by Mary Gentle
And then she moved, put her other fist on her hip, to be recognisably their Ash, Captain Ash, condottiere: a woman unlawfully dressed as a man, in doublet and hose, hair cut short as a serf’s, face gaunt with hunger and pain, but with a shining grin that lit up her eyes.
“It’s the boss!” Thomas Morgan called, his voice shaky.
“ASH!”
She couldn’t tell who shouted: they were all moving by then, careless of the armed household a few yards away; men running, shouting the news to their lance-mates, Angelotti reaching her first, tears streaming down his powder-black features, throwing his arms around her; Floria shoving him bodily aside to grab her arms, stare into her face, all questions; and then a throng: Henri de Tréville, Ludmilla Rostovnaya, Dickon Stour, Pieter Tyrrell, and Thomas Rochester with the Lion banner, Geraint ab Morgan in deep-voiced Welsh amazement: all piling on to her, mailed hands thumping her back, voices shouting, everyone too loud for her to make herself heard:
“Shit, look what happens to you motherfuckers when I leave you alone for five minutes! Where the fuck is Roberto?”
“Dijon!” Floria, a tall dirty-faced man to all appearances, grabbed at her arm. “Is it you? You look older. Your hair— You’ve been prisoner here? You escaped?” And at Ash’s nod of agreement: “Our Lady! You didn’t have to walk back in on this. You could have walked away. One man could make it out of here alone—”
She’s right. Ash felt a startled realisation. I stood a much better chance of slipping away alone. I didn’t have to come up this street and put myself in the middle of a – very small – bunch of armed lunatics.
But it didn’t occur to me not to.
There was no regret in her mind, not even wonder; all the amazement was on Floria’s face. The disguised woman surgeon touched Ash’s cold, scarred cheek. “Why would I expect anything different? Welcome to the madhouse!”
I’ll tell her about Godfrey later, Ash decided; and lifted her head and looked around at the circle of faces, the men sweating despite the chill air, weapons unsheathed, two men further away climbing down from a high wall.
“Get me my officers!”
“Yes, boss!” Morgan ran.
We’re in one of the alleys that run around three sides of House Leofric to the end of the cliff, Ash thought with a minute and detailed realisation. The fourth side is the Citadel wall itself.
She looked down the cross-alley.
I am looking north. To the Citadel wall. Over that wall – and a fucking long way down – is Carthage harbour.
In the torch and lantern light she cannot be sure: there may be a glow beyond the wall, and noise, far down below.
“Geraint!” She grinned up at Geraint ab Morgan as he pelted back from the barrier of pavises, slapping his shoulder.
“Fuck, it is you!”
“Got us here by sea, did you? I assume we have ships? How are you enjoying foreign travel to the Eternal Twilight, Geraint?”
“Hate it!” Her big-shouldered captain of archers grinned at her, half sardonic, all amazed. “Not me, boss, I didn’t do this! I get seasick, see.”
“Seasick?”
“’S why I’m an archer. Not a wool merchant like my family. I used to leave meals with the fishes all the way from Bristol to Bruges.” Geraint ab Morgan wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. “And all the way across from Marseilles to here in those fucking galleys. I just hope it’s worth it. Rich, is he, your father?”
A group of her men ran over with pavises, and she dropped to one knee behind the temporary shelter as her other officers ran up. Ash buckled her sallet back on, staring at the gates of House Leofric: fifty yards along the alley ahead, blasted by two – or three? – cannon shot, but still intact. Need more guns.
“Leofric’s not my father. He is rich. But we’ll be travelling light, so keep it to the easy, portable bits of loot – got it?”
“Got it, boss. Oh yes.”
Ash made a mental note to search Geraint on the way back to whatever ships there might be.
“How the fuck did you guys get here?”
“Venetian galleys,” Antonio Angelotti said, at her ear; and when she looked at him, his angelic lashes lowered over amused eyes: “My lord Oxford found us a pair of Venetian captains who survived the burning of the Republic. There is nothing they would not do, to harm Carthage.”
“Where are they?”
