Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  “Boss will do just fine.”

  Once past the squalidness of the nightsoil pot, and half laced into her clothes, Ash began to find it less disturbing to have a woman acting as her page. She grinned. “Why I’ve been paying you all these years as a surgeon, when—”

  She broke off, as a nun entered the cell.

  “Soeur?”

  The big woman folded her hands at her waist. A tall, tight wimple robbed her face of all context, left it nothing but an expanse of puffy white flesh in the sunlight. Her voice sounded gravelly. “I’m Soeur Simeon. You’re staying in bed, my girl.”

  Ash wriggled her arm down the sleeve of her doublet, and leaned against the upright of the back-stool while Floria laced it tight at the shoulder. She spoke as if the room wasn’t swimming around her.

  “First, I’m seeing my second-in-command, Soeur.”

  “Not in here you’re not.” The nun’s lips compressed into a hard line. “No men within the walls of the convent. And you’re not yet fit to go out.”

  Ash felt Floria straighten up. Her voice came from above Ash:

  “Allow him in for a few minutes, Soeur Simeon. After all, you let me in – and I know what’s important for my patient’s health. Good lord, woman, I’m a surgeon!”

  “Good lord, woman, you’re a woman” the nun rapped back. “Why do you think you’re allowed in here?”

  Ash chuckled at the almost audible wuff! of the wind being taken out of Floria del Guiz’s sails.

  “That fact, ma Soeur, is completely confidential. I know I can trust a woman of God.” Ash put her hands flat on her thighs, and managed to sit reasonably confidently. “Bring Robert Anselm in secretly if you must, but bring him in. I’ll get through my business as fast as possible.”

  The woman – the nun’s habit robbing her of her age, as well; she might have been anywhere between thirty and sixty – narrowed her eyes and surveyed the whitewashed sick-room and its dishevelled occupant. “You’ve been used to having your own way for quite some time, haven’t you, ma fille?”

  “Oh yes, Soeur Simeon. It’s far too late to do anything about it.”

  “Five minutes,” the woman said grimly. “One of the petites soeurs will be in here with you for decency’s sake. I shall go and organise some prayer.”

  The door of the whitewashed cell closed behind the big woman.

  Ash blew out her lips. “Whoa! There goes a born colonel of the regiment!”6

  “Look who’s talking.” Floria del Guiz went to rummage in the oak chest again, and emerged with a pair of low boots. She knelt, thrusting them onto Ash’s feet, and Ash looked down at the top of her golden head. She made as if to reach out and touch the disguised woman’s hair, then drew her hand back.

  “I’m all in tangles,” she said. “Smarten me up, will you?”

  The tall woman took a horn comb out of her purse and stepped behind her, undoing her loose braids. Ash felt a gentle, painful tugging as the comb worked its way up from the bottom of each hank of silver-fair hair, unthreading sweat-solidified knots. Her head began to throb. She shut her eyes, feeling the warmth on her face of the sun through the window, and the movement of warm summer air. First I need to arrange for the company to survive in Burgundy. What are we living on? – Christ, but I feel sick!

  The comb stopped snagging her yard-long length of hair. Floria’s fingers touched her cheek, that ran with salt tears. “Hurts? It will, with a head-wound. I could cut this lot off.”

  “You could not.”

  “Okay, okay … leave my head on my shoulders!”

  Time blipped again.

  Floria’s voice spoke quietly to someone else in the sick-room. Ash opened her eyes to see another nun, in the same dull green habit and white wimple; who met her eyes as they focused, and stepped across the room to offer her water in a wooden cup.

  “I know you.” Ash suddenly frowned. “It’s difficult to tell without the hair, but I know you. Don’t I?”

  Off over towards the window, Floria chuckled.

  The little nun said, “Schmidt. Margaret Schmidt.”

  Ash’s cheeks coloured up. She said in a voice both weak and incredulous, “You’re a nun?”

  “I am now.”

  Floria crossed the room, sliding her hand over the woman’s shoulders as she passed her. She bent down to feel Ash’s forehead. “Dijon, boss. You’re in the big convent outside Dijon.” And then, when Ash only looked bemused, “The convent for filles de joie who become filles de pénitence.”7

  Ash looked at the little nun, whom she had last seen in the whorehouse in Basle. “Oh.”

