by Mary Gentle
Lamb chuckled harshly. “If the Faris believed it was my fault, madonna, would I be here?”
“But Fernando’s still here, too.”
The Italian mercenary gave her a look that said you are a child and had nothing to do with her age.
Ash said recklessly, “What about if I paid you to kill my husband?”
“I’m a soldier, not an assassin!”
“Lamb, I always knew you had principles, if I could only find them!” She made a joke of it, laughing it away; uncomfortably aware from the look on the Italian’s face that he knew it was not a joke.
“Besides, he’s the coming man with the Faris-General.” Agnus Dei touched his white surcoat, his expression changing. “God judges him, madonna. Do you think you’re the only enemy he has, having done this? God’s judgement comes on him.”
“I’d like to get in first.” Ash, grim, watched Agnus Dei and his men mount up. Hooves and voices echoed between high, narrow houses. A bitch of a street to fight along, she thought, and dropped her chin into her mail standard to mutter aloud – purely as a supposition – and for the first time since Genoa: “Six mounted knights against seven; all Carrying war hammers, swords, axes; on very bad ground—”
And stopped. And reached up to jerk the visor of her sallet down, hiding her face. She whirled Godluc, iron shoes striking sparks in the sleet, and slid off at a gallop, men-at-arms following her all anyhow, Lamb’s appalled shout lost in the clatter.
No! I said nothing! I don’t want to hear—!
Nothing rational: a wall of fear rose up in her mind. She would not consider the reasons why.
It’s only the saint I have heard since I was a child: why—
I don’t want to hear my voice.
Eventually she let Godluc slow, on the dangerous cobbles. Torches flared as Ash led her entourage through narrow, pitch-dark streets. A clock distantly struck two of the afternoon.
“I know where we’ll pick up the surgeon on the way,” she told Thomas Rochester, having given up Floria-Florian as a name that made her speech stumble. Rochester nodded and directed the manner of their riding: himself and another armoured horseman before her, two more at the rear, and the two mounted crossbowmen in their felt hats to ride beside her. The road underfoot changed from cobbles to frozen mud ruts.
Ash rode between houses with tiny paned windows illuminated by cheap rush-lights. A black dot jerked and darted across her vision. Godluc tossed his head at its angular flight. Bats, she realised: bats flying out from under the house-eaves, in this dark daytime, snatching at insects, or trying to.
Something crunched under the war-horse’s shod hooves.
Stretching across the cold dirt in front of them, insects lay like a crisp frost.
Pismires of the air, all dead from cold: honey-bees, wasps, blow-flies. A hundred thousand of them. Godluc’s feathered hooves came down on the bright, broken wings of butterflies.
“Here,” she directed, at a three-storey house with a stack of overhanging windows. Rochester snuffled. She could see little of the dark-haired Englishman’s face under his visor, but when she studied the house outside which they had halted, she guessed the reason for his humour. A hundred rush-lights shone in the windows, someone was singing, someone was playing a lute surprisingly well, and three or four men were being sick in the gutter in the centre of the alley. Whorehouses always do good business in a crisis.
“You guys wait for me.” Ash swung down from the saddle. Light glinted from her steel armour. “And I mean here. I don’t want to find any of you missing when I come back!”
“No, boss.” Rochester grinned.
Thick-necked men in jerkins and hose, backlit, let her pass, seeing armour and livery jacket. Nothing unusual about a boy-voiced knight or man-at-arms in a Basle whorehouse. Two questions got her knowledge of the room occupied by a yellow-haired Burgundian-accented surgeon, two silver coins of indeterminate issue gained silence. She strode up the stairs, knocked once, and went in.
A woman was lying back on a pallet in the corner of the small room, her bodice pulled down and her long veined breasts drooping out. All her chemises and her woollen kirtle were ruffled up about her naked thighs. She might have been anything between sixteen and thirty, Ash couldn’t tell. She had dyed yellow hair, and a small plump chin.
The room smelled of sex.
There was a lute beside the whore, and a candle and some bread on a wooden plate on the floor. Floria del Guiz sat cross-wise on the pallet with her back against the plaster of the wall. She drank from a leather bottle. All her points had been unlaced; one brown nipple was visible where her breast lay out of her open shirt.
