by Mary Gentle
His features could not be seen in the fading light. His boy’s voice was abrupt. “I can hear a noise.”
Ash frowned. “Leash the dogs.”
She walked up to the bank, legs lead-heavy, and put her wet hair back from her ears. The usual noise from the campfires, and the sound of men drinking, echoed across the river valley.
“What did you hear?” She reached out for her shirt and began to scrub her skin dry.
“That!”
“Shit!” Ash swore, as a shout went up, from in the camp. Not men getting drunk, and fighting: too raw for that. She struggled into her clothes without drying herself off, the cloth sticking to her skin, and grabbed her sword and buckled it round her waist while she walked, and took the mastiffs’ leashes from Rickard as he sprinted after her.
“It’s the doctor!” the boy shouted.
In the growing dark, men massed, shouting.
The surgeon’s tent went over as Ash came striding up, unnoticed into the crowd of off-duty men. The pennant and pole tipped as knives hacked away the guy-ropes; the canvas suddenly sagged.
A rose of yellow flame blossomed out of the canvas, brown-edged, brilliant in what was by contrast almost the darkness of the late sunset.
“FIRE!” Rickard shrieked.
“Pack it in!” Ash roared. She went forward without thinking about it, into the middle of them, dog-leashes clutched in both hands. “Anhelt, what the fuck do you think you’re doing! Pieter, Jean, Henri—” picking out faces from the surging mass “—back off! Get the fire-watch! Get buckets, get sand on that thing!”
She was briefly aware of Rickard at her back, the boy struggling to draw his worn, munition-issue sword. Someone cannoned into both of them. The dogs snarled, a frenzy of hound-bodies throwing themselves forward; and she bawled, “Bonniau! Brifault!” and let the leashes out to her arm’s length.
The men went back from the dogs, clearing a space around her and the collapsing tent. A figure fell down into the folds of canvas – Floria?
Ash yelled, “Hold!”
“WHORE!” a billman bellowed at the wreckage of the surgeon’s tent.
“Kill the cunt!”
“Woman-fucker!”
“Fucking filthy pervert, fucking bitch, fucking dyke—”
“Fuck him and kill him!”
“Fuck her and kill her!”
Between their shoving bodies, she glimpsed other men running from other parts of the camp, some with torches, some with fire-buckets. The heat of the burning blew against her back. Charred fragments of canvas drifted past her.
Ash pitched her voice to carry. “Get that fire out before it spreads!”
“Drag her out of there and fuck her,” a man’s voice shouted: Josse. His face contorted as he spat. “Fucking surgeon!. Cut her cunt up!”
Ash said quietly to the boy, “Get Florian out of the tent: move,” and stepped forward, still with the mastiffs’ leashes around her gloved hands, glaring around at the men.
In that moment she realised that most of the faces she could see were from Flemish lances. Some surprises – Wat Rodway, from the cook’s tent, with a filleting knife; Pieter Tyrrell – but mostly it was red-faced men rawly shouting, hoarse, the stink of beer on the air, and more than that: an edge of real violence.
They’re not just going to stand and shout, and destroy a few things.
Shit.
I shouldn’t stand in front of them because they’re going to come right over me. There’s my authority gone.
The man Josse came forward, stomping over the slippery dry straw, regardless of her; reaching out to shove her aside with one hand, this woman with wet hair hanging to her thighs; his other hand going to his scabbard.
One of the Flemish lances’ crossbowmen: she has a second to recognise him as one of the men taken with her at Basle, one of the first to greet her on her return to camp.-
Ash released the mastiffs’ leashes.
“Shit!” Josse screamed.
The six dogs bounded forward, silent now, and leaped; one man wrenching himself backwards with his arm clamped between heavy jaws, screeching; two men going down with dogs at their throats; a pennant and torches visible over the heads of the mob—
Over the noise of men screaming and swearing, and the howl as someone cut at one of the mastiffs, Ash pitched her voice to battlefield volume:
“BACK OFF! DOWN WEAPONS!”
