by Mary Gentle
“A battlefield isn’t safe!” Ash remarked with asperity. “Look, I’d as soon not go to a city doctor, I don’t trust them, money-grubbing bastards, and besides, there isn’t time to get one now. I don’t want to use the remedies they use on the wagons unless I have to. And I trust you because you’ve patched me up every time someone’s hacked a chunk out of me!”
“Holy Saint Magdalen! Are you completely stupid? You – might – die.”
“Am I supposed to be impressed? I train for that every day. I’m fighting tomorrow!”
Floria del Guiz opened her mouth and shut it again.
Unhappy, Ash said, “I don’t want to give you an order.”
“An order?” Floria’s face, in profile, dripped a clear drop from her eye, that still ran from Ash’s blow. She didn’t look at Ash. “And what are you going to do if I don’t perform an abortion? Throw me out of the company? But you’ll have to do that anyway.”
“Christ, Florian, no!”
Her hand came up and grabbed Ash’s arm. “It isn’t ‘Florian’, it’s ‘Floria’, I’m a woman. I love other women!”
“I know that,” Ash said, hastily. “Look, I—”
“You don’t know it!” Floria let go of Ash’s arm. She stood for a moment with her head lowered, and then turned her face to Ash. “You don’t have the slightest idea, don’t tell me you do. What am I supposed to do when people go mad around me, because I’ve lain with a woman? What? I can’t fight them. I couldn’t hurt them even if I did! I have to pretend I’m something I’m not. What if someone decides to burn me because I’m a woman-lover and I practise medicine?”
Ash shifted uncomfortably.
Floria del Guiz held out her hands, palm up.
In the cool air and lantern light, Ash saw familiar white marks on the surgeon’s fingers.
Floria said, “These are burn scars. Old burns. I got them trying to drag – trying to drag something out of a fire, after it was much too late, because I wanted just something, a relic, a memory, if I couldn’t have her alive, with me, with me.” Floria pushed her hands across her face, sweat and tears dampening her hair. “Some man pissed on you once and you think you know about this? Don’t you tell me you know what it’s like, you thug, because you don’t know! You’ve never been defenceless in your life!”
The empty air echoed to her shout. Outside the tent, the guards stirred. Ash walked to the tent-flap, to give quiet orders.
Floria del Guiz spat, “So now you’re having a baby. So welcome to being a woman!”
“Christ, Floria,” Ash protested.
She didn’t let Ash finish. “Maybe you shouldn’t have been so damn eager to fuck my brother!”
Ash could only look at her. Between amazement and the shock of feeling kicked in the gut, she couldn’t put her thoughts in order to find an answer, couldn’t say anything at all.
“I’d do anything for you! I always have. But I won’t do this!” Floria’s voice scaled up an octave. “Don’t just sit there! Say something!”
Ash stared in panicked silence; tried to speak; then dropped her gaze from the woman’s fierce face and stared down at the rush-strewn forest-earth.
Clear and decisive, the thought came into her head: I should tell Fernando.
But if it’s a son, he’ll take it away from me.
And I can’t have it, anyway.
More than one woman’s ridden into battle with a belly on her.
Yes, and more than one woman’s got a fever after the birth and died, and the surgeons no use to her at all.
Equally clearly, a realisation came to her: I won’t have it because it’s his.
Floria’s voice snarled, “Ash!”
Ash ignored her.
Very cautiously, she began to consider the thought of carrying the baby to term.
It isn’t that long out of my life. Months. Bad timing, though, if we’re facing war … well, women have fought wars like this before. They’d still follow me. I’d make damn sure of it.
The strength of her fear of her body changing out of her control, the sheer enormity of that physical reality, left her amazed. But when it’s done? Born? Conscious that she was, to some degree, indulging herself in a pretty dream, Ash imagined a son or a daughter.
At least then I’ll have blood kin. Someone who looks like me.
With that, a chill quite literally moved the hairs on the back of her neck.
You’ve already got someone who looks like you. Exactly like you.
And who knows what I’d give birth to? Some deformed village idiot? Christ and all the saints, no! I can’t give birth to a monster.
