Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  An odd sound became, as she recognised it, someone scratching at the sickroom door. Before Floria could rise from beside her, the door opened and someone came in, carrying a pierced iron lantern. Ash turned her head away from the stabbing light. She bit down on a breath, as the movement jolted her head. Carefully, she slitted her eyes and peered at the doorway.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Ash muttered as she recognised the newcomer. “I don’t know what the Soeur was complaining about – this fucking convent’s full of men.”

  “I am a priest, child,” Godfrey Maximillian protested mildly.

  “Good God, am I that ill?”

  “Not now.” Floria’s hand pressed down on her shoulder. Ash kept herself from crying out. The surgeon added, “You did too much yesterday. That won’t happen today. This is the long boring bit. The bit you never like. The bit where boss tries to get up before she should. Remember?”

  “Yeah. I remember.” Ash momentarily grinned, catching the tall, golden-haired woman’s smile. “But I’m bored.”

  The surgeon narrowed her eyes at Ash. There was a look on her face that Ash suspected meant she would be getting a smart cuff around the ear about now, if not for her state of health. Maybe I’m not well, at that.

  “I’ve brought you a visitor,” Godfrey said. The surgeon glared at him, and he held up one broad-fingered hand reprovingly: “I know what I’m doing. She’s anxious to meet Ash, but she has to travel on from the convent later this morning. I told her she could come and speak with the captain for a few minutes.”

  Floria held an expression of scepticism as they talked across Ash’s bed. The growing light brought their faces out of the dimness: the big bearded man, and the laconic man who was a woman. Ash lay and listened.

  Godfrey Maximillian said, “It’s still me, too, Fl— my child. You used to believe that I had some skill in my art.”

  “Priesting isn’t an art,” the surgeon grumbled, “it’s a fraud practised on the gullible. All right. Bring your visitor in, Godfrey.”

  Ash made no attempt to sit up in the bed. Floria put the pierced lantern on the floor, where its light would not be so harsh. A blackbird spoke out of the emptiness beyond the window. Another called, a thrush, a chaffinch; and in a space of three or four heartbeats, a loud noise of birdsong echoed in the dawn. Ash’s head throbbed.

  “Fucking twittering birds!” she complained.

  “Capitano,” a woman’s clear voice said. Ash recognised the sound of someone moving while wearing armour: metal plates rattling and clacking, mail chinging.

  Ash raised her eyes and saw a woman of about thirty-five beside the bed. The woman wore Milanese-style white armour, with a wheel-pommelled sword belted at her waist, and an Italian barbute helmet tucked under her arm, and had a considerable air of authority.

  “Sit down.” Ash swallowed, clearing her mouth.

  “My name is Onorata Rodiani, Capitano.8 Your priest said I must not tire you.” The woman stripped off her gauntlets, to move the back-stool to the other side of the bed. Her little finger and ring-finger of her right hand were crooked, both repeatedly broken and set.

  She seated herself on the back-stool and sat carefully erect, dipping her head out of her bevor so that she could turn her chin, and see whether her scabbard was scraping the cell wall behind her. Satisfied that it was not, she turned back, smiling. “I never lose a chance to meet another fighting woman.”

  “Rodiani?” Ash squinted past the throbbing in her scalp. “I heard of you. You’re from Castelleone. You used to be a painter, didn’t you?”

  The woman rested her hand up beside her face. It took Ash a second to note she was cupping her ear, and to realise that she should speak more loudly. The side of the woman’s face was speckled black with impacted powder. Deaf from gunfire.

  “A painter?” Ash repeated.

  “Before I became a mercenary.” The woman’s white teeth showed in the dimness as she smiled broadly. “I killed my first man as a painter. In Cremona – I was painting a mural of the Tyrant at the time. An inopportune rapist. After that, I decided I liked fighting better than painting.”

  Ash smiled, recognising a public story when she heard it. It’s not that easy. The woman’s loose dark hair would show pure black in daylight. The lines of her tanned face promised plumpness in old age. If she reaches it, Ash thought, and reached her hands out from under the sheet. “Can I see that?”

  “Yes.” Onorata Rodiani handed her barbute over.