As Ash watched, the whore stroked Floria’s neck.
“Is this a sin?” the girl demanded fiercely. “Is it, sir? But fornication is a sin in itself, and I have fornicated with many men. They are bulls in a field, with their great cocks. She is gentle and wild with me.”
“Margaret. Sssh.” Floria leaned forward and kissed the young woman on the mouth. “I am to leave, I see. Shall I come back and visit you?”
“When you have the money.” A glint, under the bravado, of something else. “Mother Astrid won’t let you in if you don’t. And come in your man-shape. I don’t want to make a bonfire for the church.”
Floria met Ash’s black look. The surgeon’s eyes danced. “This is Margaret Schmidt. She’s excellent with her fingers – on the lute.”
Ash turned her back on the young whore rearranging her clothes; and on Floria, tying her points with a surgeon’s neatness. She walked across the floor. Boards creaked. A deep male voice shouted something from upstairs; there was a series of rising cries, faked, in another upstairs room.
“I never whored with women!” Ash turned, stiffly, in metal plates. “I went with men. I never went with animals, or women! How can you do that?”
Margaret murmured, shocked, “He’s a woman!”, to which Floria, now tying on her cloak and hood, said, “She is, greatheart. If you fancy life on the road, there are worse camps to join.”
Ash wanted to shout, but kept her mouth shut, halted by the decisions passing across the young woman’s face.
Margaret rubbed her chin. “It’s no life, among soldiers. And listen to him, to her, I couldn’t be with you, could I?”
“I don’t know, sweetness. I’ve never kept a woman before.”
“Come back here before you go. I’ll give you my answer then.” With remarkable self-possession, Margaret Schmidt tidied the lute and the plate on to an oaken stool, in the chiaroscuro of the rush-light. “What are you waiting for? Mother will be sending another one to me. Or she’ll charge you double.”
Ash didn’t wait to see what she thought might be a kiss of parting – except that whores do not kiss, she thought; I never—
She turned and stomped down the narrow stairs, between doors sometimes open to men with bottles and dice, sometimes to men fornicating with women; until she stopped and spun around in the hallway, nearly impaling the surgeon on the sharp edge of her steel elbow-couter. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You were supposed to be sounding out other physicians, picking up trade gossip!”
“What makes you think I haven’t been?”
The tall woman checked belt, purse and dagger with an automatic touch of one hand, the other still clasped around the neck of the leather bottle.
“I got the physician to the Caliph’s cousin truly rat-arsed, right here. He tells me in confidence that Caliph Theodoric has a canker, months to live at best.”
Ash only stared, the words going past her.
“Your face!” Floria laughed. She drank from the bottle.
“Shit, Florian, you’re fucking women!”
“Florian’s perfectly safe fucking women.” She swept her man-cut hair back into her hood, where it framed her long-boned face. “Now wouldn’t it be inconvenient if I wanted to fuck men?”
“I thought you were just paying for a room, and her time! I thought it was a trick, t
o keep up your disguise!”
Floria’s expression softened. She patted Ash gently on her scarred cheek, and then dropped the empty bottle, and whipped her mittens on against the chill seeping in from the street. “Sweet Christ. If I can put it the way our excellent Roberto would – don’t be such a humourless hard-ass.”
Ash made a half-noise not speech, all breath. “But you’re a woman! Going with another woman!”
“It doesn’t bother you with Angelotti.”
“But he’s—”
“He’s a man, with another man?” Floria said. Her mouth shook. “Ash, for Christ’s sake!”
An older woman with a tight face under her coif came out from the kitchens. “Are you bravos looking for a woman or wasting my time? Sir knight, I beg your pardon. All our girls are very clean. Aren’t they, Doctor?”
“Excellently.” Floria pushed Ash towards the door. “I’ll bring my lord back, when our business is done with.”
Cold darkness blinded Ash outside the doors; then Thomas Rochester and her men and their pitch-torches dazzled her, so that she hardly saw a boy bring Floria her bay gelding. She mounted and settled herself down in Godluc’s saddle.
She opened her mouth to shout. And then realised that she had no idea what to say. Floria, watching her, looked supremely unapologetic.
