Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  And ahead of her was open air.

  The wall of the Citadel – breached.

  Great basalt masonry gone, blocks at the edges hanging out into empty darkness – and she saw the sea beyond, the northern sea and the road home.

  House Leofric burned. Half of the side of the alley was nothing, now, except stone, rubble, beams, timbers, broken furniture, men in white robes screaming bloody, a woman in an iron collar coughing her guts into her skirt, a broken mosaic of the Boar and the Tree, exposed wood blackened and burning.

  “Take the ground floor! Secure the windows!” Ash bawled. Carracci nodded, running forward. Her hearing just began to come back, accompanied by a thin, high whistling.

  “We’re in!” Carracci: back at her side, grinning through dust-blackened sweat. “Geraint’s bowmen are at the courtyard windows! The arquebuses are there, too!”

  “Thomas Rochester, keep the perimeter! I’m going in!”

  Now is the time when you do not feel the restrictions of armour, the body, can do anything, buoyed up with the exhilaration of fighting. Euen Huw and his lance crowded shoulder to shoulder tightly round her: commander’s escort. Thomas Morgan dipped the pole of the Lion Azure banner as she strode forward, in the wake of the shouting mob of armed men, over the piled broken foundations of the wall, still hot and glowing with scraps of powder and burning fragments of cloth, into a great room with pavises now up at the shattered stone-lace windows, Geraint ab Morgan striding up and down behind the ranks of crossbowmen and arquebusiers; John de Vere at the head of the soldiers fighting—

  That was over as she looked: a dozen or more men in white robes and mail cut down, one doubled over de Vere’s blade, his guts spilling out pink on the mosaic floor; Carracci bringing his bill straight down on a nazir’s helmet, shearing the metal wide open, the man collapsing like a dropped stone. No prisoners.

  Another nazir lay at her feet, his mouth full of blood, dead or unconscious.

  For the first time in combat, Ash found herself looking to see if she knew an enemy’s face: she did not.

  Her ears hurt, badly. The Earl of Oxford shouted something, his bright steel arm lifting; and a unit, two dozen or more men, thundered across the room and took positions either side of the door.

  “Stairs!” Ash yelled, coming up with de Vere, and footsteps on the roof above made her glance up, once. “Stairwell, beyond that door!”

  “Where is the master gunner?”

  “Angelotti! ”

  The Italian gunner came over rubble at a run, more men with torches behind him. Ash stared around the broken stone cavern that had been a room, hangings still on fire, floor slippery with blood and excrement.

  “Grenades!”

  “Coming up!”

  “Get back from the door!” Ash yelled; and gauged it – a stone slab, of antique design, that slides on metal rollers. It will keep the blast in. “Go!”

  A dozen of the company’s gun-crew piled in, de Vere urging the billmen to pull back the stone door; a dozen crossbowmen covering the entrance, and Ash felt a hand on her breastplate push her sharply back.

  A shower of bolts shot up through the open door – from the stairs below, by angle – and she ducked her head automatically, grinning at Euen Huw. A runner from Geraint at the far side reached her at the same time as Dickon de Vere thumped down at her other side.

  “Courtyard’s clear!” the runner bawled.

  She risked a glance – dust, rubble; and beyond the stone windows, on the tiles by the fountain, two or three sprawled men in mail and white surcoats. Stone window frames spurted dust with the impact of black-fletched arrows. A nazir screeched orders and pain from across the great inner yard.

  “Keep it that way! Don’t waste bolts! We have to get out of here, too. Dickon?”

  “The door on the far side of the stairwell is open, they are firing from the far side of that room!”

  “Well, fuck subtlety,” Ash said – teeth white in a blackened face, an appalling flat grin on her face, her voice hoarse, her ears singing, her face frozen by the wind whipping dust across the broken room, where there is no longer a city wall to obstruct it – “Fuck subtlety, chuck in the grenades! And shut the fucking door!”

  Angelotti bellowed. His crews lit fuses, and rolled the sputtering casks across the floor and into the stairwell. De Vere put his shoulder to the stone door with her men: all shoving.

  The metal rollers screamed and stuck.

  The door jammed, three-quarters open.

