by Mary Gentle
“Di Conti,” she called. Paul di Conti loped up, a broad grin on his sun-reddened face, and dropped to one knee in front of her. “I don’t see you or the Flemish lance-leaders in my tent. Get your asses in gear; there’s a meeting.”
The Savoyard man-at-arms beamed up at her. In his soft accent, he said, “Sieur Joscelyn said he would attend in our places. Willem and I don’t mind, nor the others. Sieur Joscelyn will pass on all we need to know.”
And di Conti’s not even Flemish. Ash made herself smile.
Di Conti, his grin fading slightly, added, “It saves us crowding in, boss!”
“Well, I guess it saves half of you sitting on my lap! Right.” Ash abruptly about-faced, striding back to the centre of camp.
Walking, thinking furiously, she did not at first notice herself being shadowed by a very large, dark-haired man. His skin was pale despite the south Burgundian sun, and his sparse beard black, and he stood – she continued to look up, and up – something above six foot high. One of the dogs yelped at him and he skipped, surprisingly lightly, to one side.
“You’re… Faversham,” she recalled.
“Richard Faversham,” he confirmed, in English.
“You’re Godfrey’s assistant priest.” She could not, for some reason, find the English term in her mind.
“Deacon. Do you wish me to hold mass until Master Godfrey returns?” Richard Faversham asked, solemnly.
The Englishman was not much above her own age; sweating as he walked in the dark green robes of a priest, the sharp edges of cut straw spiking in vain against the hardened soles of his feet. One cheek had a small cross tattooed on it in blue ink. A clanking mass of saint’s medals hung suspended around his neck. Ash, identifying several prominent St Barbara’s,11 thought he might have the right idea.
“Yes. Has he notified you of when he’s coming back from,” she crossed her fingers behind her back, “Dijon?”
Deacon Faversham smiled benevolently. “No, boss. I make allowances for Master Godfrey’s unworldliness. If there is a poor man, or a sick man, and he’s met them, he’ll stay until he’s remedied their trouble.”
Ash nearly choked, coming to a dead stop amid men-at-arms, leashed hounds, tent guy-ropes, and the round balls of sweet-smelling horse droppings. “‘Unworldly’? Godfrey? ”
Richard Faversham’s small black eyes narrowed uncertainly against the sunlight. His voice, however, remained sure. “Master Godfrey will be a saint one day. There’s no billman so low, or whore so dirty, that he won’t bring them God’s Bread and Wine. I’ve known him minister to a sick child forty hours at a stretch – and do the same with a sick hound. He’ll be one of the Community of Saints, when he dies.”
Ash, her breath returning, managed to say, “Well, at the moment, I could do with him on earth! If you see him, tell him boss needs him now; meanwhile, go prepare for a mass.”
She moved on, back to the command tent, diverting only once – to speak briefly to John de Vere; and the visiting Olivier de la Marche, conveniently in conversation with the English Earl – and then stood under the Lion Azure standard, in front of her tent, and called all her officers out into the open piece of ground.
They stumbled out into the bright Burgundian sun: Geraint with his points undone and his split hose rolled down to his calves, Robert Anselm in breast-and backplate; Angelotti in a white silk doublet – Ash muttered “white! ” and “silk! ” under her breath in equal amazement, noting her master gunner to be clean – and Joscelyn van Mander, blinking hooded eyes against the glare.
She lifted her arm. Euen Huw put a clarion to his mouth and blew for general assembly. She was not too surprised at the speed with which the men made their way to the empty ground at the centre of camp, crowding it, pushing back into the open fire-break paths between the tents. Sometimes, she mused, the rumours of what I’m going to do get around before I’ve thought of it…
“Okay!” Ash pushed a squawking hen off an upturned barrel, at the foot of the Lion Azure standard, and sprang neatly up on top of it. She put her hands on her hips. The blue and gold standard hung, stiffened, above her, no breeze to ripple it on the air, but you couldn’t have everything, she thought, and let her gaze travel across the crowd, picking out faces here and there, smiling as she did so.
