Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  – Pierce

  * * *

  Message: #73 (Pierce Ratcliff)

  Subject: Ash, documentation

  Date: 13/11/00 at 10.03 p.m.

  From: Longman@

  Pierce –

  I took a day’s leave and spent it in the British Library. I didn’t particularly want to explain at the office that there may be problems with your book – not when we’ve put it in the Spring catalogue.

  I have grave problems with what I’ve found.

  Some of the documents you mention, I just can’t find – the Pseudo Godfrey, and the Cartulary (log-book, I suppose) of this St Herlaine monastery. I can’t find any record of the monastery either.

  I’ve managed to trace the German del Guiz ‘Life’, but you won’t like it, Pierce.

  In 1890, it was classified under ‘Late Mediaeval History’. Charles Mallory Maximillian was obviously being completely above-board when he did his translation of it. By 1939, it was re-classified, this time as ‘Romance Literature’, along with the Nibelungenlied! I found a reference to your 1968 American printing of Vaughan Davies, which has the del Guiz manuscript in it, and the whole thing is classified under ‘General Fiction’! And as far as the British Library’s concerned now, they don’t have any record of having a copy.

  They don’t have a record of any mediaeval manuscript by an ‘Angelotti’, either.

  As far as I can see, this material was thought to be genuine in the 1890s, was discovered to be fake in the late 1930s – and Vaughan Davies just ignored this. What I can’t understand, Pierce, is why YOU’VE ignored this.

  Unless you can give me a convincing explanation, I am going to have to discuss this with my Managing Director.

  – Anna Longman

  * * *

  Message: #60 (Anna Longman)

  Subject: Ash, archaeological discoveries

  Date: 14/11/00 at 11.11 a.m.

  From: Ngrant@

  Anna –

  I didn’t ignore anything.

  When I last consulted these documents, in the British Library, less than two months ago, they were classified under ‘Mediaeval History’. There was NO suggestion that they might be anything else.

  Please do nothing rash.

  If these documents are so unreliable – why is the ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE backing them up?!

  – Pierce

  PART FOUR

  13 August–17 August AD 1476

  The Garden of War

  I

  A young woman’s body lay on a mattress stuffed with goose-down. Whether this was too soft, she too unaccustomed, it was not possible to tell. She stayed unconscious. She nonetheless rolled a little, from side to side, and as her head turned it could be seen that she had a shaved patch over her left ear, hair sheared away from the swollen skull. A fine silver stubble grew back.

  To stop her moving, they tied her with linen bands to the wooden frame of the bed. She seemed hot, with a fever, and restless. Someone washed and combed out and plaited the rest of her hair into two loose-woven braids, so it should not turn into impenetrable sweat-glued tangles.

  Sometimes there were angry voices over her. A swearing-out of devils, or a fierce quarrel between soft-voiced women. Someone trailed oil over her forehead, and it rolled down the bridge of her nose and over her slashed cheek. When the linen sheet was taken back, half her body was spotted with black bruises, and a poultice of comfrey and Self-Heal was strapped to her right ankle, and another to her right wrist.

  Someone washed her body with water from a silver basin.

  Bees wove around the room, in the bright air between white walls, and back over the sill where climbing flowers nodded. A soft, rhythmic murmur of doves sounded beyond the window. Being washed and turned, she saw out of the window to the birds, blazing white in the sun, one of them with golden beams shining from its head and beak and golden eye: the Holy Spirit nesting in the dove-cote, along with the other doves. Then there was fire and pain and shouting, and she was bound back on the bed with new linen, and the world went away to the sound of an angry voice that rose up the registers from contralto to alto to shout.

  All the time, there was the light.

  It came first always with a cold pink and yellow glow, through the night-shuttered windows. It grew, slanting, into bars of brightness: as bright as light down the edge of a sharpened blade. And light shook from the surface of the water in the jug, that stood on an oaken chest beside the bed; dancing in blotched reflections on the white curving plaster of the ceiling.

  Once a wing brushed her, white and stiff as a swan’s feathers, but with all quills edged with gold like the leaves of a manuscript. Two voices spoke over the bed, debating about angels and those wandering spirits of the air that are devils, or perhaps old pagan gods worn weak with lack of worship.