It must already be more than forty days… I’ve got to get rid of it now, before it quickens.
Before it gets a soul.
The woman’s voice abruptly broke her concentration:
“I’m off. What am I supposed to do? Wait for you for ever? Sit around here until those assholes out there make up their minds whether a dyke doctor is just fine and dandy? Keep your damn company.”
Floria turned and walked away, to the tent-flap; not slowing as she went out.
“And your baby! It’s your problem, Ash. Solve it. You don’t need me. Ash doesn’t need anybody! I’ll be with the Duke’s Surgeon-General on the field tomorrow – where I can do what I trained for.”
Before dawn, with the woods scarcely light enough to move without stumbling, Ash went out with the other commanders to walk the ground for the battle.
Air moved against her face. Condensation gathered on the inside of her helmet’s visor, smelling of rust and armouries. Her boots skidded on the wet leaves. She almost barged into the Earl of Oxford, standing back a little from the main group of the Duke of Burgundy and his officers on the Dijon-Auxonne road. A growing paleness on her left showed her John de Vere’s silhouette.
Ash asked quietly, “Is the Visigoth army still in position? What’s the Duke planning?”
“They are. The Duke will fight this field outside Auxonne,” Oxford murmured succinctly. He added, “Their campfires are where the scouts reported, near enough. A half-mile south, on the main road. You and I, madam, are to take the left of the line, with his other mercenaries.”
“He doesn’t trust us, does he? Or he’d put us on the right, where the fighting’s heaviest.”13 Ash slid her hand down to adjust the buckle of her cuisse: even with an extra hole bored in the strap, the borrowed leg armour did not fit her very well. “Will he at least let us try a flying wedge attack? We could take out the Faris.”
“The Duke says not: she will have battle doubles14 on the field.”
The silhouettes of shoulders moved against the light. Here the road and river swung suddenly away east, on her left hand, away from the shallow slope blocking the river valley to the south. Men moved off the road, on to rough pasture, striding up the hill in front of them. The sky was barely brighter than the earth. Ash realised de Vere’s brothers were with him; peered over her shoulder for Anselm – present – and a bleary-eyed Angelotti.
“Okay,” Ash said steadily to Oxford, as they stumbled into the cold morning, “so we might have to take her out several times! Let me put a snatch-squad together, my lord. Go round the flanks with about a hundred of us, we could be in and out and away. It’s been done.”
“The Duke requests that I bring your company to the field, under his banner,” Oxford said, voice bleak. “We do as we’re commanded. And hope that by this evening it is no longer necessary to think about raiding Carthage.”
The ground lifted under her feet. Dew blackened the leather of her boots, and the lower part of her scabbard. The air remained chill, but clear: no more rain.
“My lord, my sources—” Godfrey’s contacts now reporting direct to her “—say they’re still bringing up supplies, in the dark. We might have caught them on the hop,” Ash said. “Some of their wagons are being pulled by their messenger-golems. Maybe they’re desperate!”
“God send they are overstretched,” de Vere said, grimly f
or a man with a force that outnumbers his enemy.
Boots skidding in mud, Ash topped the hill, her breathing harsh in her own ears; and peered out across the dimness.
A spur of hill here jutted into the river valley. They stood on its shallow western knoll, with the ancient wildwood hard up on her right hand. No way to move troops through it. Scouts reported not walking the ground so much as scrambling ten feet above it on clotted deadfalls.
This should bring us north of their camp – wonder if the heralds have gone down yet? Well, at least we found each other…! Could have wandered around this wilderness for days.
The temptation to murmur, to that interior part of herself that hears a voice, Battle commander, Visigoth army, probable location? is almost irresistible.
Could the machina rei militaris answer that one? Would it lie? Would she know I’ve asked—?
No point wondering. Act as if she would. It’s the only safe thing to do.
They set off down the slope in front. She clattered in the Duke of Burgundy’s wake, aware that most other commanders would ride the ground, but that Duke Charles wants to know what this hill is like for men on foot, and men with gun-carriages. She was mildly impressed; cheered. Rapid, low-voiced conferences went on ahead of her. She squinted into the weak light of dawn.
