Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  “Hey,” she said quietly. “This is me, remember? Tell me about it. Godfrey, what is it?”

  “Little one…”

  She closed her hand over his. “You’re too good a friend to worry about telling me something bad.” Her eyes flicked up to his face, and her grip froze. “Okay, I wasn’t born of freemen. Technically, I guess somebody in Carthage owns me.”

  That made her grin, wryly, but there was no answering smile from Godfrey Maximillian. He stood and stared at her, as if her face was new to him.

  “I see.” Ash’s heart thumped, once, and then beat hard and rapid. “It makes a difference to you. Fucking hell, Godfrey! I thought we were all equal in the eyes of God?”

  “What would you know about it?” Godfrey sprayed spit across her, suddenly shouting, his eyes wide and bright. “Ash, what would you know? You don’t believe in our Lord! You believe in your sword, and your horse, and your men that you pay money to, and your husband that you can get to shove his cock into you! You don’t believe in God or grace and you never have!”

  “Wh—” Breath taken away, Ash could only stare.

  “I watched you with him! He touched you – you touched him, you let him touch you – you wanted to—”

  “What does it matter to you?” Ash sprang to her feet. “In fact, what business is it of yours? You’re a damn priest, what would you know about fucking?”

  Godfrey bellowed, “Whore!”

  “Virgin!”

  “Yes!” he snapped. “Yes. What other choice have I got?”

  Breathing hard, silenced, Ash stood on the flagstone walkway facing Godfrey Maximillian. The big man’s face twisted. He made a noise. Appalled, she watched the tears well out of his eyes; Godfrey crying hard, as a man cries, wrenched deep out of him, deep from the inside. She reached up to touch his wet cheek.

  Almost in a whisper, he said monotonously, “I left everything for you. I followed you halfway across Christendom. I’ve loved you since I first saw you. In my soul’s eye I still see you, that first time – in a novice’s robe, with your head shaved, and that Soeur beating your back bloody. A little white-haired scarred brat.”

  “Oh, shit, I love you, Godfrey. You know I do.” Ash grabbed both his hands and held them. “You’re my oldest friend. You’re with me every day. I rely on you. You know I love you.”

  She held him as if she held a drowning man, gripping him painfully hard, as if the tighter the grip, the more chance she stood of rescuing him from his anguish. Her hands whitened. She shook him, gently, trying to catch his eye.

  Godfrey Maximillian reversed the grip and closed his hands around hers.

  “I can’t stand to watch you with him.” His voice broke. “I can’t stand having to see you, know that you’re married, you’re one flesh – flesh—”

  Ash tugged her hands. They did not come free, trapped in Godfrey’s broad fingers.

  “I can bear your casual fornications,” he said. “You confess to me, you’re absolved, it means nothing. And there have been few of them. But the marriage bed – and the way you look at him—”

  Ash winced at his grip. “But Fernando—”

  “Fuck Fernando del Guiz!” Godfrey roared.

  Silenced, Ash stared at him.

  “I don’t love you as a priest ought.” Godfrey’s bright wet eyes met hers. “I made my vows before I met you. If I could wipe out my ordination, I would. If I could be anything other than celibate, I would.”

  Fear thumped in her gut. Ash wrenched her hands free. “I’ve been stupid.”

  “I love you as a man does. Oh, Ash.”

  “Godfrey—” She stopped, not sure what she would have protested, only that the walls of the world were falling down around her. “Christ, this isn’t a decision I want to take! It’s not like you’re just another priest, I can kick you out, hire another one. You’ve been with me from the beginning – before Roberto, even. Sweet saints. What a time to tell me.”

  “I’m not in a state of grace! I say mass every day, when I know that I wish him dead!” Godfrey began to twist his rope belt between his fingers, in agitation.

  “You’re my friend, my brother, my father. Godfrey… You know I don’t—” Ash sought for a word.

  Godfrey’s face went crooked. “Don’t want me.”

  “No! I mean – I don’t want to – I don’t desire – oh, shit, Godfrey!” She reached out as he spun around and strode towards the steps. She barked out, “Godfrey! Godfrey!”