  The other two women smiled.

  Ash made an effort, and managed to speak. “If you change your mind before you take the last vows, Margaret, you’ll be welcome in the company. Say, as surgeon’s assistant.”

  Floria’s face, as she glimpsed it, held an expression somewhere between awe, cynicism and unease; but mostly one of surprise. Ash shrugged at her and, at the resulting twinge, put her hand up to her head.

  The woman from Basle made a courtesy. “I make no decisions until I see what life in a nunnery is like, seigneur – demoiselle, that is. So far it isn’t so different from the house of joy.”

  A rap sounded at the door.

  “Bugger off,” Ash said. “I’m seeing Robert on my own.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, finding it restful; letting the opening and closing of doors go on without her. From other wounds, she recognised this weakness. Knew more or less how long it would take to pass. Too long.

  What am I? The Faris says, Just a piece of rubbish. Just the same as a male calf you slaughter when it’s born, because it’s useless, because all you want is heifers to keep in milk.

  But you hear a voice.

  And that’s all it is? Some brazen head, away in North Africa; some … some engine they’ve made, that spits out Vegetius and Tacitus and all the ancients on war? Just a – a library? Nothing more than tactics out of a manuscript, there for the asking?

  Ash smothered a giggle under her breath, not willing to let out the tears that pricked behind her eyes.

  Sweet Christ, and I’ve trusted my life to it! And the times I’ve read bits out of De Re Militari and thought, no, there’s no way you should do that tactic under those circumstances – what have I been listening to?

  Ash felt a strong temptation to speak, aloud, and ask her voice those questions. She shook the impulse off, opening her eyes.

  Robert Anselm stood in front of her.

  The big man was out of armour, in hose patched at the knee, and a demi-gown undone over a laced Italian doublet: all in blue wool and all looking very much slept in, and slept out of doors at that. He carried an empty dagger scabbard at his belt, thrust through the loop of his leather purse.

  “Uhh…” Robert Anselm reached up suddenly and grabbed the velvet hat off his head. He turned it between his big hands, thumbs absently pressing the pewter Lion badge on each revolution. His gaze fell.

  “Are we safe? Where are we encamped?” Ash demanded. “What’s the situation here – who’s the local lord, under the Duke?”

  “Uh.” Robert Anselm shrugged.

  Ash’s head twinged, as she put it back to look up at him. He immediately dropped into a crouch in front of her stool, his forearms resting on his knees, his head lowered. Ash found herself looking at the salt-and-pepper bumfluff growing out around the edges of his scalp.

  I could tell you you’re a fucking idiot, Ash thought. I could hit you. I could say what the fuck do you think you’re doing, leaving my company to run itself?

  Her stomach growled, appetite returning. Bread, wine, and about half a dead deer, for preference… Ash put one hand up to shield her eyes from what was becoming painfully bright sunlight at the window. The air grew hotter. This must be morning moving on towards noon.

  “You never saw what I did at Tewkesbury, did you?” she said.

  Anselm’s head came up. His expression was mottled, under the dirt
, a strained white-and-red, unpleasant and unhealthy-looking. He rubbed the back of his neck. “What?”

  “Tewkesbury.”

  “No.” Anselm’s shoulders began to untighten. He put one knee down on the floor to keep himself steady. “Didn’t see it. I was on the other side of the battle. I saw you at the end, wrapped in the standard. You were dripping.”

  Dripping red, she remembered; feeling again the wet cloth, the scratch of heavy embroidery, the sheer exhaustion of wielding a poleaxe. A razor-edged blade on a six-foot shaft. An axe that bites as hard into metal and body-parts as a domestic axe does into wood.

  “That worked,” she said measuredly. “I knew I had to do something at that age to get noticed. I was far too young for command, but if I’d waited and done something remarkable at sixteen or seventeen – it wouldn’t have been remarkable. So I took and held the Lancastrian standard on Bloody Meadow.” Now she lowered her gaze, catching Robert Anselm with an expression of pure distress on his features.