She caught a sound of voices behind her: Florian and Rickard, some of the surgeon’s-tent assistants. She didn’t take her eyes off the billmen and archers massing in the firebreak between tents. Bashas opposite were being trodden down as the crowd grew: men inside them yelling protests. The crackle of flame grew behind her.
“Brifault!”
The mastiffs, hallooed back, came to heel. She felt the switch of attention: the crowd no longer a mass of men who might just push past her, not even seeing one more person in the confusion of the camp, but men in mail shirts, with daggers in their hands, and torches – one, Josse, with a drawn sword – facing her.
Ash, aware that reality is what consensus says it is, feels it begin to slip: from mutual agreement that she is commander of the company, to being just a young woman, in a field, at night, surrounded by men who are bigger, older, armed, drunk.
Entirely automatically, she started to mutter, “Armed revolt, in camp, thirty men—”
‘Re-establish command and control by—’
“Who do you think you fucking are!” Josse sprayed spit from his mouth as he bellowed. The sheer volume of voice from that big a man blasted the air. He glared, said, “You’re fucking dead,” and lifted his falchion.
The movement of a live blade triggered every combat reflex.
Ash grabbed the neck of her scabbard with her left hand and her hilt with her right hand, ripping the sword out of the sheath. In the space of that second, Josse’s arm went up, torch-light flashed off his falchion’s edge, and the heavy curved blade chopped down. She whacked her sword in behind it, parrying, accelerating it down; slammed his blade down so hard into the dirt between them that her feet came off the ground. Landing, balanced, she slammed one foot on to his blade and held it; and lifted up her sword pommel-first and rammed it straight into his unprotected throat.
A voice among the gathered men whispered, “Shit…”
Ash felt wetness on her hands. She pulled the weapon back. Josse put both hands to his crushed trachea and fell, wheezing whitely, on to the smouldering straw at her feet. Simultaneously, sudden and final: one foot kicked; his bowels relaxed; the breath made a loud, harsh noise in his throat.
Men at the back still pushed to get forward, the shouting still went on there; but here, at the edge of the crowd around the surgeon’s tent, shock and silence.
“Shit,” Pieter Tyrrell repeated. He raised bright, drunken eyes to Ash. “Oh, shit, man.”
A billman said, “He should’ve known better than to draw sword.”
A sudden influx of men, in plate, and under Anselm’s pennant, thrust in from one side; and Ash lowered her sword, seeing the provosts going in, breaking up what she now estimated in the darkness to be a crowd of fifty or sixty men.
“Well done.” She nodded acknowledgement to Anselm. “All right, get this man … buried.”
Deliberately, she turned her back on the men, letting Anselm sort it. She rubbed her glove over the stained pommel of her sword, wiping off blood, and sheathed the weapon. The mastiffs closed in around her legs.
Rickard and Florian del Guiz, in the wet smoking wreckage of the surgeon’s tent, stared at her: the boy and the woman with identical expressions.
“He was going to kill you!” Rickard protested shrilly. He stood with his feet planted apart and his head down, much the way that Anselm habitually stood, watching the departing men with awkward bravado and fear. “How can they do that! You’re the boss!”
“They’re hard men. If they’re drunk, nobody’s boss.”
“But you stopped it!”
Ash shrugged, gathering up the mastiffs’ leashes. She rubbed Bonniau’s muzzle, the dog’s wet drool sliding over her hands. Her fingers shook.
Florian stepped out of the wreckage of the pavilion: over burned canvas, wooden chests smashed open, spoiled surgical instruments and scattered, trodden bunches of herbs. Someone had started on smacking the disguised woman around, Ash saw: her lips bled and her doublet sleeve was ripped out of its point-holes.
“You okay?”
“Motherfuckers!” Florian stared at the squad pulling Josse’s body away in a blanket. “I’ve had them under my knife! How could they come here and do this?”
“Are you badly hurt?” Ash persisted.
Florian spread pale, dirty long fingers in front of her and looked down at the tremors shaking her hands. “Did you have to kill him?”
“Yes. I did have to. They follow me because I can do that without thinking about it, and I sleep nights afterwards.” Ash reached out and lifted the surgeon’s chin, studying the bruises.