  Ash took the weight, the pull on her muscles shooting pain through her head, and rested the helmet on the bolster beside her. She poked at strap, rivets and helmet liner with an inquisitive finger; and ran the pad of her finger around its T-shaped opening. “You like barbutes? I can never see out of the damn things! I see you’ve gone for rose-head rivets as well.”

  The woman’s left thumb stroked the disc pommel of her sword. “I like brass rivets on a helmet. They polish up bright.”

  Ash rolled the barbute back towards her. “And Milanese vambraces? I’ve always used German arm defences.”

  “You like Gothic armour?”

  “I can get more movement out of their vambraces. As for the rest of it, all fluting and edge-work – no. It’s frilly armour.”

  There was a snort from the doorway, where Floria and Godfrey stood talking in undertones. Ash glared at them.

  “So. You want to see my sword?” Onorata Rodiani offered. “I wish I could show you my war-horse, too, but I have to leave this morning for the war that will come to France. Here.”

  The woman stood and drew. That sound of sharp steel sliding against the fine wood that lines a sword-scabbard brought Ash up on her elbows. She struggled to get her back up against the bolster, finally sat, and reached her hand out for the hilt. She ignored the pain that made her eyes water.

  France? Ash thought. Yes. The Visigoths have more men and supplies than I’ve ever seen; they’re not stopping where they are now. After the Swiss, and the Germanies… France isn’t a bad guess.

  The Faris is equipped for a full-scale crusade.

  “So how many lances do you have?” Ash flicked the wheel-pommelled sword in her hand. The thirty-six-inch blade, wide at the hilt and tapering to a needle point, slid through the air like oil through water. A living blade: the feel of it worth every pang in her scalp. “Christ, that’s sweet!”

  “Twenty lances,” the woman said, and added, “Isn’t it?”

  “I see you’ve gone for hollow-grinding on the blade.”

  “Yes, and didn’t I have to stand over the blade-smith to make him do it properly!”

  “Oh God, never trust an armourer.” Ash lowered the blade and sighted along it, testing its trueness by eye, and found herself focusing on the grinning face of Godfrey Maximillian. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all…”

  “Well, get my guest some wine, then! You want her to think we don’t have any courtesy around here?”

  Floria del Guiz linked her arm through the priest’s. She murmured, “We’ll get some wine, boss. We’ll be right back. Honest.”

  Ash flipped the blade upright in her hand. A sliver of dawn light flashed off the scratched, mirror-bright steel. There was, she noted, a distinct curve to one edge of the blade, near the hilt, where battle nicks had been polished out on a grinder. A man could have shaved with the weapon’s edge.

  “Nice work on the grip,” she commented appreciatively. “What is it, brass wire over velvet?”

  “Gold wire.”

  At the door, leaving, her priest said something to her surgeon that Ash did not quite catch. Floria shook her head, smiling. Ash lowered the sword, scooping up the linen sheet on her left hand, and rested the blade across her muffled finger.

  “Balances about four inches down… I like ’em blade-heavy, too. I bet it really cuts.” She raised her head, glaring at Godfrey and Floria. “What?”

  “We’ll leave you to it, child. Madonna Rodiani,” Godfrey bowed. Behi
nd him, Floria was grinning for some reason that Ash did not understand, but obscurely felt might be best not inquired into. Godfrey smiled blandly at her. He said, “I’ll just tiptoe away now. Florian will tiptoe away.”

  Ash heard Floria mutter something that sounded very like: “Everybody will tiptoe away! My God, these two could bore for Europe…”

  “You,” Ash said with dignity, “are interrupting a professional discussion. Now fuck off out of my cell! And while you’re getting us wine, you can find me breakfast as well. Bloody hell, anybody would think I was an invalid.”

  It was pure pleasure to forget the armies over the border, forget the nightmare of Basle; for however short a time.

  “You can’t be fighting the war in your head every hour of the day; not and win when it does come to a battle.” Ash grinned, all decisions temporarily in abeyance.

  “Madonna Onorata, stay for breakfast? While we eat, I want to ask you what you think about something in Vegetius. He says stab with the sword point, because two inches of steel in the gut is invariably fatal – but then, your man may not fall over until he’s had time to kill you. I often use the edge, and cut, which is slower, but maybe takes a man’s head clear off, after which I find he generally doesn’t bother me again. What’s your preference?”