Her strides ate up ground, going downhill, and her calves ached. At the foot of the long slope, she noted that the ground was squashy – thickets and reeds blocked the dawn, that side: marshes, maybe? On this edge of the river?
The pre-dawn greyness did not grow any brighter.
A skyline of hills and thick forest, ahead. A faint bell split the darkness, maybe from the abbey in Auxonne. She had the thought, Are the other side out walking the territory, right now? If we met—!
The officers and Duke’s men moved off, Cola de Monforte saying something quietly. She heard only perfect choke-point. Walking back around the eastern end of the spur, they met the road beside the river. Movement became easier with the ground sure underfoot. Ash glanced up at the steeper eastern end of the spur, overhanging the Dijon road.
If we set up on the ridge, that’s going to be the left of the line; that’s where we’ll be. If they try to move past on the road, we’ll hit their unprotected backs. If they try and flank us up that cliff— well, I don’t know about the rest of the Burgundian army, but we’re going to be fine!
Except that what they’ll do is prep for combat, and come straight up that southern slope at us…
The voice of Duke Charles of Burgundy said, “My lords, we shall return to camp. It is clear in my mind. We will fight as soon this saint’s-day morning as we may. Sidonius favour us!”
A decision! Ash applauded wryly, in her own mind.
“Guys,” she said.
“Boss?” Robert Anselm came instantly to her side in the morning darkness; Antonio Angelotti and Geraint ab Morgan treading on his heels.
The Earl of Oxford gave a stream of rapid orders; Dickon, George and Tom de Vere moved off about his business; he turned and said something to Viscount Beaumont, who laughed. An electricity spread throughout the group of men: knowing, now, that today will see a chance of being killed or of winning honour, money, survival.
“God pardon me if I have ever offended thee,” Ash said formally, and reached up and embraced Robert Anselm. He gripped her, stepped back in the dew-soaked turf at the edge of the road, and said:
“As I hope to be forgiven, so I forgive thee, in God’s name. We’re going in, aren’t we?”
Ash gripped Angelotti’s forearm, whacked Geraint across the shoulders. Her eyes were bright.
“We’re going in. Okay. This is where the Lion Azure does what it’s paid to. Get them into battle array.”
She speeded up, finishing the circuit, walking back towards the northern tree-line and the camp faster than was safe in the dim dawn, and caught up with the Earl of Oxford. She pointed to the Duke of Burgundy:
“If he won’t let us take out the Faris… My lord Earl, I want to consult with you about the tactics of this battle. I have an idea.”
George de Vere, behind her now, sardonic, said, “The four most terrifying words in the language, a woman saying I have an idea.”
“Oh, no.” Ash smiled sweetly at him, in the dim light. “There are two words much more frightening – boss saying, I’m bored. You ask Fl— ask my surgeon.”
John de Vere seemed to be smiling, under his raised visor
“We’ve got numbers,” she said. “I don’t think the Turks will come in on our side: they’re observers. We’ve got guns. We ought to win it – but the Visigoths beat the Swiss and no one survived the field to tell us how they did it. Just rumours: ‘They fight like Devils from the sulphurous Pits’…”
“And?” the Earl of Oxford prompted.
“My lord,” she said steadily, “look at that sky. There’ll be little or no sun today. When we fight this field, we’ll be fighting under the shadow of their darkness. Cold, dim – a winter battle.”
Unseen, she made a fist, dug her nails into her palms, and showed nothing of what she felt.
“We should talk to our priests.” Ash pointed at the Briar Cross that hung around the Earl’s neck, dark against his surcoat. “I’ve got an idea. Time for God to give us a miracle, your Grace.”
Within two hours of walking the ground, Ash stood beside Godluc’s warm flank, Bertrand holding the war-horse’s reins, and Rickard carrying her helmet and lance. Her thigh armour was borrowed, from a short stocky English knight in de Vere’s train. It did not fit.
Half the sky above her was black.