  She saw beyond the ceiling of the white cell a stacked rise of circles, circle within circle, each rimmed with faces and wings, and behind the saints’ faces thin gold rings, a knife-scratch thin, haloes hot as the metal poured in a goldsmith’s furnace. She sought, but could not find, a Lion.

  The light, slanting the other way, drenched the room in gold. Chill shivered her, and hands brought up the linen sheets. A sharp clear-skinned face bent over her, short hair turned to rose-gold.

  “D—”

  Too soft a croak: and water from a wooden cup was spilling down her mouth and chin, soaking the sheets; leaking into her mouth, pricking a way between surfaces of dehydrated flesh. She felt in one instant the roar of pain through her flesh. Hurt leg, hurt arm, battered body; and her unbandaged hand jerking in its linen bands.

  Fingers freed her. She felt for as much of her body as she could reach. Body, whole; no more damage to leg and arm than she has had before. A spurt of pain in her head. She touched her cheek, which flared with pain, and probed with her tongue to find the shattered roots of two back teeth in the upper left of her mouth.

  “Did Thomas—”

  “Thomas Rochester is alive! He’s alive. And the others. Baby—”

  More water at her lips, this with a stench of some herb in it. She drank, would she, would she not; but lay, fighting sleep, for as long as it took for the light to begin again, dew-wet and chill, at the shutters of the window.

  Memories of darkness pushed at her, of a black sky, and an endless night, and lands growing winter-cold in the middle of harvest time.

  “They’ll be following—”

  “Hush…”

  Sleep took her down so fast that what she said was slurred, incomprehensible to anyone present:

  “I will not be taken away to Carthage!”

  II

  She woke sweaty and warm. A dream of terror slid away from her, like water vanishing through sand. Ash opened her eyes as delirium became sudden clarity:

  Shit! How many days have I been sick? How long will it be before the Faris comes after me, or sends a snatch-squad—?

  The voice of Floria del Guiz, above her, said, “You got stepped on by a horse.”

  “So much for the glory of battle…” Ash strained to focus her open eyes. “Sod this for a game of soldiers.”1

  “Bloody idiot.”

  The wooden-framed bed creaked as weight came down on it. Ash felt her body hoisted up by warm, strong arms. Time blipped: she thought she felt another body in the bed beside hers; then realised that the warm torso and breasts under the linen shirt pressed against her cheek were Florian’s; that the woman surgeon was cradling her, and that her own body was weak as water.

  Florian’s quiet voice buzzed in Ash’s ear, transmitted more by vibration through the flesh and bone of the surgeon’s body than by sound. “I suppose you want an honest answer to how badly you’re injured? Seeing as you’re the boss?”

  “No…”

  “Damn right you don’t.”

  You should have washed, Ash thought dimly, smelling a warm stench of old sweat on the surgeon’s clothes. She let her head fall back limply against Florian’s breasts, the bright wh
ite cell swimming before her eyes. “Oh shit…”

  The weight of their two bodies was pressing them together on the goose-down mattress, into a valley in the centre of the bed. Ash gazed up at a plastered white ceiling, her eyes tracking the black dot of a bee as it buzzed into the room. The pressure of the woman’s arms around her felt inexpressibly welcome.

  “You’re tough as shit,” the rough voice above her said. “That’s more significant than anything I can do for you.”

  In the room’s hush, Ash heard a distant choir. A noise of women’s voices, singing mass. The tiny room filled with the scent of lavender: she guessed it must be growing close by.

  Nothing in the room was hers.

  “Where’s my fucking sword? Where’s my armour!”

  “Yeah, that’s my girl!”

  Ash shifted her gaze to Floria’s face. “I know I’m going to die before I’m thirty. We can’t all be Colleoni2 or Hawkwood.3 How close have I come?”

  “I don’t think your skull’s cracked… I’ve sewed you up. Said the right charms. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll stay in bed for the next three weeks. And if you will take my advice, it’ll be the first time in five years!” The surgeon’s cradling arm tightened. “I really can’t do any more for you. Rest.”

