes keenly on her. “You have no public need.”
“I might just fight him anyway,” Ash grumbled. She folded her arms across her brigandine, looking down at the gilded rivet-heads and blue velvet. “Look. She’s not my fetch. I’m not her devil. I’m just some amir family’s by-blow, that’s all. Christ knows the Griffin-in-Gold went across the Mediterranean often enough, twenty years ago. I’ll be a bastard second cousin or something.”
She raised her head, catching Anselm and Angelotti exchanging a look that she couldn’t read. Floria poked the red coals. Godfrey drank from a leather mug.
“There is something I thought we would say?” Godfrey wiped his mouth and looked diffidently around the tent, at its shadowed folds and faces profiled in candlelight. “About our complete confidence in our captain?”
Robert Anselm muttered, “Fucking hell, clerk, get on with it, then!”
There was an anticipatory silence.
Into it, the last two lines of the hand-gunners’ ballad echoed, having the failed bull Fernando being serviced by the cow.
Ash caught Anselm’s eye, and, poised between absolute rage and laughter, was precipitated into helpless giggles by what must be an exactly similar expression on Robert’s face.
“I didn’t hear that,” she decided, cheerfully.
Angelotti looked up from scribbling with a quill, leaning across his trestle table. “That’s all right, madonna, I’ve written it down in case you forget!”
Godfrey Maximillian sprayed bread-crumbs across the tent, whatever he would have said lost or superseded.
“I’m getting a new company,” Ash announced, with a deadpan humour; and was disconcerted when Floria, who had remained silent, said flatly, “Yes – if you don’t trust us.”
Ash saw the absence o
f five days written into Floria’s expression. She nodded, slowly. “I do. I trust all of you.”
“I wish I thought that you did.”
Ash jabbed a finger at Floria. “You’re coming with me. Godfrey, so are you. And Angelotti.”
“Where?” Florian demanded.
Ash rattled her fingertips against her scabbard, keeping arrhythmic time to her calculations. “The Visigoth general can’t crown her Viceroy in Aachen, it’s too far to travel. We’re turning west. That means she’s going for the nearest city here, which is Basle—”
Godfrey said excitedly, “That would be a useful first move! It fixes the League and the south Germanies under their government. Aachen can come later. Sorry. Go on, child.”
“I’m going into Basle. You’ll see why in a minute. Robert, I’m giving you temporary command of the company. I want you to make a fortified camp about three miles outside the city, on the western side. You can put my war-pavilion up, tables, carpets, silver plate, the whole works. In case you get visitors.”
Anselm’s high forehead wrinkled as he frowned. “We’re used to being sent off while you negotiate a contract. This one is already signed.”
“I know. I know. I’m not changing that.”
“It isn’t the way we’ve done it before.”
“It’s the way we’re doing it now.”
Ash unfolded her arms and stood up. She glanced around at their faces, in the candlelit tent, fixing her gaze briefly on Floria. There is a lot of history here. Some of it not known to everyone. She put the problem aside for later.
“I want to talk to the general.” Ash hesitated. Then she went on, speaking to each of them in turn.
“Godfrey, I want you to talk to your monastic contacts. And F-Florian, you talk to the Visigoth physicians. Angelotti, you know mathematicians and gunners in their camp, go get drunk with them. I want to know everything about this woman! – I want to know what she has to break her fast, what she wants her army to do in Christendom, who her family are, and whether she does hear voices. I want to know if she knows what’s happened to the sun.”
Outside, the setting crescent moon argues the arrival of another lightless day.
“Roberto. While I’m inside the walls of Basle,” Ash said, “I can do with all the implicit threat that I can get, sitting there outside.”
Going into the city of Basle, Ash could think of nothing else except She has my face. I don’t have father or mother, there’s no one in the world who looks like me, but she has my face. I have to talk to her.
Sweet Christ, I wish it would get light!
In the daytime darkness, between its mountains, Basle echoed with the hooves of war-horses and the shouts of soldiers. Citizens leaped out of her way, scurried indoors; or never left their houses, shouted from upper-storey windows as she rode by. Whore, bitch, and traitor were most common.
“Nobody loves a mercenary,” Ash mock-sighed. Rickard laughed. The company’s men-at-arms swaggered.
Crosses marked most doors. The churches were packed. Ash rode through processional flagellations, finding the civic buildings all shut up except for one guild house. That had black pennants outside.
Ash negotiated climbing the narrow crooked stairs in armour, her escort behind her. Bare oak support beams protruded from the white plastered walls. The lack of space made any weapon a liability. A rising noise came from the upstairs chambers: men’s voices speaking Schweizerdeutsch, Flemish, Italian, and the Latin of North Africa. The Faris’s council of occupation: somewhere she might be found.
“Here.” Ash took off her sallet and handed it to Rickard. Condensation misted the bright metal.
It was, when she entered, no different from any other room in any other city. Stone-framed windows with diamond-leaded panes, looking out on rain on the cobbled streets below. Four-storey houses across the narrow alley, plaster-and-beam frontages gleaming in the wet – in rain turning to sleet, she suddenly realised. White dots dropped into the circles of lantern light, light from other windows, and the pitch-torches illuminating the men-at-arms below.
Sloping roofs blocked the black sky above the street. The room sweltered and stank with a hundred tallow candles and rush-lights. When she looked at the marked wax candle, she saw it was just past midday.