  She was quite genuinely not afraid of injury.

  When she had worked out, to her own satisfaction, that she probably would not die on this particular day – this despite having known men who walked around for several days after a blow on the head, only to drop dead for no reason that anyone could see (despite the company surgeon’s covert rummaging in the contents of their brain-pan) – having decided this, and having suffered the extreme unpleasantness of having her two broken back teeth filed down flat, Ash to all intents and purposes forgot her wound. It became one of many.

  That left her with nothing to do but think.

  Ash leaned her elbows on the nunnery window’s edge, gazing out into the confusion of a wash-day in the enclosed courtyard. The stench of Cuckoo Pint starch filled her nostrils. She smiled, ruefully, at the peaceableness of it.

  Behind her, someone entered the cell. She didn’t turn, recognising the tread. Godfrey Maximillian came to stand at the window. She noticed he glanced reflexively up, as Florian and Roberto and little Margaret had, at the sun in the sky. He looked to be burned red across the cheekbones.

  “Fl-Florian says you’re well enough to talk business.”

  “Now you’re doing it! She does, does she? That’s damn good of her.”

  A sparrow darted down, dipping its beak for the crumbs she held on her palm. Ash chirruped as it fluffed brown feathers at her, watching her with one black, pupilless eye.

  She said, “I suppose we’re deemed, de facto, to have broken our contract with the Visigoths. The Faris certainly broke whatever agreement she had with me. I think we’ve chosen the side we’re not going to be on in this war.”

  Godfrey said, “I wish it was that simple.”

  A sharp beak pecked her palm.

  Ash raised her head, to gaze up at Godfrey Maximillian. “I know that just staying out of the way won’t be good enough. The Visigoths are coming north anyway.”

  “They’ve come as far as Auxonne.” Godfrey shrugged. “I have sources. We came through Auxonne, on the way from Basle. It’s no more than thirty-five, forty miles from here.”

  “Forty miles!” Ash’s hand jerked. The sparrow abruptly flicked into flight, dipping across the courtyard crowded with women. The sound of nuns’ voices and the noise of water slopping in tubs drifted up to the window.

  “That’s … getting to the point where I’m going to have to do something. The question is, what? The company, first. I need the lads back on-line…”

  A flash of sunlight on slate roofs, bright as a kingfisher’s wing, took her eye. Past the convent wall, beyond strip-fields and copses, the white walls and blue slate roofs of a city shone clean and bright and clear under the midday light. Under the sun.

  “Godfrey, I have to ask you something. As my clerk.9 Call this my confession. Can I lead them into combat – if I can’t trust my voice?”

  One look at the frown creasing his face was enough.

  “Oh yes.” Ash nodded. “The Faris does have a war-machine, a machina rei militaris. I watched her speak to it. Wherever it is – Carthage, or closer at hand – it wasn’t in the same place as she was when she spoke to it. But she heard it. And I … heard it. It’s my voice, Godfrey. It’s the Lion.”

  She kept her voice steady, but water stung the lids of her eyes.

  “Oh, child.” He cupped his hands around her shoulders. “Oh, dear child!”

  “No. I can stand that. It was a genuine miracle, a genuine Beast, but – children imagine things. Maybe I wasn’t even present, I just heard the men talking. Maybe I made up seeing the Lion myself when I started hearing voices.” Ash moved her shoulders, freeing herself from his hands. “The Visigoths, the Faris – she’ll be suspicious now. Before, they had no reason to think anyone else could use the machine. Now … they might be able to stop me doing it. They might be able to make it lie to me. Tell me to do the wrong thing, in the field, get us all killed…”

  Godfrey’s face showed shock. “Christ and the Tree!”

  “I’ve been thinking about it, this morning.” Ash smiled crookedly, there being nothing else to do but haul herself together. “You see the problem.”

  “I see that you would be wise to tell no one about this! This is Under the Tree.” Godfrey Maximillian crossed himself. “The camp is rowdy. Disturbed. Morale could go either way. Child, can you fight without your voice?”