  “How many leagues are we from Basle?” Ash demanded. “What’s happened to my company?”

  Floria del Guiz heaved a sigh that Ash felt against every rib.

  “Why can’t you be like my other patients and start with ‘where am I?’ You’re in a convent, we’re outside Dijon, in Burgundy, and the company’s camped about a quarter of a mile that way.” Her long dirty finger stabbed the air above Ash’s nose, indicating a direction out of the cell window.

  “Dijon.” Ash’s eyes widened. “That’s a fuck of a way from the cantons. We’re the other side of Franche-Comté. Good. Dijon… You’re a fucking Burgundian, Florian, help me out. You know this place?”

  “I should do.” Floria del Guiz’s voice sounded acerbic. She sat up, lurching Ash’s body uncomfortably. “I have an aunt living six leagues from here. Tante Jeanne’s probably at court – the Duke’s here.”

  “Duke Charles is here?”

  “Oh, he’s here. So is his army. And his mercenaries. You can’t see the meadows outside the town for military tents!” Florian shrugged. “I suppose this is where he came to after Neuss. It is the southern capital.”

  “Have the Visigoths attacked Burgundy? What’s happening about the invasion?”

  “How would I know? I’ve been in here trying to keep you alive, you silly bitch!”

  Ash grinned, helplessly, at her surgeon’s total disregard for military matters. “That’s no way to talk to your boss.”

  Florian shifted around under her in the bed, until she could look Ash directly in the face. “I do, of course, mean ‘you silly bitch, boss’.”

  “That’s much better. Fuck.” Ash tried to tense her muscles to sit up, and flopped back, her face screwed up in pain. “Some fucking surgeon you are. I feel half dead.”

  “I can arrange the other half any time you like…”

  A cool palm laid itself against Ash’s forehead. She heard Floria grunt, vaguely dissatisfied.

  The surgeon added, “There’s a pilgrimage up here every day, with a good three-quarters of the men trying to get in to speak to you. What’s the matter with these guys? Don’t they know a convent when they see one? Can’t they even wipe their own arses without you being there to tell them to do it?”

  “That’s soldiers.” Ash pushed her hands against the mattress, trying to sit up. “Shit! If you’ve been saying I can’t see them because I got a crack on the head—”

  “I haven’t been saying anything. This is a convent. They’re men.” Florian smiled wryly. “The sisters won’t let them inside.”

  “Christ, they’ll think I’m dying or dead! They’ll be off to sign up with someone else before you can say condotta!”4

  “I don’t think so.”

  With a long-suffering sigh, Floria del Guiz got out of the bed and began to hold up Ash’s torso and heap pillows under her shoulders and head. Ash bit her lip to keep from vomiting.

  “You don’t think so – why not?”

  “Oh, you’re a hero.” Floria grinned crookedly, moving to stand beside the cell window. The white daylight showed up purple flesh under her eyes, and lines cut into the flesh at the sides of her mouth. “You’re the Lioness! You saved them from the Visigoths, you got them out of Basle and into Burgundy, the men think you’re wonderful!”

  “They what?”

  “Joscelyn van Mander is quite dewy-eyed. You military types are too damn sentimental, I’ve always said so.”

  “Fucking hell.” Ash felt the goose-down pillows give under her as she leaned back, dizzy. “I had no right to go wandering into Basle looking for the Faris, and even if I did, I put my men in danger. You name it and I fucked it. I really fucked up, Florian. They must know that!”

  “If you walk down there today, they’ll throw rose-petals under your feet. Mind you,” Floria remarked thoughtfully, “if you walk down there today, I may be burying you tomorrow.”

  “A hero!”

  “Haven’t you noticed?” The surgeon delicately pointed upwards. “The sun. You’ve brought them back to the sun.”

  “I brought—” Ash broke off. “When did the sun come back? Before we got to Burgundy?”

  “As we crossed the border.” A frown compressed Floria’s brows. “I don’t think you understand me. The sun’s only shining here. In Burgundy. It’s still dark everywhere else.”

  Ash licked her lips, her mouth dry.