“Moored ten miles west of here, along the coast. We came in disguised as a wagon-caravan from Alexandria. I thought – we thought they might have taken you, after Auxonne. There were rumours you were in Carthage.”
“No shit? For once, rumour’s right.”
The expectation was less marked on Angelotti’s face, but it was there all the same in his eyes, as it was in all the eyes watching her. A trust, an expectation. Ash felt fear pang in the pit of her belly again, crouching behind the flimsy shields.
Down to me. We got to do this and get out – or just get out – or we’re all dead. However many of them are here, they’re dead men if I can’t get them out. And they expect me to do it. They’ve expected it for five years now.
My responsibility. Even if de Vere brought them in.
The freezing winds from the southern desert moved across her face, bringing a faint sound of shouting and panic-stricken confusion up from the centre of the Citadel. Nothing moving here in this broken place. Where is Leofric, where are his men? Where are the King-Caliph’s men? What’s happening here?
“Right,” Ash said. “Somebody find me some armour! That fits. And a sword! My lord de Vere, I want a word with you,” and she stood and stepped forward to meet the Earl of Oxford as he ran up, taking his steel-clad arm and steering him a few steps in close under the walls, no murder-holes above, and the angle too steep to be shot at.
A scream and a crunch came from somewhere along the alley, and a loud cheer.
“Got ’im!”
“Fucking rag-head!”
“’Ave that from the fucking Franks, why don’t you?”
“Madam,” John de Vere said.
Ash looked up at the English Earl in a mutual amazement. His faded blue eyes crinkled as if against bright light or in amusement. His steel armour was covered by de Vere livery, brilliant scarlet and yellow and white in lantern light. Under the pushed-up visor of his sallet, his face was fair, dirty, lined, and bright with the excitement of a much younger man.
Boom!
The sound stabbed her ears. Even through helmet-padding it hurt. Every bit of loose mortar and stone dust on the walls fell down into the alley, showering her livery jacket and doublet shoulders; every bit of debris on the quake-damaged cobbles leaped up, making her eyes sting.
“Captain Ash,” John de Vere spoke loudly over the cascade of sounds after Angelotti’s cannon-fire. His tone sounded businesslike, or, if not quite that, pragmatic at least. No surprise at her presence. He pointed over her head towards the massive Citadel wall: a twenty-foot-high blank end to the alley to her right. “The rest of the guns are on their way in.”
She fell back into habit: brief questions, to the point. “How are you getting men and artillery up here?”
“Along the top of the wall. This wall, that encloses the Citadel. It’s wide enough for patrols, so I’m using it. All the streets are choked.”
John de Vere’s pointing hand shone, encased in delicate Gothic fluted gauntlets, the lantern light picking out the lace-pattern of pierced metal on cuffs and knuckles. Ash found herself thinking, He’s come here in all his riches, but in armour light enough for manoeuvre in these bloody tight alleys; I’ve seen none of my men wearing more than breast, back and leg armour, no spaulders and pauldrons,3 he may be mad but he knows what he’s doing.
“What about the gate between the Citadel and Carthage itself?”
“Madam, I have men holding that gate, ready, and also Carthage’s south gate on the landward side – we have perhaps an hour, if God and Fortune favour us, to raid and run.”
Thomas Mor
gan and the billman Carracci trotted up; and an armourer’s apprentice who stared as he knocked out the rivet and removed her steel slave’s collar. Ash stretched out her arms while they stripped off her livery and doublet, pointed on some young man’s arming doublet – a trifle tight across the chest, but with reassuring panels of mail sewn in at armpits and shoulders – and set about pointing and strapping someone else’s breastplate and backplate on over it.
They did not fit her. Stationary defence only, she thought. No running around.
“Get you leg armour in a second, boss,” Carracci promised.
Ash sucked in her breath as the metal shell locked home and Thomas Morgan pulled the straps tight. She rapped her knuckles against the plackart riveted to the breastplate. Protection. Carracci knelt to buckle tassets on to the lower lames of the fauld.4
Her mouth curved up, in a smile she couldn’t conceal. “Knee cops,5 if you can’t find anything else. Some fucking rag-head did my knee in at Auxonne.”