  “I got two of my best friends killed doing that,” Ash said. “Richard and Crow. I’d known them for years. They’re both on that slope somewhere. Buried in the ditch the White Rose dug afterwards. And you rode over me by accident. That’s what we do. We kill people we know, and we get killed. And don’t tell me it’s bloody stupid. There aren’t any ways to get killed that are sensible!”

  Anselm yelled, “I’m getting old!”

  Ash’s mouth stayed open.

  Robert shouted, “That’s what those little shits have started calling me! ‘Old man.’ I’m twice your age, I’m getting too old for this! That’s why it happened!”

  “Oh, fucking hell.” His hands were shaking and she grabbed at them, feeling his warm flesh clammy; and she tightened her grip as hard as she could, which was far less than she expected. “Don’t be stupid.”

  He wrenched his hands out of hers. Ash grabbed at the sides of the stool. Her head swam.

  “I’m sorry, all right?” he yelled. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! It was my fault!”

  The sheer volume of his shout brought her lip snarling back against her teeth. She winced at the pain; winced as the cell door banged open and back against the wall, Floria del Guiz grabbing Anselm’s arm, yelling; him throwing her violently off—

  “That’s enough!” Ash took her hands down from her ears. She breathed in, and lifted her head.

  Margaret Schmidt stood in the doorway, looking anxiously back along the passage. Floria had both her long-fingered hands tight around the big man’s biceps again, straining to drag him out of the room. Robert Anselm’s feet were planted firmly apart, his shoulders braced wide, and his head bullishly down; nothing short of six men is going to throw him out of here, Ash reflected.

  “You, go and tell the Soeur Maîtresse nothing is the matter. You,” her finger jabbed at Floria, “let go of him; you—” to Robert Anselm “—shut your fucking mouth and let me speak.” She waited. “Thank you.”

  “I’ll go,” Floria said, with distaste at her own embarrassment. “If you send her into a relapse, Robert, I’ll geld you.”

  The surgeon left the room, closing its door upon herself, Margaret Schmidt, and a number of other nuns attracted by the break in their monotony.

  “Now you’ve had a chance to yell at me for getting hurt,” Ash said gently. “Feel better?”

  The big man nodded, sheepishly. He stared intently at his own feet.

  “Have you really been sleeping on the convent steps?”

  His shaven head dipped. The big shoulders came up, slightly, in a minuscule shrug.

  “I turn forty this year. Two choices,” he said, apparently addressing the floor. “Get out of this while I’m alive, or stay in the business. Stay as a woman’s commander, or get my own company. Christ, woman, I’m starting to feel old. Please don’t tell me Colleoni rode into battle when he was seventy!”

  Ash shut her mouth. “Well … that is exactly what I was going to say. You telling me you’re out of here, is that it? Bottle gone?”

  “Yeah.” He did not sound goaded into a confession, but flatly honest.

  “Yeah, well, tough shit. I need you, Robert. If you want to go and start your own company, that’s different, you can go, but you’re not leaving mine because you’ve scared yourself shitless. Got that?”

  Robert Anselm reached out for her insistent hand. “Ash…”

  “Get me into that bed, or I’m going to throw up again. Jesus Christ, I hate head wounds! Robert, you’re not going. Sometimes I do think I couldn’t run this fucking company without you.” Her hand knotted around his. She pulled herself up off the stool on to her feet. She stood, swaying, not needing to accentuate it.

  Robert Anselm muttered sarcastically, “Yeah. You’re a poor weak woman.” He dipped and scooped his other arm under her knees, lifting her bodily, and carried her the few feet to the bed. With one knee dinting the mattress, he lowered her down. “You won’t trust me after this. You’ll say you will, but you won’t.”

  Ash relaxed down into goose-feather softness. The white ceiling swooped, circling. She swallowed a mouthful of sour saliva. To have her body supine and cradled brought such relief that she let out a long breath and shut her eyes.

  “Okay, so I won’t. Not for a while. Then I will trust you again. We know each other too well. Like she said, if you leave, I’ll geld you. We’re in deep shit, now, and it needs sorting!”

