Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  “Visigoths don’t use much ordnance,” Geraint observed. “Your boys wouldn’t like that.”

  Angelotti gave his reserved smile. “There is something to be said for being on the same side as the big guns.”

  “And the men-at-arms?” Ash asked Robert Anselm.

  “I’d say about half of them – Carracci and all the Italian lads, the English, and the easterners – are happy with the contract. The French lads don’t like being on the same side as the Burgundians, but they’ll wear it. They all think we owe the rag-heads something for Basle.”

  Ash snorted. “I’ve looked in the war-chest – they owe us!”

  “They’ll get stuck in, when the time comes,” Anselm continued, amused. He frowned. “Can’t answer for the Flemings. Captain, I don’t get to talk to di Conti and the rest, now, I just get to talk to van Mander; he says it saves time if he passes orders on.”

  “Uh huh.” In perfect understanding of the unease in Anselm’s mind, Ash nodded. “Okay, let’s move on—”

  John de Vere spoke for the first time. “These dissenting lances, madam Captain, how much of a problem will this be?”

  “None at all. There are going to be some changes.”

  Ash met de Vere’s gaze. Something in her determined expression must have been convincing: he merely nodded, and said, “Then you deal with it, Captain.”

  Ash dismissed the subject. “Okay: next…”

  Beyond the men huddled around the linen-covered table, beyond the peaked roofs of the tents, the forested limestone hills around Dijon glimmered green. Below the tree-line, in the valley, slopes glistened green and brown: rows of vines ripening in the sun. Ash slitted her eyes against that brilliance, attempting to judge whether this sun-in-Leo was still shining as strongly as on the previous day.

  “Next,” Ash said, “the matter of what we’re going to do.”

  Ash glanced at Oxford. She found herself absently digging with the tip of her eating-knife at the charcoal-black pastry that had coffined a cow-steak and cheese pie. Her blade scattered fragments on the cloth. “It’s like I said to you earlier, my lord. This company’s far too big for you to want us just as an escort. But we’re nowhere near big enough to take on an army – Visigoth, or Burgundian.”

  The English Earl smiled briefly at that. Her officers winced.

  “So… I’ve been thinking, your Grace.” Ash jerked her thumb over her shoulder. Where the tent-walls were removed, the long slope of pasture up to the city walls was visible; and the peaked roofs of the convent. “While I was up there. I had time to think. And I came up with a half-baked idea that I want to approach the Duke with. The question is, your Grace, have you and I had the same half-baked idea?”

  Robert Anselm rubbed his wet hand across his face, hiding a grin; Geraint Morgan spluttered. Angelotti gazed at Ash from under ambiguously lowered oval lids.

  “‘Half-baked’?” the Earl of Oxford questioned, mildly.

  “‘Mad’, if you prefer.” Excitement keyed her up, momentarily wiped out both oppressive heat and the effects of her injury. She leaned forward on the table. “We’re not going to attack the entire Visigoth invasion force, are we? That would take everything Duke Charles has got here, and then some! But – why should we need to attack them head-on?”

  De Vere nodded, briefly. “A raid.”

  Ash dug her knife-point into the table. “Yes! If a raiding force could take out the head … a raiding force of, say, seventy or eighty lances: eight hundred men. Bigger than an escort, but still small enough to move fast, and to get out of trouble if we meet their army. And that’s us, isn’t it?”

  Oxford leaned back slightly, his armour clicking. His three brothers began to stare at him.

  “It isn’t a mad idea,” the Earl of Oxford said.

  Viscount Beaumont lisped, “Only by comparison! Not as mad as some of the things we’ve done, John.”

  “And how does it help Lancaster?” the youngest de Vere brother broke in.

  “Quiet! Ruffians.” The Earl of Oxford thumped Beaumont on the shoulder, and ruffled Dickon’s hair. His worn, lined face was alive when he turned his attention back to Ash. Above him, the white canvas blazed gold, hiding the fierce southern European sun.

  “Yes, madam,” he confirmed. “We have been thinking alike. A raid to take out their commander, their general. Their Faris.”

  For a moment, what she sees is not the sun-drenched camp in Burgundy, but a frost-starred pleasance26 in Basle: a woman in Visigoth hauberk and surcoat wiping spilt wine from the dagged silken hem, her frowning face Ash’s own. A woman who has said sister, half-sister, twin.