“Gentlemen,” she said, projecting only enough that they had to be quiet to hear her. “Gentlemen – and I use the term loosely – you will be pleased to hear that we’re going to war again.”
A muted rumble greeted this, part pleasure, part groans of dismay (some of them genuine).
Ash did not know what her grin did to her face as she stood there facing them, did not quite realise how it made her face blaze with brightness, with a sincere content. It broadcast, in the anticipation of a battle, her absolute (if unconscious) certainty that all was right with the world.
“We’re going to fight a battle against the Visigoths,” she called. “Partly because we like the sun here in Burgundy! Mostly because my lord the Earl of Oxford is paying us to do this. But mainly,” she added emphasis, “mainly we’re fighting the Visigoth bitch because I want my fucking armour back! ”
What had been raucous, deep male laughter and cheers came together as a shout of laughter, and a loud yell of triumph that almost jarred the earth under the upturned barrel. Ash held up both arms over her head. There was a silence.
“What about Carthage?” Blanche called from one of the wagons.
What did I say about rumour?
“That can wait!” Ash made herself grin. “Three or four days and we fight a field against the rag-heads. I’ve got you an advance on your pay. Your duties for the rest of today are to go out and get rat-arsed, and fuck every whore in Dijon twice! I don’t—” The loudest roar of noise overwhelmed her, she tried to make herself heard, gave up, grinning so hard it hurt; and at the first drop in the sound level, completed what she had been going to say: “I don’t want to see a sober man wearing the Lion Azure tonight!”
A Welsh voice shouted, “No danger of that, boss!”
Ash raised a silver brow at Geraint ab Morgan. “Did I say that included officers? I don’t think so.”
The noise at this was, if anything, louder than before; eight hundred male voices baying with pure pleasure. Ash felt herself lifted up on the adrenalin.
“Okay – whoa! I said, whoa! Shut up!” Ash took a breath. “That’s better. Go get pissed. Go get laid. Those of you that do come back are going to fight a battle, and give the rag-heads fucking hell.” She slammed a hand against the standard-pole, shaking the folds of the silk above her. “Remember, I don’t want you guys to die for your flag – I want you to make the Visigoths die for theirs!”
There was a cheer for that, and men at the back of the crowd beginning to drift away. Ash nodded once to herself, and turned around precariously on the barrel. “Mynheer van Mander!”
That stopped most of them moving. Joscelyn van Mander stepped forward from the officers’ group, his movements uncertain. He glanced around. Ash saw him make eye-contact with Paul di Conti and half a dozen Flemish lance-leaders.
“Come here.” She beckoned, insistently. As soon as he came within reach, she bent down and seized his hand, shook it firmly, and turned to the men crowding in close, and held the Flemish knight’s arm up with hers. “This man! I am going to do something I haven’t done before—” she leaned forward and embraced the startled van Mander, her cheek against his rough cheek.
Deep voices whooped, in startlement and glee. Those men-at-arms and knights who had begun to drift off pushed back into the central ground. A thunder of questions arose.
“Okay!” Ash spun around, holding both hands up again, and getting silence. “I want to publicly acknowledge my debt to this man. Here and now! He’s done great things for the Lion Azure. The only thing is – there’s nothing else I can teach him!”
Flemish men-at-arms, deliriously proud, banged fists against breastplates, their faces alight. Van Mander’s broad features were
caught halfway between pride and apprehension. Ash kept herself from grim laughter. Get out of this one, sonny…
Waiting while the noise died down again, she watched Paul di Conti’s face, the other lance-leaders. And Joscelyn van Mander’s expression.
Your officers don’t take orders from me now, they take orders from you. Therefore they are not my officers…
Therefore, they have no reason to be in my camp.
“Sir Joscelyn,” she said, strongly and formally, “there is a time for the apprentice and the journeyman to leave the master. I have taught you everything I know. It is no longer for me to command you. It is time now for you to lead your own company.”
She gauged the quality of the hush that followed; judged it satisfactory.
She swung her arm around, indicating the assembled troops. “Joscelyn, there are twenty lances, two hundred Flemish men here, who will follow you. I myself began the Lion Azure with no smaller number of men.”