“Sure, boss!” Carracci took an archer’s falchion and sword-belt from Thomas Rochester: the dark Englishman now kneeling to help him buckle them around her armoured waist.
Ash turned her head to speak to John de Vere, yanking on the mail gauntlets again. “You’re here for the Stone Golem. Have to be. Fuck, this is a suicide raid, my lord!”
“Madam, it need not be; and we are in such straits, in the north, that she must be stopped in some way.”
“How are you going in?”
“By main force – take this House, and search it from roof to cellars.”
“That’s easier said than done. You know what it’s like in these places?”
“No—”
John de Vere broke off to shout to his brother Dickon; the young knight strode away down the right-hand alley to where, in lantern light, scaling ladders were visible at the foot of the Citadel’s enclosing wall, and dark heads silhouetted the skyline above it, in a furious bustle of activity.
“I’m going up there,” Ash stated. “I need to get my bearings. Did you start this raid before the quake, my lord, or after it?”
“It was a happy accident.”
“A happy—!” Ash snorted, despite herself.
Rope-and-wood ladders hung from their scaling hooks on the parapet, twenty feet above her head. She reached up, had one terrifying moment when her arms seemed too weak to pull her up – Christ, I’ve rested, I can’t be sick now! – and then she found her footing, powerful leg-muscles pushing her up, swaying in the winter-dark air, reaching up to hands at the parapet and the muttered oaths from men who didn’t recognise her in borrowed armour.
A row of pavises, broken doors, and splintered beams made a temporary barricade across the wall. Further along was bare. On the higher front of House Leofric, that overlooked that stretch of wall, she glimpsed the flash of light from Visigoth steel helmets, and from the heads of arrows: the amir’s soldiers able to lay down a withering fire if they went forward of this position.
“Francis; Willem!” She greeted her crossbowman and lance-leader. “What’s it like at the Citadel gate?”
“Fuck,” Willem muttered.
The two men stared at her, frozen, holding a solid oaken cask between them. The bowman, Francis, abruptly coughed, spat, and said, wonderingly, “Couple of skirmishes, boss. There’s nobody really down there right now. Everybody’s running around like a bitch in heat because of the quake damage.”
“Let’s hope it stays like that. Okay, get shifting!”
“Boss—” The crossbowman gave up, shaking his head, but with a wide grin. He turned back as other men came running up with casks. “Here! She’s back—!”
Up here, on the roof of the city, out of the sheltering alleys, the bitter wind sheared across Ash’s face, under her visor, and tears sprang into her eyes. She was instantly frozen. She ran, half-crouching, to the harbour-facing side of the city wall, glancing out into the black depths.
John de Vere went back to the ladders, shouted down, took something, and came across to her, holding a thick woollen cloak which he thrust at her. “Madam, take this. I’ve had your people coming into the city disguised for the last three days. They are God’s own bastards and a joy to lead. I had the raid planned for a later hour, but this—” A stark gaze around, at the broken roof-lines of the inner city, at tumbled walls and blocked alleys: “This was an opportunity not to be refused. Will you take command again under me, madam? Are you well enough to do so?”
Ash glanced up at the sky. Nothing to give her the hour. Maybe thirty minutes since she had emerged from the sewers? No more.
The cold at least kept some of the stink out of her nostrils; she doubted the others, with a stench of powder and killing on them, had even noticed it.
“Who else of my officers is here? And where the fuck are the others?”
“This is but half your full company. By Duke Charles’s command, Master Robert Anselm stays in Dijon, with two hundred men, keeping up the defence against the Gothic forces; his last message reached me a week since. They hold out.”
“Robert’s—” Safe. Alive. “They’re alive!”
Or, they were, a week ago.
Sod it, they’re alive still, I know they are! I know them.
Her eyes filled up with tears.
“Son of a bitch!” Ash said weakly. “I might have known. It takes more than a bunch of rag-heads to finish these arseholes off. Sweet Christ, I should’ve trusted them for that!”