  “No.”

  Ash, for the first time, saw the Earl appear startled.

  In a very practical tone, Ash repeated, “No. Not their commander. Not here in Europe. Believe me, the Faris expects that. She knows damn well that every enemy prince wants her head on a spike, right now, and she’s well guarded. In the middle of about twelve thousand soldiers. Attacking her right now is impossible.”

  Ash looked around at their faces; back at de Vere. “No, my lord – when I said I’d had a half-baked idea, I meant it. I want to mount an attack on Carthage.”

  “Carthage!” Oxford boomed.

  Ash shrugged. “I bet you anything you like, they won’t be expecting that.”

  “For damn good reason!” one of the middle de Vere brothers exclaimed.

  Godfrey Maximillian spluttered, “Carthage!” in a tone of outraged astonishment.

  Angelotti murmured something in Robert Anselm’s ear. Floria, as still as a animal scenting hounds, looked at Ash with a narrow, baffled, complaining expression on her smudged face.

  John de Vere, in much the same sceptical tone as she had earlier spoken to him about his Lancastrian claims, said, “Madam, you were planning to ask Charles of Burgundy to pay you to attack the King-Caliph in Carthage?”

  Ash took a breath. She leaned back against the upright of the back-stool, overheating under the canvas canopy, and held her goblet up for Bertrand to fill it with watered wine.

  “There are two things to be considered, your Grace. One – their King-Caliph Theodoric is sick, maybe dying. This I have from trustworthy sources.” She momentarily met the gaze of Floria, of Godfrey. “A dead King-Caliph would be very useful. Well, a dead caliph is always useful! But – if there were to be a dynastic struggle going on back home, then I don’t think the Visigoth army would be pushing their invasion north this campaigning season. They might even get recalled back to North Africa. At the least, it would halt them over the winter. They probably wouldn’t cross the Burgundian border.”

  “Now I see why you hoped to speak to Charles, madam.” John de Vere looked thoughtful.

  Dickon de Vere spluttered something. Under cover of the English lords’ increasingly loud talk, Floria del Guiz said, “Are you mad?”

  “De Vere’s a soldier, and he doesn’t think it’s mad. Not entirely mad,” Ash corrected herself.

  “It’s desperate.” Robert Anselm frowned, abstracted; reservations in his voice over and above what he was saying. He wiped his sweating, shiny head. “Desperate; not stupid.”

  “Carthage,” Antonio Angelotti said softly, some expression on the master gunner’s face that Ash couldn’t identify. That worried her, needing to know how he would be, on the field of battle.

  Godfrey Maximillian looked at her. “And?” he prompted.

  “And…” Ash pushed her stool back and stood up. The English lords‘ debate had reached shouting proportions, John de Vere thumping his fist repeatedly on the table, and her movement went unnoticed. Like birds disturbed in corn, her officers’ faces lifted to her.

  She thought, looking around the table, that no one who didn’t know these men could have picked up the growing atmosphere of distrust – certainly de Vere and his Englishmen seemed unaware of it – but to her it was loud as a shout.

  “Boss,” Geraint ab Morgan said. “Are you telling us what’s on your mind, here?” />
  Ash said to Roberto, to Florian, to Godfrey, Angelotti, Geraint: “If their King-Caliph dies, it will give us breathing-space.”

  A look of settled disbelief closed up Godfrey Maximillian’s expression. That was enough: she swung around, moved to stand with her hand against one of the tent-poles, staring out past the pavilion’s spidering guy-ropes, past their shadows on the turf. Her eyes saw glimmering hot, brilliant, infinite sparks of sun on metal – silver platters, dagger pommels, sword blades in the meadow, the metal finial crowning the great standard-pole of the Lion Azure camp.

  Ash turned. The sun dazzled her eyes: everything under the canopy now impenetrable with brown shadows, only a glimmer of white faces visible. She walked back inside, to the table.

  “Okay. You’re smart. Not the King-Caliph.” She dropped her hand on to Robert Anselm’s shoulder, closed it; feeling the rough blue-dyed linen of his pourpoint and the warmth of his body. “Although that would be a bonus.”