“Ash.” She produced a leather livery badge. “Condottiere to the Faris.”
The Visigoth guards let her pass in. She seated herself at table, her men behind her, reasonably secure in her knowledge that Robert Anselm could handle both Joscelyn van Mander and Paul di Conti, that he would take notice of what the leaders of smaller lances said; that, if it came to it, the company would follow him into an attack. A quick glance around showed her Europeans and Visigoths, but not their Faris.
An amir (by his robes) said, “We must arrange this coronation. I appeal to you all for procedure.”
Another Visigoth civilian began to read, carefully, from a European illuminated manuscript. “‘As soon as the Archbishop hath put the crown on the king his head, then shall the king offer his sword to God on the altar … the worthiest earl that is there present shall … bear it naked before the king…’”15
This is not what I do, Ash thought. How the hell do I get to speak to their general?
She scratched at her neck, under her mail standard. Then she stopped, not wanting to draw attention to rat-nibbled leather and the red dots of flea-bites.
“But why crown our Viceroy by heathen ceremonies?” one of the Visigoth qa’ids demanded. “Even their own kings and emperors don’t command these people’s loyalty, so what good will it do?”
Further down the table, on the far side, a man with yellow hair cut short in the Visigoth military fashion lifted his head. She found herself staring at the face of Fernando del Guiz.
“Ah – nothing personal, del Guiz,” the same Visigoth military officer added genially. “After all, you may be a traitor, but, hell, you’re our traitor!”
A ripple of dry humour went around the wooden table, quelled by the amir; who nonetheless glanced at the young German knight quizzically.
Fernando del Guiz smiled. His expression was open, generous, complicit with the high-ranking Visigoth officer; as if Fernando were seeing the joke against himself.
It was the same disarming smile he had shared with her outside the Emperor’s tent at Neuss.
Ash saw his forehead gleaming in the candlelight: shiny with sweat.
Not a sign of strength of character. Not at all.
“Fuck!” Ash shouted.
“‘And the king shall be’—” A white-haired man, in a murrey-coloured woollen pleated gown, with a silver-linked chain around his neck, looked up from tracing a hand-written document with his be-ringed finger. “Your pardon, Frau?”
“Fuck!” Ash sprang up and leaned forward, her gauntleted hands resting on the table. Fernando del Guiz: stone-green eyes. Fernando del Guiz, in a mail hauberk, and a white tunic under it; the badge of a qa’id laced to his shoulder, and his mouth now white around the lips. He met her eyes and she felt it, felt the eye-contact as a literal jolt under her ribs.
“You are a fucking traitor!”
The hilt of her sword is solid in her grip, the razor-sharp blade drawn two inches from the scabbard before she even thinks about it, every trained muscle beginning to move. She feels in her body the anticipated jolt of the sword-point stabbing through his bare, unprotected face. Smashing cheekbone, eye, brain. Brute force solves so many things in life not worth wasting time thinking about; this is what she does for a living, after all.
In the split second before she drew, Agnus Dei – now visible, sitting in his Milanese armour and white surcoat beyond the amir – gave a shrug that said plainly, Women!, and said loudly, “Keep your private business for another time, madonna!”
Ash flicked a glance back to ascertain where her six men-at-arms were positioned, behind her. Impassive faces. Ready for back-up. Except for Rickard. The boy bit on his bare hand, appalled at the silence.
&n
bsp; It reached her.
Fernando del Guiz watched, no expression on his face. Safe behind the walls of public protection.
“I will,” Ash said, sitting down. Around the low-beamed room, suddenly tense men wearing swords relaxed. She added, “I’ll keep my business with Lamb for another time, too.”
“Perhaps mercenaries do not need to attend on this meeting, condottieri,” the lord-amir offered drily.
“Guess not.” Ash braced her hands against the edge of the oak table. “I really need to speak with your Faris.”
“She is in the town’s great hall.”
It was clearly the placation of a quarrelsome mercenary. Ash appreciated it. She pushed herself to her feet, and concealed a smile at Agnus Dei having also to gather his men, make his farewells, and leave the meeting and the house.
She glanced back as Lamb and his men stepped carefully out on to the cobbles after her. She tugged her cloak around her against the sleet. “All mercenaries out on the street together…”
That would either make him fight or laugh.
The creases deepened in his brown face, under his barbute with its sodden plumes. “What’s she paying you, madonna?”
“More than you. Whatever it is, I bet it’s more than you.”
“You have the more lances,” he said mildly, pulling on his heavy gauntlets.
Confused by the evaporation of her anger, Ash put on her helm and reached out as Rickard brought Godluc, and mounted quickly and easily. Not that a war-horse’s shod hooves were any more certain on the cobbles than her own slick-soled boots.
Lamb called, “Did your Antonio Angelotti tell you? They’ve burned Milano, too. Down to the dirt.”
A smell of wet horse permeated the chill air.
“You were from Milan, weren’t you, Lamb?”
“No mercenary is from anywhere, madonna, you know that.”
“Some of us try.” That brought Guizburg to mind, fifty miles away: shattered town walls and unbreached keep; and another jolt left her breathless: He is upstairs in that little room and I wish he was dead!
“Which one of you was it?” she demanded. “Who let ‘twins’ meet, without warning either of us?”