  Ash yelled, “DOWN!” in a voice that ripped her throat, and fell flat on to sharp, sticky rubble.

  Boom!

  The semi-muffled blast lifted her, bodily, she felt it. Two more followed, on the heels of the first; Euen Huw in his padded jack almost suffocated her, where he sprawled across her armoured back, and then she was up on her feet, the Welshman beside her; her and his lance scrambling across the room, the archers swearing loudly and getting up from below the windows, John de Vere and the three lances with him standing up, one screaming man being bandaged by Floria, her face dirty, intent, utterly concentrated; and Ash ran to the end of the jammed door.

  “DUMB BITCH!” Euen Huw screamed in her ear.

  “Someone’s got to do it!”

  Riding adrenalin, bubbling laughter behind the metal bevor that protects her mouth, body in metal plate that digs and restricts, she hurtled through the gap between door and wall, out on to the pie-shaped step in the stairwell, into blackness lit by flaring torches from the room opposite and a man charging out straight at her.

  She registers that it is someone wearing an acorn-shaped helmet, mail hauberk, flowing robes, and with a sword lifted up. It is a snapshot recognition of an enemy silhouette. She is already moving, swinging her sword up in a two-handed grip, bringing it over her head; her shoulder-muscles forcing the metal to whip over in a tight arc and slice down, smack, on his upraised arm.

  Her blade doesn’t slice mail: riveted links absorb the edge’s cut. But under the arm of his hauberk, smashed back with the power of her blow, his elbow-joint shatters at the impact.

  “Aahh—!” His piercing-high scream: pain, rage?

  Anyone with him? Behind him?

  Jarred through mail gauntlets and armour, Ash whips her blade down, through, and up again: over and down – no split-second hesitation between the blows: she hits the man hard on the junction between his helmet and his falling arm, stopped by the mail between neck and shoulder.

  “Uhhnh!”

  Hits him again—

  “Uhh! Uhhnh! Uhhh!”

  —and again, and again, grunting uncontrollably, putting him down with ferocity and speed; he falls down on the floor, long before she stops striking; ready for the man behind him—

  No one.

  Her breastplate drips, red running thinly over mirror-polished steel. The bottom edge of the steel is cutting painfully into her hipbone.

  A snapshot apprehension of dust, smoke, silence in the far room, every nerve shrieking with alertness—

  Thomas Morgan stumbled into her shoulder, bearing her banner, shouting: “Haro! The lion!”

  Euen Huw’s wiry body tried to shove her aside, at the head of the men of his lance: it ended with both of them stumbling into the far wall together, to a raucous cheer from Geraint’s archers.

  Nothing else moving, nobody—

  An empty room opposite, empty platform, no one running up the stone stairs—

  The powder-blackened walls of the stairwell dripped.

  Ash stopped, a fierce smile on her face.

  Her stomach heaved dryly at the hot smell of burned flesh.

  There had been a squad running up the stairs at precisely the wrong moment. One man’s arm, blown clear off, lay at her feet, ragged and bleeding from the white knob of the shoulder-joint, sword still gripped in the hand. A heap of men lay tangled midway down the clockwise curve of the stairs. As dead men always do, they looked like men sprawling in a heap, splashed with red limewash or dye, their s
words and bows dropped any old how. But arms do not bend at that angle, legs do not lie under bodies that way; and a blackened, fried face stared up at Ash through the dust: Theudibert, Nazir Theudibert; no point in looking at the faces of the men with him, his eight, no point now.

  She looked, all the same. Gaiseric and Barbas and Gaina, young men, boys not much older than she is. Their faces are recognisable, although Gaiseric’s helmet, blown off by the blast, has taken a large part of his jawbone with it. Barbas’s open eye reflects the greasy light of torches: Euen’s men, behind her, with Rochester’s lance, Ned Mowlett, Henri de Tréville; their men stomping in.

  Gladness sears through her: rich, amoral, vengeful, entirely of the moment.

  “Clear! ” Ash screamed. Her escort pulled her back; men charged across the stairs into the room on the opposite side.

  The Visigoth soldier she has killed is dragged bodily by one arm and thrown against the wall, out of the way.