“But I don’t want to leave the Lion Azure,” van Mander blurted.
Ash kept a smile on her face.
Of course you don’t. You’d rather stay as a significant number of men and officers in my company, and try and sway the way I run it. That’s why you want a weak leader – you get all the power and none of the responsibility.
Put you on your own and you’re a very small number of men, with no influence whatsoever, and the buck stops with you. Well, tough. I’ve had enough of this company-within-a-company. I’ve had enough of things I can’t trust – Stone Golem included. I certainly won’t take a split company into a battle in four days’ time…
Joscelyn van Mander began frowning. “I won’t leave.”
“I have—” Ash spoke loudly over him, getting their attention again. “I have spoken to my lord of Oxford, and my lord Olivier de la Marche, Duke’s Champion of Burgundy.”
A pause to let that sink in.
“If you wish, Sir Joscelyn, my lord Oxford will give you a contract with him. Or, if you want to be employed on the same terms as Cola de Monforte and his sons,” – she saw the famous names of these mercenaries hit home among the Flemish lances, and moreover, saw van Mander see it – “then Charles, Duke of Burgundy, will employ you direct.”
The Flemish knights roared. Looking around, Ash could already judge which of the Flemish men-at-arms would be sneaking back into the Lion Azure camp tonight under assumed names; and which English billmen would be speaking fluent Walloon under Olivier de la Marche’s direct command.
Ash shifted her weight back on to one heel. The upturned barrel was solid beneath her. She let the warm air blow over her face, and, with one finger to the mail standard at her neck, let a little air into the sweaty warmth of her neck. Joscelyn van Mander looked up, his lips pressed together into a thin line. She could make a guess at the words he was holding back – would have to hold back, now, or precipitate a public quarrel.
Which will have the same effect: he and his lances will have to leave. Ash let her gaze travel over the heads of the men-at-arms, and the crowding support staff from the wagons; reckoning up with a practised eye how clean a split it might be.
Better five hundred men I can trust than eight hundred I’m doubtful about.
A hand tugged the skirt of her doublet. Ash looked down.
Richard Faversham, deacon, said in his high English voice, “Might we hold a celebratory mass, to pray for God’s good fortune on this newly made company of the Flemish knights?”
Ash surveyed Faversham’s face, boyish despite the black beard. “Yes. Good idea.”
She lifted a fist for attention, got it, and projected her voice out to the edges of the crowd to make this known. Her own attention remained on Joscelyn van Mander, huddled in a knot with his officers. She checked by line of sight where her escort was, where her dogs were, and the impassive expressions of Robert Anselm and Geraint and Angelotti. Nowhere in the packed mass of people could she pick out Florian de Lacey, or Godfrey Maximillian.
Fuck, she thought, and turned back to find Paul di Conti raising, on a bill-shaft, a hastily tied livery coat – one of van Mander’s original ones: the Ship and Crescent Moon. This makeshift standard lifted into the air, the better part of the two hundred men that Ash had earmarked for this began to move towards it.
“Before you leave the camp,” she said, “we will hear mass, and pray for your souls, and for ours. And pray that we meet again, Mynheer van Mander, in four days, with the army of the Visigoths lying dead on the earth between us.”
As Deacon Faversham raised his voice to order things, Ash got down from the barrel, and found herself standing beside John de Vere, Earl of Oxford.
The Earl turned from a conversation with Olivier de la Marche. “More news, madam Captain. The Duke’s intelligence brings him word that the Visigoth lines are overstretched – their supplies liable to be cut off. There are Turkish troops a scant ten miles from here.”
“Turks?” Ash stared at the Englishman. He, composed, and with a glint of excitement in his faded blue eyes, murmured, “Yes, madam. Six hundred of the Sultan’s cavalry.”
“Turks. Fuck me.” Ash took two steps on the rough turf and straw, ignoring the crowd of men; swung around, her gaze elsewhere, calculating. “No, it makes sense! It’s exactly what I’d do, if I were the Sultan. Wait for the Carthaginian army to commit itself, take out their supply lines, get them cut up by us, and pick up the pieces… Does Duke Charles really think he won’t have a Turkish army on his doorstep, the morning after we beat the Visigoths?”