  He was too quick, outpacing her, a big man moving with reckless speed, almost running down the stone steps that clung to the inside of Dijon’s city walls. Ash stopped, staring down at him, a broad-shouldered man in a priest’s robe, pushing his way into the cobbled street, between women with baskets, men-at-arms, dogs running underfoot, children playing at ball.

  “Godfrey…”

  She noted that Rochester and Huw were indeed not far from the foot of the steps. The small Welshman had a mug of something, and as she watched, Thomas Rochester gave a tavern boy a small coin in exchange for beer and bread.

  “Oh, shit. Oh, Godfrey…”

  Still in two minds whether to go after him, try and find him in the crowd, Ash saw a golden head at the foot of the wall below her.

  Her heart stopped. Rochester lifted his head, said something, and waved the man through – a man who, as he began to climb the steps, was not a man at all: was Floria del Guiz, and not her brother.

  III

  Ash muttered an obscenity under her breath, and stalked back to the crenellations, pulse thumping.

  A white ghost of a crescent moon had begun to show against the blue daytime sky, low down towards the west. A wain creaked over the bridge, into Dijon, below Ash: she leaned out to watch it. Golden heads of grain drooped, heavy in their sheaves, and she thought of the watermills on the far side of the city, and the harvest, and the winter conditions of the land not forty miles away.

  Floria loped up the last steps to where Ash stood. “Damn fool priest nearly knocked me off the steps! Where’s Godfrey going?”

  “I don’t know!”

  Seeing the woman’s surprise, Ash bit back the anguish in her tone, and repeated, more calmly, “I don’t know.”

  “He’s missed Vespers.”

  “Do you want something?” Without stopping to think, Ash added, “Now that you’ve bothered to appear again. What bloody relative are you avoiding this time? I had enough of that in Cologne! What the fuck use is a surgeon if she – if he’s never here!”

  Floria’s elegant brows went up. “I suppose I did think I might approach my Aunt Jeanne cautiously. Since she hasn’t seen me in five years, it might come as something of a shock, even though she knows I dress as a man for travelling.”

  The tall, dirty woman shook her head, putting precise sardonic verbal quotation marks around the last words.

  “I don’t believe in rubbing people’s noses in things they find difficult.”

  Ash glanced deliberately down at herself, and her brigandine, and man’s hose. “And I do rub people’s noses in it, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Whoa!” Floria held up her hands. “Okay, I give in, start weapons practice again. For God’s sake go and hit something, it’ll make you feel better!”

  Ash laughed shakily. A tension in her relaxed. A breeze ruffled against her face, welcome after the stifling streets. She hitched her sword-belt around, the scabbard having begun to rub against the sides of her leg armour. “You’re happy to be back here, aren’t you? In Burgundy.”

  Floria smiled crookedly, and Ash could not make out what lay behind her expression.

  “Not exactly,” the surgeon said. “I think your Faris-general is mad as a rabid dog. Being behind one of the world’s best armies seems a good idea to me, if it keeps me away from her. I’m happy enough here.”

  “Hey, you’ve got family here.” Ash looked out, away from the walls, at the moon in the western sky; gold now beginning to shade pink on the clouds. She fisted her hands
and stretched her arms, the brigandine’s enclosing weight hot and familiar and reassuring on her body. “Not that family are an unmixed blessing… Christ, Florian! So far I’ve had Fernando telling me he wants my beautiful body, Godfrey throwing ructions, and Duke Charles not able to make up his mind if he’s going to hand me back to the Visigoths!”

  “If he’s going to what?”

  “You didn’t hear?” Ash shrugged, turning towards the woman; who leaned, slender in stained doublet and hose, against the grey masonry, her insouciant face alive with questions. “The Faris has sent a delegation here. And, among the minor matters like declaring war and invading us or France, she wants to know if she can please have her bondswoman mercenary commander back.”

  “Rubbish,” Floria said with abrupt, complete confidence.

  “She might have a case in law.”

  “Not once my family lawyers see the documentation. Give me a copy of the condotta. I’ll take it to Tante Jeanne’s attorneys.”

  Noting how her surgeon avoided the word bondswoman, Ash said, “Would it matter to you if I weren’t legitimate?”

  “It would startle me considerably if you were.”