Dark fingermarks stood out on the woman’s flesh, where she had been grabbed and held.
“Get one of the deacons here, Rickard. Florian, killing doesn’t matter to me. If it mattered, I’d’ve gone down the first time thirty armed thugs marched up to my tent and said, ‘That’s our war-chest, piss off, little girl’. Wouldn’t I?”
“You’re mad.” Florian shifted her head away, staring down at the wreckage. One wet streak marked her cheek. “You’re all fucking mad! Bloody maniacs, bloody soldiers! You’re no different!”
Ash said dryly, “Yes, I am. I’m on your side.”
To the deacon who trotted up with a lantern, she said, “Get the doctor bedded down in the field chapel. Is Father Godfrey back yet?”
The man gasped, “No, Captain.”
“Okay. Feed her, keep an eye on her, I don’t think she’s hurt too bad, there’ll be a guard along later,” and as Robert Anselm returned, his armour rattling as he strode up to her, Ash continued, “I want Florian in the chapel tent, and a guard on it, nothing too obvious.”
“It’s done.” Anselm gave orders to his subordinates. Turning back to Ash, he said, “Girl, what the fuck was that?”
“That was a mistake.”
Ash looked down at the trodden straw. There was dark blood on it, not very much, but visible in the lantern’s light. The stink of burned canvas and spilled herbs rose up in the night air.
Thomas Rochester, at Anselm’s back, said, “You couldn’t disarm him. He was twice your weight. I reckon you only had one chance, and you took it.”
Robert Anselm stared after the departing surgeon. “He’s – she’s a woman, and she fucks women?”
“Yeah.”
“You knew about this?” At her hesitation, he spat on the straw, swore softly, and fixed her with expressionless eyes. “You fucked up here.”
“Yeah. Josse was good in a fight. I fucking needed him.” Ash scowled. “I need all the good men I’ve got! If I’d seen this coming, I wouldn’t have had to do that.”
“Shit,” Robert Anselm said.
“Yeah.”
“Get that cleared up,” Anselm directed his returning men. Ash walked aside with him, down the path between pavilions, as the physic-tent was sifted, shifted, and cleared.
“Do I call a meeting and talk to them?” Ash mused, aloud. “Or do I let it sink in what they’ve done, and let their heads clear in the morning? Have I still got a surgeon? One they’ll trust?”
The big man sniffed, thoughtfully, and prodded with his sabaton at a wisp of extinguished straw, grinding it into the dew-wet dirt. “He’s been with us five years, half of them have been put back together in – her – tent. Give ‘em a chance to work out it’s still the doc. First time somebody hits ’em, most’ll come running.”
“And those that don’t?”
The pennant that had been lurking about at the back of the crowd became clear as it moved forward. Ash’s face took on a grim expression.
“Master van Mander,” she called. “I want a word with you.”
Joscelyn van Mander, Paul di Conti, and five or six more of the Flemish lance-leaders picked their way through the confusion; van Mander’s face white under his helmet.
“What the hell were you doing, letting your men do this?”
“I couldn’t stop them, Captain.” Joscelyn van Mander reached up and took off his helmet. His face was flushed, his eyes bright; she smelled wine on him, and on the others.
“You couldn’t stop them? You’re their lance-leader!”
“I command only by their consent,” the Flemish commander said, unsteadily. “I lead by their wishes. It’s the same for all us officers. We’re a mercenary company, Captain Ash. It’s the men who matter. How could I stop them? We’re told the surgeon is a devil, a demon; a lustful, perverted vile thing; an offence to mankind—”
Ash raised a brow. “So she’s a woman: so what?”
“She’s a woman who has lain with other women, who knows them carnally!” His voice pitched high with outrage. “Even if I could bring myself to tolerate it, because he’s, she’s, your surgeon, and you’re commander—”
“That’s enough.” Ash cut him short. “Your duty is to control these men. You failed.”
“How could I control them, their disgust at this?” His breath blasted, warm and beer-laden, across the space between them. “Don’t blame me, Captain. She’s your surgeon.”
“Get back to your tent. I’ll tell you your penalties in the morning.”