  She let her gaze move from Godfrey, who sat stroking his amber-brown beard; to Floria’s face, to Angelotti’s Byzantine-icon solemnity, Geraint’s puzzled and impatient expression.

  Beaumont said something in rapid English.

  “Yes,” Oxford added, raising his head from the discussion to Ash, and with a nod of acknowledgement to the viscount. “You said, madam, that there are two things to be considered; what is the second?”

  Ash nodded to Henri Brant. The steward bustled the servers and pages clear out of the tent. A sharp command got her the captain of the guard’s attention: ordering the men-at-arms to circle the tent further off. She smiled to herself, shaking her head. And still there’ll be rumours, before nightfall.

  “The second thing.” Her expression took on a serious, pragmatic abstraction. “Is the Stone Golem.”

  Ash leaned her fists on the tablecloth and looking around at her officers, and the Earl of Oxford. “The machina rei militaris, the tactics-machine. That’s what I want to raid.”

  Ash, watching Godfrey as she spoke, saw his dark, brilliant eyes blink. There was a furrow across his forehead: fear, condemnation, or concern: all unclear.

  “Are you certain—” he began.

  Ash gestured him to silence, not before she saw the look that Floria del Guiz gave the priest.

  “We know the Faris hears a voice,” Ash said quietly. “You’ve heard all the rumours, about the Visigoth’s Stone Golem. It talks to her from Carthage, it tells her how to win battles with her armies. That’s what we need to take out. Not the Caliph. I want a raid to smash, burn and destroy this machine that she talks about. I want to wipe out this ‘Stone Golem’, shut her damn voice up for good!”

  A woodpecker began to hammer at one of the alders growing down by the river, the hard toc-toc-toc echoing through the humid air, sharper than the noise of men at sword-drill. Across the river, there was nothing to distinguish the bright southern afternoon horizon from the other three quarters of the compass.

  Viscount Beaumont’s blurred lisp asked, “How much does she depend upon this machina, and how much on her generals? Would the loss of it be such a loss to her?”

  Before Ash could answer, John de Vere cut in. “Have you heard anything else, since you set foot at Calais, but ‘the Stone Golem’? Even if it only exists as a rumour, the machina is worth another army to her.”

  “Then, if it is nothing but rumour,” his brother George remarked, “it can’t be destroyed, no more than you can cleave smoke with a sword.”

  Tom de Vere put in, “And if it does exist, is it in Carthage, or with their woman-general? Or elsewhere? Who can say?”

  Ash heard the woodpecker stop. Between tents, and over the palisades, she could see boys with slings down by the river bank.

  Briskly, she said, “If the war-machine was with her, we could have bought that information by now. It’s not with her. If it’s elsewhere – then it’s so valuable to them that it can only be smack in the heart of the Visigoth Empire, under a phenomenal number of guards, in the middle of their capital city.” Ash paused and grinned. “The city I’m suggesting we raid.”

  Laconically, the Earl of Oxford said, “‘If’.”

  “Anything this unique – that’s where it’s going to be, your Grace. Can you see the King-Caliph letting it out of the city? But we can buy that information, confirm it; Godfrey’s got contacts with the exiled Medicis. You can find out anything from a bank.”

  Wryly, John de Vere said, “I have chiefly found them unwilling to be co-operative with exiled Lancastrians. I wish your clerk better fortune. Madam, what is the machina rei militaris doing for the Visigoths? Is it a vital target?”

  “This invasion is being run by the Faris; she’s vital but you won’t get her; she believes her machine is vital. Any way you look at it,” Ash said, pulling out a back-stool and sitting down again, “she believes it instructed her to beat the Italians and the Germans and the Swiss, on the field.”

  She held out one of the dirty goblets automatically, forgetting there were no pages. She lowered the vessel. Making a long arm and grabbing the pottery jug herself, she splashed the goblet generously full of watered wine and drained it, aware that her face must be as heat-red as Anselm’s and Oxford’s.

  Am I going to get away with this? she thought. This much and no more?

  “You are very anxious to go and die,” the Earl of Oxford said gently.