  She tried to see his face, in the dim light. She remembers many of the men she has seen in Leofric’s household. This man is unrecognisable, a little soft brown hair poking out from under the lining of his helmet. Two slashes from her edge have chopped his face apart from temple to cheekbone, eye to mouth.

  She remembers almost all the faces of the men she has killed, in five years.

  “Block the doors!” Ash shouted, voice pitched brazen-high to carry through the clamour. “Bottle them up! Don’t lose it, guys! We don’t need to kill them! Take the stairs!”

  She took two steps back, as the mass of men went past her, seeing nothing but torchlight on armoured backs, swords and maces over their heads, no room in here for polearms; and she stepped back again, her chest heaving, breath forcing itself raggedly into her lungs, finding herself beside John de Vere, giving brisk orders to a runner from the perimeter.

  “Skirmish at the gate, madam!”

  She could not read his mouth, with his bevor up; she could just hear him if she thumbed up one side of her helmet.

  “Which gate?”

  “Citadel! Some amir’s house-guard, fifty men or more.”

  “Can we still get out that way?”

  “We’re holding!”

  Defence is easier than attack: the gate can probably hold. If her men don’t lose heart. More explosions rocked the lower part of the building, echoing hollowly up the stairwell. Taking the next floor down.

  Ash turned, Euen’s men with her. Thomas Morgan swore under his breath as the top of the banner caught against the shattered vaulting of the ceiling:

  “Other commanders fucking stay still! Other commanders don’t fucking charge up and down the fucking field of battle!”

  “Follow me!” She went through the door again, hearing the sound of hammering and banging even with her deafened ears. The mass of armed men had gone through and down the stairs. Angelotti stood, shouting orders.

  A dozen of the gun-crew, with mauls, knocked shards of splintered timber under the doors, jamming closed the doors to every room opening on to the stairwell.

  “Well done!” Ash walloped the shoulder of his padded jack. “Keep doing it! Follow them down!”

  “Yes, madonna! The bang – bellissima! ”

  Ash stepped over Theudibert’s stained, burned legs. Her escort trod indiscriminately on the body until Euen Huw cursed and kicked it sideways on the steps.

  But it is bellissima, she thought, staring into the dead man’s face. It is bellissima, too. like Godfrey says – said. Fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners.6

  With Morgan cursing at getting the banner down the narrow stairwell, and runners pelting up and down the stairs towards her, it took her long minutes to get down to the next floor. Sounds of shrieking voices and slicing metal echoed up from below.

  Two men in Lion livery lay across one threshold, hacked about the face and stomach: Katherine, Ludmilla’s lance-mate; and big Jean the Breton.

  Ash knelt down. Jean moved, whimpering. Katherine Hammell opened white eyes in a blood-drenched face; moved one hand to touch her belly, and the half-slashed but still effective protection of her jack.

  “Get them upstairs! Move it!” She rattled on past, the clatter of tassets loud in the enclosing stone; four of her escort splitting off to carry the wounded.

  Angelotti’s door-team overtook her, running down the steps with complete disregard for safety, hammering rough wedges in as the foot-soldiers hacked arms and hands from doorframes, crossbows shot up rooms, and stone slabs slid shut.

  The grenades had chipped the edges of the worn steps, and twice her feet slid out from under her; both times she was grabbed and set back on the steps, and they pelted on down.

  Counting floors, Ash thought: Four? Yes. We’re four floors down. Shit, too easy, even if they don’t have all their forces here, too easy! We’re not seeing anybody! Where are Alderic’s men—?

  A gust of hot air whooshed into her face.

  Hot as fire: blasting her unprotected skin and eyes.

  “Stop!” She thwacked Euen across the breastplate to halt him, shoved up her visor, stood listening.

  Something teased at her hearing. She frowned, looked questioning at Euen, who shook his head. A sliding, crackling noise.

  Boom!

  Thirty feet below her, a great number of voices suddenly screamed.

  The sound howled up the stone shaft. Over it, she heard the sound of creaking, breaking wood; and a hollow roar of flames.

  “Shit!” Ash gripped the hilt of her sword and ran down the curving steps.

  “Boss, stop!”