Ash stared the Flemish lance-leader down, ignoring for the moment the other lance-leaders with him; noting, as he turned and stalked away, who followed his pennant, and who stayed to undertake the clear-up of the area.
“Goddammit!” Ash said.
“We’ve got trouble,” Anselm said phlegmatically.
“Yeah, like I really need more trouble.” Ash smoothed her still-wet shirtsleeves down. “Maybe I should look forward to Charles handing me over to the Visigoths … it can only be an improvement!”
Robert Anselm ignored her temper, which she was used to him doing.
“I’ll hold some kind of inquiry tomorrow. Fines, beatings; stop this before it gets out of hand.” When she glanced up at him, Anselm was watching her. “And I’ll be interested to know if van Mander’s lances overheard any ‘chance remarks’ from Joscelyn before this riot.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me.”
“I’d better go check on Florian.”
“About Josse.” Robert Anselm halted her as she was about to walk off into the camp. “Stop by my tent later. I’ve got wine.”
Ash shook her head. “No.”
“We can have a drink. To Josse.”
“Yeah.” Ash sighed, in gratitude for Anselm’s particular understanding. She grinned. “I’ll be along. Don’t worry about me, Roberto. I don’t need the wine. I’ll sleep.”
A hot, muggy mist came up with the next day’s dawn. Granules of water hung suspended in the air inside the palace. The misty whiteness of the presence chamber tinged with gold as the sun rose over the horizon.
Ash stood beside the Earl of Oxford, welcoming the coolness that stone walls gave the early morning. De Vere and his brothers being awarded a place not far from the ducal throne, she was able to look about her, see the Burgundian nobles assembled, the foreign dignitaries – but not, so far, the Visigoths.
The clarions rang and the choirs began to sing a morning hymn. Ash took off her chaperon hat and bowed her knee to the white marble floor.
“I have no idea what the Duke will do,” John de Vere said, as the hymn finished. “I’m an outsider here, too, madam.”
“I could have had a contract with that man,” she whispered, voice barely a breath.
“Yes,” the Earl of Oxford said.
“Yes.”
They mutually looked at each other, and as mutually shrugged, each with a quiet smile on their faces as they got to their feet, Duke Charles of Burgundy seating himself on his t
hrone.
Her satisfaction vanished with the automatic glance she gave to find Godfrey, and listen to Godfrey’s prompting voice at her ear. The place beside her was taken by Robert Anselm, Godfrey Maximillian not being present.
Robert might believe Godfrey would stay overnight in Dijon, last night, but he’s wondering where our clerk is right now. I can see it on his face. And I don’t have anything I can tell him. Godfrey, where the fuck have you gone?
Are you coming back?
“Hell!” she added, under her breath, and realised at de Vere’s curious glance that she had spoken aloud.
Under the cover of the Duke’s chamberlain and chancellor speaking, the Earl of Oxford said, “Don’t worry, madam. If it comes to it, I’ll think of something to keep you here, out of Visigoth hands.”
“Like what?”
The Englishman smiled confidently, seemingly amused by her caustic tone. “I’ll think of something. I often do.”
“Too much thinking’s bad for you … my lord.” Ash tagged his title on to the end. She raised her head, trying to look across the heads of the crowd.
Complicated heraldries of Burgundy and France blazed silver and blue, red and gold, scarlet and white. Her eye travelled over the various groups, some standing in corners, others seated by the great open fireplaces full of sweet rushes. Nobles and their affinities, merchants in silk, because of the growing heat; dozens of pages in Charles’s white puff-sleeved livery jackets, priests in their sombre browns and greens; and servants moving rapidly from one group of people to another. The freshness of the early morning made voices lively – but with a particular tone, she noted: solemn, grave and reverent.
Where’s Godfrey when I need him?
Listening for intelligence, she overheard a tall man discuss the virtues of bratchet bitches for hunting; two knights speaking of a tournament combat over barriers; and a large woman in an Italian silk robe talking about honey glazes for pork.
The only political conversation Ash could hear was between the French ambassador and Philippe de Commines:8 it mostly involved the names of French Dukes with which she was not overly familiar.