“Godfrey will be at the hall by now.” Ash shifted, rousing Godluc to a slow walk. “The Faris will be there. Ride on.”
Floria’s gelding shivered and flicked its head up. The white, soundless swoop of a disorientated barn owl curved past in flight, not a yard from the surgeon’s hat.
“Look.” Floria pointed up.
Ash tilted her head to gaze up at the high gable roofs.
She was not used to noticing the fullness of the summer skies. Now, every gable line and window ledge was thick with roosting birds – with pigeons, rooks, crows and thrushes, fluffing out feathers against the chill. Blackbirds, sparrows, ravens; all, in an uncanny peace, sharing their perches undisturbed with merlin hawks and peregrines and kestrels. A low, discontented mumbling went up from the flocks. White guano streaked the beams and plaster.
Above them, the overcast clouds of the day’s sky stayed invisible, and black.
Despite the Visigoth ordinance restricting any noble’s escort to six or less, Basle’s civic hall was packed with men. It stank of tallow candles and the remnants of a huge banquet, and of two or three hundred sweating men crowded into the space between the tables, waiting to petition the Visigoth Viceroy at the high dais.
The Visigoth general was not visibly present.
“Fucking hell,” Ash swore. “Where is the woman?”
A fug smudged the heights of the barrel-vaulted roof, with the Empire’s and cantons‘ banners hanging down over tapestried stone walls. Ash let her gaze sweep across rushes and candles and men in European dress, doublet and hose, and brimless felt hats with tall crowns. Far more men were wearing southern robes and mail: soldiers and ’arifs and qa’ids. But no Faris.
Ash tilted the visor of her sallet low, leaving only mouth and nose to be seen; her silver hair hidden under her steel helmet. Fully armoured, she is not immediately recognisable as a woman, never mind as a woman who bears a resemblance to the Visigoth general.
Around the walls, as servers, stood clay-coloured Visigoth golems, eyeless and metal-jointed, their baked skins cracking in the great fireplaces’ heat. Lifting herself on armoured toes, Ash could see one golem standing behind the white-robed Visigoth Viceroy – who was, she noted with a little surprise, Daniel de Quesada – and holding a brazen head, which de Quesada consulted for a currency exchange as she watched.
Floria took wine from one of the pantlers rushing past, not apparently minding that it came from well below the salt. “How on earth can you tell this lot apart? Bear and swan and bull and marten and unicorn… It’s a bestiary!”
A fast scrutiny of heraldry on liveries showed Ash that men were present from Berne, Zurich, Neuchatel and Solothurn, and from Fribourg and Aargau … most of the Swiss Confederation lords, or whatever one called the lords among the League of Constance, all with an equally shut-faced look to them. Conversations were going on in Schweizerdeutsch and Italian and German; but the main talk – the shouted talk up at the head table – in Carthaginian. Or in North African Latin when the Visigoth amirs and qa’ids recalled their manners, which nothing forced them to do.
So where do I look for her now?
Thomas Rochester rejoined Ash, moving through the civilian crowd. The lawyers and officials of Basle moved back automatically, as one does from a man in steel plate, but otherwise ignored the mercenary man-at-arms. He lowered his voice to speak to Ash.
“She’s been out at the camp, looking for you.”
“What?”
“Captain Anselm sent a rider. The Faris is on her way back here now.”
Ash kept her hand from her sword-grip with an effort of mind, such gestures being prone to misinterpretation in a crowded hall. “Did Anselm’s message say what her business was?”
“To talk to one of her mercenary junds.” Thomas grinned. “We’re important enough for her to come to us.”
“And I’m Saint Agatha’s tits!” Suddenly queasy, Ash watched the throng around Daniel de Quesada, which did not grow any the less for being watched. Quesada’s face was hardly marred by scars, now. His eyes moved very quickly around the hall, and when one of the cocky-tailed white dogs nosing in the rushes yipped, his body startled uncontrollably.
“I wonder who’s pulling his strings?” Ash thought aloud. “And did she come out just to take a look at me, back at Guizburg? Maybe. Now she’s gone out to the camp. That’s a lot of trouble to go to, just to look at a bastard one of your family fathered on a mercenary camp-follower twenty years ago.”