  He arranged her neatly in the bed, not unused to handling the wounded. Ash opened her eyes. Robert Anselm seated himself sideways on the edge of the bed, his head turned towards her, and suddenly frowned. “‘She’?”

  “No. It wasn’t her who said that, was it? Not the nun. He. Florian did.”

  “Mmm,” Robert Anselm said absently. The way that he sat, arms spread, hands down supporting his weight, occupying all the space around himself, was so purely Anselm that she had to smile.

  “It’s all very well to sound so certain, isn’t it?” Ash said. “Get back and run the company. If that works, then they haven’t lost confidence in you. As soon as I can get up without falling over, I’ll come and sort out what we’re going to do next. We won’t have long to make up our minds here.”

  He gave a curt nod and stood up. As his weight left the mattress, she felt suddenly bereft.

  Her head pulsed with pain. “We’ve just run like fuck. We don’t have a contract here in the Duchy. Do this wrong, and my lads’ll be deserting in droves by tomorrow… If you fuck up my company, I’ll have your bollocks,” she snapped weakly.

  Robert Anselm looked down at her. “It’ll be under control. Next time,” he crossed to the cell door, “wear a bloody helmet, woman!”

  Ash made an Italian gesture. “Next time, bring me one!”

  Robert Anselm stopped, on the threshold. “What did the Faris say to you?”

  Fear punched in under her breastbone, flooding her body. Ash smiled, felt the falsity of it, let her face find its own expression of distress, and croaked, “Not now! Later. Get that asshole Godfrey up here, I want to talk to him!”

  What had been background pain flared, throbbing, until water began to run out of her eyes. She took little notice of what was said or done then, except for someone putting a bowl to her lips, and since she smelled wine and some herb she swallowed it in great gulps, and then lay praying until – not soon enough – she fell into a drugged sleep.

  Her sleep became troubled less than an hour later.

  Pain seared into her head. She froze, lying as still as possible, swearing at Floria whenever the surgeon came near her; her body broken out in a cold sweat. When the light dimmed, she felt it to be from the pain in her head. A male voice told her repeatedly that it was only evening, was sunset, was night, was the dark of the moon; but she shifted on the hot bolster, fangs of pain biting into her head, jamming her mouth shut with her fist, her own teeth breaking the skin of her knuckles. When she did give way and scream, when the pain became too bad, the movement blasted her into some region that she r
ecognised: a place of blazing physical sensation, complete helplessness, complete inescapability. She had it one heartbeat, forgot it by the next; knew it for a memory, but not now what it was a memory of.

  “Lion—” Her pleading voice choked in her throat; barely above a whisper: “By Saint Gawaine— by the Chapel—”

  Nothing.

  “Hush, baby.” A soft voice, man or woman’s, she couldn’t tell which. “Hush, hush.”

  Still in a frozen whisper, she snarled: “Are you a fucking machine! Answer me! Golem—”

  ‘No suitable problem proposed. No available solution.’

  The voice in her secret soul is unemphatic, as it has always been. Nothing of the predator in it; nothing of the saint?

  Pain swarmed over every cell of her body; she whispered, despairingly, “Oh shit—!”

  Another voice, Robert Anselm’s, said, “Give her more of that stuff. She won’t die of it. For bloody Christ’s sake, man!”

  Sharp and rapid, Floria rapped out, “You can do this? Then you do this!”

  “No; I didn’t mean—”

  “Then shut up. I’m not losing her now!”

  III

  She must have slept, but didn’t realise it except in retrospect.

  Pre-dawn light made a grey square of the window before her eyes. Ash groaned. Her palms were cold with sweat. The bed-linen smelled stale. As she moved her shoulder, she felt wool against her cheek, and realised that she was still fully dressed. Someone had undone her points, loosening her clothing. Stabs of pain entered her skull with every breath she took in, with every tiny movement of her body.

  “I must be getting better, it hurts.”

  “What?” A shadow rose and bent over her. The chill dawn illuminated Floria del Guiz. “Did you say something?”

  “I said, I must be getting better, it’s starting to hurt.” Ash found herself sounding breathless. Floria put the familiar bowl to her mouth. She drank, spilling half on the yellow bed-linen.