  Ash almost laughed. She choked it back, shot a glance at Floria del Guiz, and licked her lips. “And if I’m not freeborn either?”

  A silence.

  “You see. It matters,” Ash said. “Proper bastards are okay, so long as they’re the bastards of noblemen, or gentlemen-at-arms at the very least. Being born a serf, or a slave – that’s something else. Property. Your family probably buys and sells women like me, Florian.”

  The tall woman looked blank. “They probably do. Is there proof of your been born from a slave mother?”

  “No, there’s no proof, as such.” Ash dropped her gaze. She rubbed at her sword’s steel pommel with her thumb, picking at nicks with her nail. “Except that by now, a lot of people are hearing what someone’s been using serfs for, in Carthage. Breeding soldiers. Breeding a general. And, as Fernando was happy to remind me, throwing out the ones they don’t think will grow up to standard.”

  With a spurious air of unshockability, Florian snapped, “That’s stock-breeding, that’s what you do.”

  “To give them credit,” Ash said, her voice altered, her throat constricting, “I don’t suppose my company are going to give a fuck. If they’ll wear me being female, they won’t care if my mother was a slave. So long as I can get them through a battle, I could be Beelzebub’s great scarlet whore for all they care!”

  And when they know that I don’t hear a saint, I don’t hear the Lion, I just – just overhear someone else’s voice? Someone else’s machine. That I’m just a mistake, on the way to breeding her. What then? Does that make a difference? Their confidence in me is always a thin thread—

  She felt a pressure, a weight, and lifted her head to find Floria del Guiz’s arm around her shoulders, the surgeon trying to force her touch through the armour.

  “There’s no way you’re going anywhere near Visigoths again,” Floria said briskly. “Look, you’ve only got that woman’s word for it—”

  “Fuck it, Florian, she’s my twin. She knows she’s slave-born. What else can I be?”

  The tall woman lifted a hand, touching grimy fingers to Ash’s cheek. “It doesn’t matter. Stay here. Tante Jeanne used to have friends at court. She probably still does; she’s that kind of woman. I’ll make sure you’re not sent anywhere.”

  Ash moved her shoulders uncomfortably. The breeze, dropping, left the upper walls of Dijon as hot as anywhere else. A noise of singing and drunken shouts came up from the tavern at the foot of the steps; and the clash of polearm-butts, as the guards on the bridge changed to evening shift.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Floria’s hand insistently turned Ash’s head, forcing Ash to look at her. “It doesn’t matter to me!”

  The warm pressure of her fingertips dug into Ash’s jaw. Ash stared up, close enough to Floria’s face to smell the woman’s sweet breath, close enough to see the dirt in the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, and the glimmer of light in her brown-green irises.

  Making eye-contact, Floria grinned lopsidedly, released Ash’s jaw, and trailed a fingertip along the scar on her cheek.

  “Don’t worry, boss.”

  Ash gave a great sigh, relaxing back against Florian. She slapped the woman’s back. “You’re right. Fuck it, you’re right. Come on.”

  “Where to?”

  Ash grinned. “I’ve taken a command decision. Let’s go back to camp and get completely rat-arsed!”

  “Good idea!”

  At the foot of the steps, they picked up the escort, and strode back through the streets towards the south gate.

  Arm-in-arm with the surgeon, Ash came to a stumbling halt as Florian suddenly stopped. Thomas and Euen’s men instantly faced outwards, hands on weapons.

  An elderly woman’s voice said coldly, “I might have known that where Constanza’s brat is, you would also be. Where is your half-brother?”

  The woman was fat, in brown kirtle and white wimple, and clasped a purse against her belly in both her hands. Her clothes were rich silk, embroidered; and the visible gathered neck of her shift made from the finest lawn. All that was visible of her lined, sweating white face was a double chin, round cheeks, and a snub-button nose.

  Her eyes were still young, and a beautiful green.

  She demanded, “Why have you come back to shame your family? Do you hear me? Where’s my nephew Fernando?”

  Ash sighed. She murmured to herself, “Not now…”

  Florian backed up a step.

  “Who’s the old bat?” a billman at the back of the escort asked.