Antonio Angelotti appeared at her elbow, tall and sweating and swaying. “Boss. ’M going back to camp. It’s true. Their armies defeated the Swiss ten days ago.”
Knowing it must have happened, and hearing it, were two different things. Ash said, “Sweet Christ. Have you found anyone who was there, who saw it?”
“Not yet. They were outmanoeuvred. The Swiss.”
“Oh, that’s why everyone’s creeping up the arse of the King-Caliph. That’s why everybody’s throwing banquets. Son of a bitch. I wonder if Quesada meant it when he said they intended to war on Burgundy?” She shook Angelotti’s shoulder, roughly. “Okay, go back to camp, you’re pissed.”
The master gunner, leaving, drew her eye to the great doors. Godfrey Maximillian strode in, glanced around, and made for the blue Lion liveries. The priest bowed to Ash, and glanced at Floria del Guiz before he opened his mouth to speak.
“That’s the look I hate,” the disguised woman said, not particularly quietly. “Every time before you speak to me, now. I don’t bite, Godfrey. How long have you known me! For Christ’s sake!”
Her cheeks flushed, her eyes brilliant. Her bowl-shaped haircut was spiked with damp drizzle. A server and a pantler glanced as they hurried past, their white aprons stained. Seeing what, when they see her? Ash wondered. A man, definitely. With no sword, therefore a civilian. A professional man, because of the well-cut woollen demi-gown lined with fur, and the fine hose and boots and velvet hat. A livery badge pinned to the upturned velvet hat-brim: therefore a man who belongs to a lord. And – given the prominent Lion – belonged to Ash.
“Quieten down. I’ve got enough problems here.”
“And I don’t? I’m a woman, for fuck’s sake!”
Too loud. Ash beckoned Thomas Rochester and Michael, one of the crossbowmen, forward from the rear wall of the hall.
“Take him outside, he’s drunk.”
“Yes, boss.”
“Why does everything have to change?” Floria demanded, wrenching her arms away. Thomas Rochester efficiently punched the surgeon in the small of the back, his armoured fist hardly moving any distance; and while her face was screwed up in pain, lifted her between himself and Michael, an
d half-carried her out.
“Shit.” Ash frowned. “I didn’t mean them to manhandle h—”
“You wouldn’t object if you still thought she was a man.” Godfrey’s hand gripped his cross, on his substantial chest. The hood of his robe was far enough forward to give her only a glimpse of beard and lips, nothing of his expression.
“We’ll wait till the Faris gets here,” Ash said decisively. “What have you heard?”
“That’s the head of the goldsmiths’ guild.” Godfrey indicated with a slight inclination of his hood. “Over there, talking to the Medici.”
Ash’s gaze searched along the table, identifying a man in a black wool coif, with strands of silver hair wisping out under his ear. He sat within easy whisper of a man in an Italianate gown and a dagged green hood. The Medici sat grey-faced and drawn.
“They trashed Florence, too, to make a point.” Ash shook her head. “Like Venice. To say, we don’t need this. Don’t need the money or the armour or the guns. We can just keep pouring it in from Africa… I think they can.”
“Does it matter?” A man in a scholar’s gown first bowed to Ash and then straightened, startled, frowning at the unexpected woman’s voice.
Godfrey interposed himself. “Sir, you are?”
“I am – I was – astrologer to the court of the Emperor Frederick.”
Ash could not help a snort of cynicism, her eyes travelling to the hall door, and the darkness beyond. “Bit redundant, aren’t you?”
“God has taken the sun away,” the astrologer said. “Dame Venus, the daystar, may still be seen at certain hours, thus we know when morning would break, but for our wickedness. The heavens remain dark, and empty.” The man wilted a little. “This is the second coining of the Christ, and his judgement. I have not lived as I should. Will you hear my confession, Father?”
Godfrey bowed, at Ash’s acknowledgement; and she watched the two men find a relatively quiet corner of the hall. The astrologer knelt. After a time, the priest rested his hand on the man’s forehead in token of forgiveness. He came back to Ash.
“It seems the Turks have paid spies here,” Godfrey added. “Which my astrologer knows. He says the Turks are much relieved.”