  No, that can’t be – it can’t only be here!

  Ash absently pushed Floria’s hands away as the woman tried to put a wooden bowl to her lips. She took it in her own hands, and sipped, frowning.

  They put out the sun. But not here, in Burgundy. Why Burgundy?

  Unless the Eternal Twilight spreads where…

  Where the armies from the land Under the Penitence successfully invade. No, how could that be?

  Maybe it’s not just here that there’s the sun, but in all the lands north of what they’ve conquered, France and the Low Countries and England, where the Eternal Twilight hasn’t yet spread? Shit, I need to be up and talking to people!

  “If the guys think I got them out of trouble,” Ash continued her progression of thought, “ – Green Christ only knows why! – then I’m not going to tell them different. I need all the morale on my side that I can get. Bloody hell, Florian. You’re Burgundian, aren’t you? What are our chances of getting another contract here, given that I made a sterling effort to off the Duke not so long ago?”

  Ash gave a small smile, her lips wet with the clear spring water.

  “Would your Tante Jeanne get us an in to court?”

  Floria’s expression closed like a door shutting.

  “You’d better see Robert Anselm today,” she remarked. “It probably won’t kill you. It might kill him if you don’t.”

  Ash blinked, her attention disrupted from the Visigoths. “Robert? Why?”

  “Who do you think rode over you at Basle?”

  “Oh, fuck.”

  Floria nodded. “He’ll be sitting outside the convent gate about now. I know this, because he’s been sleeping out there.”

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Three days.”

  “How long has he been out there? Don’t tell me. Three days.” Ash put her head in her hands, and winced as her fingers came into contact with the shaved patch of her scalp, and the painful irregularity of cat-gut stitches. She rubbed at her eyes. She was suddenly conscious of being dressed only in a stale nightshirt, and of needing the nightsoil pot. “Then who’s been running my company!”

  “Geraint-the-Welsh-bastard.” Floria widened innocent eyes. “Or at least, that’s what they seem to think his name is. With Father Godfrey. He seems to have it all under control.”

 
; “Does he, by God! Then it’s more than time I was back in charge. I don’t want the Lion Azure turning into Geraint ab Morgan’s company while I sit on my arse in some damn convent!” Ash rubbed the heel of her hand over her face. “You’re right, sod you; I’ll get up tomorrow, not today. I still feel like there’s a horse treading on me. I’ll see Roberto. I’d better see the maîtresse of this place, too. And I’m getting dressed.”

  The surgeon eyed her sardonically, but made no comment except, “And with all your boys outside these walls, you expect me to act as your page, I suppose?”

  “You might as well learn to be a page. You’re a crap surgeon.”

  Floria del Guiz blurted out a laugh, an open guffaw completely different from her usual mordant chuckle, plainly taken by surprise. She whooped, and thumped the flat of her hand against her thigh. “You ungrateful cow!”

  “Nobody loves an honest woman.” Ash’s mouth moved into an unwilling smile, remembering. “Or maybe I’m just a wayward wench.”

  “A what?”

  “Never mind. Christ, I’m well out of that!”

  And I’m staying as far away from the Faris as I can get.

  Okay, maybe we are far enough away to be safe. For the moment. What do I do now? I don’t know anything like enough about this situation!

  Ash swivelled her legs around with difficulty and sat on the edge of the bed. Blood thundered in her ears, drowning out the sound of doves cooing beyond the window. She swayed where she sat.

  “Poor bloody Robert. It would have to be him. Find me a chair, or at least a stool with a back to it. I don’t want him to see me looking as if the Grim Reaper will be getting the next audience with me!” Ash stopped, adding suspiciously, “This is a convent? I’m not putting on a dress!”5

  Florian laughed, moving past her towards the oak chest against the far wall. She trailed her fingers through Ash’s unshaved hair, affectionately and lightly: Ash hardly felt the touch.

  “I sent down to Rickard for your gear. The Soeur wouldn’t let me bring a sword within the confines of the convent, but,” Floria’s head emerged, her hands clutching shirt, doublet, and hose, “you’ve got your green and silver, and a velvet demi-gown. Will boss be content with that?”