  “I’m anxious to fight, live, and get paid. I’ve got frighteningly little money in the war-chest, and—” Ash jabbed a finger at the Burgundian and mercenary tents visible down by Dijon’s confluence of rivers “—there’re too many other places my lads can go and sign on for better money. We need a fight. We got our asses kicked at Basle, we need to kick back.”

  The Earl of Oxford pursued, “A fight for something that may be a rumour, a phantasm, a nothing?”

  No. I’m not going to get away with this much and no more.

  “Okay.” Ash swirled wine in her goblet, watching light ripple. She flicked a gaze up, to de Vere, aware that he was quietly challenging her. “If I’m going to do what I plan, I have to have authority backing me up with money. And you’re not going to give me authority or money unless you’re convinced. It’s this way, your Grace.”

  Godfrey Maximillian’s brown hand touched his Briar Cross. Ash read Godfrey’s face so plainly that it amazed her nobody else did. Only the Earl of Oxford’s presence was stopping her company clerk from blurting out Are you going to tell him that you have heard her voice? That you have always heard voices?

  Unexpectedly, the younger de Vere, Dickon, spoke up. “Madam Captain, you hear voices. I heard your men say. Like the French maid.”

  His voice rose at the end, a hint of a question; and he flushed under his elder brothers’ glare.

  “Yes,” Ash said, “I do.”

  In the outbreak of brass voices, English noble soldiers shouting their conflicting views in growing excitement, Ash momentarily put her face in her hands.

  In the dark behind her eyes, she thought, And if the Stone Golem is destroyed, does my voice and my life go with it?

  “Look at me, your Grace,” she invited, and when the English Earl did, she said, “And when you see the Faris, you’ll be looking at the same face. We are alike enough to be twins.”

  “You are a bastard of her family?” Oxford’s brows went up. “Yes. That is possible, I suppose. How does it concern this?”

  “For ten years, I’ve thought I heard the Lion speak to me.” Ash, unawares, crossed her breast, her fingers brushing the bright pierced metal of the plackart. She met and held each of their gazes in turn, Robert Anselm’s considering frown, Angelotti’s enigmatic lack of expression; Floria’s scowl, Geraint’s sheer confusion, and the English Earl’s keen, weighing stare.

  “For ten years, I heard the voice of the Lion speaking in my soul, on the field of battle. That’s why some of them here call me ‘Lioness’. When they think about it.” Ash’s mouth took on a wry smile. “There’s been campaig
ns when you couldn’t move around here for God-struck holy men hearing saints’ voices; it isn’t that unique.”

  A ripple of male laughter went around the table.

  Ash narrowed the focus of her attention to the attainted English Earl.

  “This part I want kept quiet as long as I can,” she said. “There’s no way to keep it completely secret; you know what camps are like. My lord Oxford, I know the Faris hears a voice. I heard her speak to it. It isn’t the Lion I’ve been hearing. It’s their war-machine. She hears it because they bred her to. And I hear it – because I’m her bastard half-sister.”

  Oxford stared. “Madam…” And then, plainly dismissing doubt, and asking what he considered essential: “They know this?”

  “Oh, they know it,” Ash said grimly. She sat back on the stool, resting her hands flat on her armour. “That’s why they bothered to take me prisoner, in Basle.”

  Oxford snapped his fingers, his expression saying plainly of course!

  Dickon de Vere said naively, “If your voices are on her side, pucelle, can you still fight?”

  The reverberations of that question were visible on the faces of her officers. Ash smiled a close-lipped smile at the English knight.

  “Whether I can or whether I can’t, I can prove to you that it’s the same voice – the same machine. If it wasn’t,” she switched her gaze to John de Vere, “they wouldn’t have been so damn anxious to find me in Basle. And they wouldn’t want to drag me off to Carthage for interrogation.”

  A breath of humid air came up from the river, bringing the smell of weed and cool water, over the sweat and stench of the camp. She reached out and gripped Floria’s shoulder, and Godfrey Maximillian’s arm.

  “Carthage wants me,” Ash stated. “I won’t run. I’ve got eight hundred armed men here. This time I’m taking the fight directly to them.”

  Her eyes glittered. She is keen, uncomplicated as a blade; with that frightening smile that she wears when she goes into a fight – frightening because it is serene, the smile of someone for whom all’s right with the world.