“You had no word?” the Earl said.
“None: and I was lied to, told we were all dead on Auxonne field!”
“Then I am glad to bring you this news.” John de Vere smiled, one ear cocked to the shouting and clamour below. “And if I had a better thing, I would have brought it to you with as good a heart. Your people sorely felt your loss.”
“I didn’t know—” Ash swallowed, her throat tightening. She felt herself grin. “Shit. They made it? You’re sure they made it? When you left, they were okay? Robert’s okay?”
“Inside the walls of Dijon, and like to hold out, I think. The news of its fall would have been heard, madam. They have Charles within the walls, also, and the capture of a Duke, or his death, would have been shouted abroad. Now.” De Vere reached out and gripped her forearms in his gauntlets. “We must take counsel together.”
When you wake up on a runaway wagon, you either grab the reins, or you jump off. One or the other.
Dozens of men on the wall now, heaving weapons and crates down the scaling ladders, into the alleys; and all of them detouring past Ash as they ran back and forth, staring, calling it’s her, it is her, receiving her nods of acknowledgement; running with a new fervour, excitement, joy.
“Bugger counsel!” Ash said. “We go or we fight. Now—”
Perhaps an hour, now, from the moment of the quake. The sense grows in her of a clock, ticking, ticking away time in which the overturned hive of Carthage might recover, regroup, begin to send troops out of the fortress-houses of the inner city and into the streets and alleys. To discover Frankish cannon-fire.
“They won’t have heard us yet. Or they’ll think it’s just some amir or other taking advantage of the confusion to do in old enemies—”
BOOM!
“Shit! ” Ash grabbed the stone parapet. The violence of the sound jabbed into her eardrums. One of Angelotti’s cannon exploded? she thought, about to run to that side of the wall; and then a flare of light bloomed on the night’s darkness, towering up, rising from the harbour below.
“That,” the Earl of Oxford directed her attention, “will be Viscount Beaumont.”
The pillar of fire rose up, illuminating the cliff below Ash, shining red light across the inner harbour of Carthage. Smoke, flames: and at the foot of the towering conflagration, a great Visigoth war-galley, burning – burning to the water line.
She gripped the stone and leaned over, staring down at black water, ice. Fierce crackling flames billowed up, fork-tongued: stabbing up into darkness. By t
heir immense light she saw other ships, a whole harbour full of vulnerable, inflammable wood, rope, cord, cargo. Another curl of flame suddenly ripped the night air, racing up the masts of a merchant cog, spidering out along the yardarms, wisping ropes into so much ash on the cold wind.
Two ships now on fire. Three. Four. And over there—
Ash squinted, tears running down her frozen cheeks from the wind, at the roofs of warehouses across the inlet. She unconsciously hauled the cloak around her shoulders and knotted the ties. Warehouses, with forked curls of flame flickering up from their roofs and upper granary stores—
Another sudden noise came on the wind, as if the explosion had been a signal. Noise blown from the west, from the main part of Carthage town that lay over the next headland. She could not distinguish if it were fire or voices.
“And that will be my brothers, Tom and George,” the Earl of Oxford added. “The King-Caliph brings in a lot of cattle, Captain. Thousands of head, to feed all Carthage, where nothing may graze. George and Tom will, I trust, have taken and stampeded the stock market…”
“The stock—” Ash wiped her streaming nose. She choked back a laugh. “My lord!”
“Streets full of maddened cattle, in these ruins, should spread more confusion.” De Vere added thoughtfully, “I wanted to fire the naphtha plant too, but that would be too well-guarded, and I could gain no solid information as to where it is sited.”
“No, my lord.” You’re a fucking maniac, my lord. In her mind’s eye: tremor-ravaged buildings, running men, women, wild-horned beasts, fire, injury, death, utter confusion. Utter effective confusion. “How many of us are with you?”
“Two hundred and fifty. Galley-crews back at the ships. Fifty men on this Citadel gate, fifty holding the south gate where the aqueducts come into the city. Above one hundred here, light armour, close-combat weapons, and light guns; crossbows and arquebuses.”