The east, where the sun should have risen on the massive army, was a towering darkness. Only behind them did an odd half-light stir cocks in the baggage wagons to crow late news of dawn.
Glancing downhill, south, she could no longer see the enemy campfires.
Behind her, that part of the sky that was not black had been covered with a back-shadow of morning light. Now it was becoming rapidly overcast, dark as the east and south. Clouds came together, chalk-yellow and fat-bellied, as tall as castle walls or cathedral spires.
Jesu Christ. Five hundred people organised. In place. Where they should be.
“I’m too knackered to fight!” she murmured.
Rickard grinned, palely. Her war-horse’s breath steamed. Ash looked up the slope to the skyline and the multiple forces of the Burgundian army.
She thought, in the idle moment that follows extreme exertion: The main view of a field of battle is legs.
Dismounted, she has the impression of the field consisting of nothing but legs – horse’s legs, by the hundred, some masked by livery caparisons hanging limp in the cold wet air, but most bare roan or bay or black: milling as the knights move over the crest of the slope into position. And men’s legs, made slender by silver armour, all of the knights and most of the men-at-arms having steel on their lower limbs, even the archers’ bright hose having steel cops strapped on over vulnerable knees. Hundreds of legs: feet treading down what had been some lord’s wheat and was now churned mud and horse-shit.
Minutes ticking by: past the third hour of the morning, surely?
A flurry of cold, wet air blew into her face. Trumpets shrilled. She had barely time to glance back at Anselm, Angelotti, Geraint ab Morgan; all three of them with their clusters of sergeants, gun-captains and lance-leaders thronging around them, orders urgently, furiously being given.
“Mounting up,” she murmured, and took her sallet from Rickard, manoeuvring it carefully over her braided hair, settling it down on her head. She let the buckle strap swing free for the moment. One foot finding the stirrup, she sprang lightly up into the saddle.
From here, high above ground, her view changed; the field becoming instead all helmets and standards. Silver against black thunderheads, a mass of steel shoulders blocked her view: knights wearing their articulated pauldrons. Riders crowded in knots, shouting to each other, wearing a throng of duck-tailed Italian sallets, and Ger
man sallets with long pointed tails, surmounted by heraldic Beasts; dim colours echoed by the sagging wet silk of their banners and standards above.
Robert Anselm slapped his hands together. “Fuck me, it’s cold!”
“Everybody clear about what they’re doing?”
“Yeah.” Anselm had his sallet tipped back on his head. He looked out from under it at her. “Sure. All twenty thousand of us…”
“Yeah, right. Never mind. No plan ever survived ten minutes after the fighting started … we’ll wing it.”
Up on the backside of the hill here, Ash could look to left and right and see the Burgundian army riding and walking into place: twenty thousand strong.
“I think that’s Olivier de la Marche’s banner on the right wing,” she pointed out to Rickard. The boy nodded jerkily. “And the mercenaries over on the left, and Charles’s own banner there – the heavy armoured centre. You should study heraldry. We could do with a better herald in the Lion Azure.”
His flaring black eyebrows dipped. “How many of them can fight, boss?”
“Hmm. Yes. That may be a better question than who’s a Raven and lion Couchant…” Ash felt her bowels rumble. “About two-thirds of them, I’d say. The rest are peasant levy and town militia.”
She shifted Godluc a few steps, leaning sideways, not able to see Angelotti now with the other master gunners, the Duke having decided to mass his serpentines15 in the centre.
“It’s dysentery,” she said firmly. “That’s why I keep wanting to shit myself. It’s dysentery.”
Geraint ab Morgan, moving to stand by her other stirrup, nodded. “That’s right, boss. Lot of it about this morning.”
With a gesture to her officers, Ash rode at a gentle pace up the slope of the hill and over the crest, her personal banner borne behind her by Robert Anselm; to where Euen Huw and his lance guarded the Lion Azure standard, in the centre of five hundred fighting men. The pommel of her sword tapped arrhythmically against her plackart as she rode. A faint moisture began to sting her bare face and uncovered hands.