  “Fernando del Guiz is in the Duke’s palace, madame,” Ash cut in, before Florian could speak. “I think you’ll find him with the Visigoths!”

  “Did I ask you, abomination?”

  It was said quite casually.

  There was a shifting among the men in Lion tabards; assessing that there were no Burgundian soldiers in this street, that the woman – although nobly dressed – was out with no escort. Someone sniggered. One of the archers drew his dagger. Someone else muttered, “Cunt!”

  “Boss, you want us to do the old bitch over?” Euen Huw asked loudly. “She’s an ugly old shite, but Thomas here will fuck everything on two legs, isn’t that right?”

  “Better than you, you Welsh bastard. At least I don’t fuck everything with four legs.”

  They were moving as they spoke, broad men in armour, hands going to bollock daggers. Ash barked, “Hold it!”, and put her hand on Florian’s shoulder.

  The elderly woman screwed up her eyes, squinting at Ash against the bright sun that slanted down into the street, between the gabled roofs. “I am not afraid of your armed thugs.”

  Ash spoke with no asperity. “Then you’re downright stupid, because they won’t think twice about killing you.”

  The woman bristled. “The Duke’s peace holds here! The church forbids murder!”

  Seeing this woman, in her neat chaff-flecked gown, with the folds of her white headdress neat under her chin – knowing just how quickly it could all be changed, to cloth ripped off to show grey hair, kirtle slashed, shift bloodied, skinny legs sprawled naked on the cobbles – all this made Ash speak quite gently.

  “We kill for a living. It gets to be a habit. They’d kill you for your shoes, never mind your purse, and they’re even more likely to do it for the fun of it. Thomas, Euen, I think this woman’s name is – Jeanne? – and she’s some relative of our surgeon. Hands off. Got me?”

  “Yes, boss…”

  “And don’t sound so damn disappointed!”

  “Shit, boss,” Thomas Rochester remarked, “you must think I’m desperate!”

  They seemed to fill the street: the bulk of men who have padded doublets under mail, steel plates strapped to legs, long-hilted swords swinging from their hips. Their voices were loud, and under cover of Euen Huw’s beery “Couldn’t get laid in
a whorehouse with a bag of gold louis!”, Ash said, “Florian, this is your aunt?”

  Florian stared ahead, her face set. She said, “My father Philippe’s sister. Captain Ash, may I present Mademoiselle Jeanne Châlon…”

  “No,” Ash said feelingly. “You may not. Not today. Today, I’ve had just about enough!”

  The elderly woman stepped straight into the group of soldiers, oblivious to their only brief amusement. She seized the shoulder of Florian’s doublet and shook her, twice, with little jerky movements.

  Ash saw it momentarily as Thomas and Euen did: a small, fat old woman catching hold of their surgeon, and the tall, strong, dirty young man staring down with an appalled helplessness.

  “If you don’t want her hurt,” Thomas Rochester offered to Florian, “we’ll just take her away for you. Where’s the family live?”

  “Teach her a few manners, on the way.” Wiry, black-haired Euen Huw thumbed his dagger back into its sheath, and took hold of both the woman’s elbows from behind. As his hands tightened, Jeanne Châlon’s face turned white under its summer flush and she gasped, and went limp against him.

  “Leave her alone.” Ash stared the Welshman down until he relaxed.

  “Let me look, Tante Jeanne!” Floria del Guiz reached out, with long-fingered hands, taking the woman’s fat arm, and moving it gently at the elbow. “Damn it! Next time I have you in the surgeon’s tent, Euen Huw—”

  The Welsh lance-leader shifted his grip, uncomfortably aware that he was still supporting the woman against his chest. Half-fainting, Jeanne Châlon flapped her free hand, slapping at him. He attempted to support her without gripping her wide waist and hips, grabbed her as she slid downwards, finally lowered her to the cobbles, and grunted, “Fuck, Florian, boy; get rid of the old cow! We all got families back home, don’t we? That’s why we’re out here!”

  “Sweet Christ on a stick!” Ash shoved the men bodily back, breaking up the sweat-soaked, airless crush. “She’s a noblewoman, for Christ’s sake! Get it through your thick heads, the Duke can throw us out of Dijon! She’s my fucking husband’s aunt, as well!”