  The sun burned sparks from flints in the convent’s wall, glittering in the corner of her eye. A waft of warm air brought her thyme, rosemary, chervil, and more Cuckoo Pint from the herb garden. Ash looked at him flatly.

  “I always knew I might have to find out. That’s why, when we fought Tewkesbury field – I never called on my voice the whole of the day. If I was going to lead men out to fight, where they could be killed, I didn’t want it depending on some damn saint, some Lion-born-of-a-Virgin, I wanted it depending on me.”

  Godfrey gave a choked sound. Ash, puzzled, looked up at the bearded man. His expression wavered somewhere between outright laughter, and something very close to tears.

  “Christ and the Holy Mother!” he exclaimed.

  “What? Godfrey, what?”

  “You didn’t want it depending on ‘some damn saint’—” His deep, resonant laugh boomed out; loudly enough to make some of the nearer nuns lift their heads and stare up at the window, eyes squinting against the brilliance of the sun.

  “I don’t see what—”

  “No,” Godfrey interrupted, wiping his eyes, “I don’t suppose you do.”

  He beamed at her, warmly.

  “Miracles aren’t enough for you! You need to know that you can do it by yourself.”

  “When there are people depending on me, yes, I do.” Ash hesitated. “That was five years ago. Six years. I don’t know that I can do without my voice now. All I do know is, I can’t trust it any more.”

  “Ash.”

  She looked up to meet Godfrey’s sobering gaze.

  The priest pointed towards the distant town. “Duke Charles is here. In Dijon. He’s been holding court here since he withdrew his army from Neuss.”

  “Yeah, Florian told me. I thought he’d’ve gone north to Bruges or somewhere.”

  “The Duke is here. So is the court. And the army.” Godfrey Maximillian rested his hand over her arm. “And other mercenaries.”

  What she had taken to be a distant continuation of Dijon’s white walls, she now saw to be white canvas. Sun-bleached tents. Hundreds of tents – more, as her eye ran along their peaked canopies. Thousands. The glitter of light on armour and guns. The swarming of men and horses, too far away for livery to be distinguished, but she could guess them to be Rossano, Monforte, as well as Charles’s own troops under Olivier de la
Marche.

  Sombrely, Godfrey said, “You have eight hundred fighting men out there in the Lion Azure, not to mention the baggage train, and they all talk. It’s known you’ve been with the Visigoths – and with their Faris-General. Consequently, there are many people who are anxiously waiting to speak to you, when you recover and leave this place.”

  “Oh. Shit. Oh, shit!”

  “And I don’t know how long they will wait.”

  IV

  The next morning’s heat laid a blue glaze over the distant trees, and turned the sky a hot, powdery grey. Ash walked down between daisy-thick banks and towering cow-parsley, leaving her demi-gown and doublet sleeves behind, to where the Lion Azure had their camp, the promised quarter of a mile beyond the convent grounds. She came at it covertly through a copse of birches, and the company’s tethered cattle and goats, grazing the rich water meadow.

  Ash scratched at one of the wicker pavises strapped to the side of a baggage wagon, some distance from the main gate, making a mental note that Geraint’s idea of how far apart one should space pickets was sadly lacking.

  “I shouldn’t be able to do this…”

  She stared at the camp beyond the wagons, the fire-breaks between tents trodden down to dust, and the figures of men in Lion livery mostly sprawled around dead fire-pits, eating oat-porridge from wooden bowls.

  Okay. What’s been changed? What’s different? Who—

  “Ash!”

  Ash tilted her head back, shading her eyes against the sun, staring up at the top of the wagon. Heat crisped the skin across her nose and cheeks. “Blanche? That you?”

  A flash of white legs, and a woman swung herself out over the wagon-shafts, and threw her arms around Ash. The yellow-haired ex-whore thumped her back. Tears sprang to Ash’s eyes.

  “Whoa! Steady on, girl! I’m back, but you don’t want to kill me before I get inside!”

  “Shit.” Blanche beamed, happily. White sunlight showed wet smears on her cheeks. “We thought you were dying. We thought we were stuck with that Welsh bastard. Henri! Jan-Jacob! Come here!”