“He is anxious,” the Earl said gravely, “to have an army left, to take the field against them. He is calling his priests to him, now.”
Ash absently crossed herself.
“For the rest,” de Vere added, “the bulk of his army will march south, detachments moving today and tomorrow: we move with the rest of the mercenaries, the morning after next. Leave a base camp here. Get your men ready for a forced march. We will see, madam, how much of a commander you are without your saints.”
Twenty-four hours passed in chaos, herded into order by the Lion’s officers: neither Ash nor any man in the command group slept more than two hours.
Yellow clouds massed on the western horizon, nickering with summer lightning. Humid heat increased. Men scratched under constricting armour, swore; fights broke out over loading kit on to packhorses. Ash was everywhere. She listened to three, four, five different voices at a time, gave orders, responded, checked supplies, checked weapons; dealt with the provosts and gate-guards.
She held her final command meeting in the armoury tent, in the stink of charcoal, fires, soot, and the banging of munition harness being hammered out rough and ready.
“Green Christ!” Robert Anselm yelled, wiping his streaming forehead. “Why can’t it fucking rain?”
“You want to march this lot in bad weather? We’re lucky!”
The oppressiveness of the storm nonetheless made Ash’s head throb. She shifted, uncomfortably, as Dickon Stour strapped a new greave to her shins, the metal rough and black from the forge. She flexed her knee to the ninety-degree angle that that armour allowed.
“No, it’s cutting into the back of my knee.” She watched him undo roughly riveted straps. “Leave it: I’ve got boots, I’ll just wear upper leg harness and poleyns.”
“I got you a breastplate.” Dickon Stour turned, picked it up, held it out in black hands. “I’ve cut the arm-holes back?”
There is not time to forge a new harness. She turned, let him hold it against her, brought her arms together in front of her as if she gripped a sword. The breastplate’s edges rammed into her inner arms. “Too wide. Cut it back again. I don’t care about rolled edges on the metal, I just want something I can wear for four hours, that’ll deflect arrows.”
The armourer grunted discontentedly.
“Have the Great Duke’s men gone?”
“Moved out at dawn,” Geraint ab Morgan shouted, over the noise of arrowheads being hammered out, at productio
n-line speed.
In these twenty-four hours, nearly twenty thousand men and supplies have gone south: it will take them until the feast-day of the saint to cover the forty miles between here and Auxonne, here and the Faris’s army. Empty dust, mud, and trodden common ground surrounds Dijon. The town and the country for miles around are stripped of supplies.
Summer thunder rumbled, all but inaudible under the sharp clangs of the armourers hammering out arrow-heads by the hundred. Ash thinks briefly of the road south. A few miles down the river valley and Dijon will be behind them: there is nothing but a few farms, villages in clearings in the forest, and great swathes of empty pasture, common land, and wilderness. An empty world.
“Okay – two hours and we ride.”
Travelling south, the land grows colder.
By evening, ten miles south of Dijon, Ash rode aside from the long column of men and packhorses, spurring her riding horse up on to a rise. Smudges of black rose from fields ahead.
“What’s that?” She leaned down to Rickard, as the boy ran up.
“They’re trying to save the vines!”
“Vines?”
“I asked this old guy? They had frost here last night. They’re making smoky fires in the vineyard, trying to keep the frost from forming tonight. Otherwise there’ll be no harvest.”
Two or three men-at-arms were riding out from the column: further orders needed. Ash spared one more glance for the hillsides and the vineyards, row upon long row of cropped vines clinging to the earth; and the distant figures of peasants moving between the smudge-fires.
“Damn; no wine,” she said. Turning her horse, she noted Rickard had four or five fresh coney-carcasses slung off his belt.
“This will be a bad year,” the Earl of Oxford remarked, bringing his barrel-chested gelding up with her.
“I’ll tell the lads we’re fighting for the wine harvest. That’ll make them kick Visigoth ass!”