  One boot heel slipped. She grabbed for the wall with her free hand, ripping the leather palm of her mail mitten, and skidded to a stop on her arse on the next pie-shaped big step with a room opening off it. Fifth floor down.

  There was nothing beyond.

  “Carracci?” Ash shouted.

  At the rim of the step, ahead, was darkness. Empty darkness.

  She stood up and limped across to it, for once careless of the door at her back; and heard a clatter of boots as Euen’s men moved in, and ignored them, ignored them, because what was in front of her was nothing, nothing at all.

  The stone stairs ended where she stood. She was looking down a sheer masonry drop into blackness, where flames flickered, stirred…

  Furnace-hot air shrieked up from below. She clamped her hand over her mouth, leaning forward, looking down. Light flared.

  “Shit,” Euen Huw breathed at her side.

  “Pity of Christ!”

  The stairwell went on down, a slick-walled empty stone shaft fifteen feet across. At the bottom, fierce flames roared up among a great mass of tangled ropes, planks, beams, and splintered wood.

  Black against the fire at the bottom of the shaft, fallen men writhed and screamed.

  “Get ropes! Get scaling ladders! Get them down here! GO!”

  Sick-faced, Euen Huw turned around and pelted back up the stairs.

  Ash stayed quite still, looking down at men in mail shirts and padded jacks and helmets, who had plainly fallen fifty or sixty feet straight down. And not down on to stone, but on to the collapsed wreckage of stairs.

  Deliberately collapsed. The stairs for these last two floors weren’t stone. They were wood—

  Ash knelt, reached down at the side of the shaft, finding what she expected: a hole in the masonry big enough to socket a wooden beam, which would support wooden stairs.

  Which can be brought down, tripped, collapsed, whenever an enemy gets in.

  The sounds of screaming echoed up from below, and the roar of fire.

  “A bolt-hole shaft,” Ash said, and became aware it was the Earl of Oxford, panting, standing beside her and staring down, his expression blankly fierce. She stepped to one side to let the men with rope ladders through. “That’s where they are. Alderic, the household troops, Leofric if he made it.”

  “They collapsed the stairs and fired them, with our people on them.” John de Vere knelt, constraine
d by his leg armour, staring over the edge into bitter blackness and flames. “And now they will have barricaded every door down there, and it will take more than powder to get through.”

  “More powder than we have,” Antonio Angelotti said, beside her. His eyes were brilliant in his blackened face: wet.

  “Shit!” She smashed her mailed fist into the wall. “Shit. Shit!”

  “Out of the way!” a low-pitched, ragged voice ordered.

  Ash stepped back again, letting Floria pass her, which the woman did without a look; merely ordering Faversham and a lance of men to help her carry up two bodies, which the ladders had brought up. Carracci was one, helmet gone, screaming. His high-coloured face and white-blond hair all one colour now: burned black.

  “Pity of Christ,” Ash said again, her face wet and her voice shaking; and then she straightened, walked to the edge, and looked down at the men on the ladders, dangling over fire, desperately trying to get within reach of the broken bodies of the fallen.

  Superheated air breathed across her face.

  “Back up the ladders!”

  “Boss—”

  “I said pull out! Now! ”

  As the last man came up, flames licked at his heels, soaring up.

  Black smoke and panic filled the shaft.

  Coughing, tears streaming down her face, Ash began to push and shove men up the stairs, Morgan with her with the banner, Euen’s men at her side; John de Vere grabbing men and throwing them up the steps, climbing, climbing in searingly hot air and soot, until she staggered out last across a stone threshold and out into air cold by contrast – the ground floor room of House Leofric, open to the sky.

  “They have air-shafts!” Ash bit back a fit of coughing. “Air-shafts! They can feed the fire! Turn the whole thing into a chimney!”

  Someone put a leather flask to her mouth. She gulped water, stopped, coughed it back up again, her mouth bitter with bile. Another mouthful; this one swallowed.

  “You okay, boss?” Euen Huw demanded.

  She nodded abruptly. Heads were turning, at the defended windows, the other doors, the arquebusiers poised to shoot up into the shattered roof. To the Earl of Oxford, she yelled, “They’ve turned it into a chimney! We haven’t got time to wait for the fire to burn out, there’s too much timber down there!”