by Mary Gentle
In a siege, there is nowhere to flee to.
Angelotti added, “We should get Roberto and the men out.”
Ash turned back to Price. “There’s the three main gates into the city… Any sally-ports?”
Price nodded. “Yeah, my lads were looking at ’em when we were here in the summer. There’s about half a dozen postern gates, mostly over the east side. There’s two water-gates down this side, where they diverted the river through the town to the mills. You want us to sneak Master Anselm and the company out down a mill-race, boss?”
“That’s right, Sergeant.” Deadpan, Ash looked at him. “One at a time. It should take, oh, about three days, provided we do it in the dark, and nobody notices!”
John Price gave a short, choked laugh. He wiped his nose on the back of his sodden mitten. “Fair enough.”
She thought, I want to despise him for responding to so blatant a manipulation. A wry smile moved her mouth. But all I wish is that someone would do the same for my morale.
We are committed, that’s for sure.
Ash turned until she could see Angelotti’s dirty angelic features, as well as Price. Rickard hovered behind her, with Price’s men.
“Send the scouts out again.” Her voice dropped chill into the bitter air, warm breath turning to white mist as she spoke. “I need to know if the overall commander of the Visigoth forces is here, too. I need to know if the Faris is here at Dijon.”
“She will be,” Angelotti muttered. “If the Duke is.”
“I need to be sure!”
“Got you, boss,” Price said.
Ash squinted in the white light: a calculating look at the distant fires in the western camp of the Visigoth army. “Angeli, can you get one of your people up through the engineers’ camp to the walls without being noticed?”
“Not difficult, madonna. One gunner looks very like another, without livery.”
“Not a gunner. Find me a crossbowman. I want to send a message in over the walls. Tied to a crossbow bolt is as good a way as any.…”
“Geraint will object, madonna? To my telling his missile troops what to do?”
“Find me a man or woman that you trust.” Ash turned away from the valley. The ground squelched under her boots as she staggered back towards the cover of the waist-high soaking bracken, and the wet trees.
In memory – not in, never in, the silent recesses of her soul, now – in memory she hears the Wild Machines say ‘BURGUNDY MUST FALL!’ And a sardonic, quite different part of herself asks, How long do you plan to ignore this?
“Find me Geraint, and Father Faversham,” she ordered Rickard; waiting at the edge of the black depths of the wood. “Euen Huw, Thomas Rochester, Ludmilla Rostovnaya, Pieter Tyrrell. And Henri Brant, and Wat Rodway. Officer meeting, soon as we’re back at HQ. Okay, let’s go!”
Avoiding sodden branches, and keeping a footing on the rough ground and undergrowth, took all her attention, and she gladly surrendered herself to that necessity. Ten or so armed men lumbered up out of the bracken and briar, cursing at the wet darkness under the trees, and took up their places around Ash as she went. She heard them muttering about the fucking size of the fucking rag-head army, God love us; and the lack of game in the woods, not even a God-rotted squirrel.
The true wildwood, even in winter, would have been impassable; progress measured in yards, not leagues, per day. Here on the cultivated edges, where charcoal-burners and swine-herds lived, it was possible to move fairly quickly – or would have been, by daylight.
The sun! Ash thought; one hand on the shoulder of the man in front, one arm cocked up to shield her face, able to see nothing but blackness. Dear God, two months travelling in pitch-darkness, twenty-four hours a day: I hate the night, now!
A league or so away, they paused to light lanterns and went on more easily. Ash swatted a wet, leafless hornbeam branch out of her face, following the back of the man in front, a crossbowman, sergeant of Mowlett’s lance. His mud-drenched cloak swung in her vision, held down by the leather straps of belt, bag, and bolt-case. A twisted rag had been tied around his war-hat, above the brim; it might once have been yellow.
“John Burren.” She grinned, pushing her way through wet briar to walk beside him. “Well, what’s your men’s guess – how many rag-heads down there?”
He rasped, “A legion plus artillery. And a devil.”
That raised her brows. “‘Devil’?”
“She hears devil-machines, don’t she? Those damned things in the desert, like you showed us? That makes her a devil. Fucking bitch,” he added, without emphasis.
Ash staggered sideways in time to avoid a tree, looming black in the faint lamplight. Confronted by his broad back, she said wryly and on impulse, “I heard them too, John Burren.”
He looked over his shoulder, his expression in the darkness uncomfortable. “Yeah, but you’re the boss, boss. As for her… We all got bad blood in families.” He skidded, avoiding underbrush; regained his balance, and stifled the noise of a phlegmy sniff in his cupped hand. “And anyway, you didn’t need no voices at all to get us out of that ambush outside Genoa. So you don’t need ’em now, Lion or Wild Machine, do you, boss?”
Ash thumped him on the back. She found a smile creasing her mouth. Well, hey, how about that? I said I wanted someone to improve my morale…
Green Christ, I wish I thought he was right! I do need to ask the machina rei militaris. And I can’t. I mustn’t.
An hour travelling in the dark with lanterns brought them to the pickets and the muzzled, silenced dogs. They passed over the dug-trench-and-brushwood walls into the camp: two hundred men and their followers encamped under mature beech forest.
Most of the beech trees were already de-barked to above the height of a man’s reach, feeding the meagre fires that now gave the only light. The borders of a streamlet were trodden down into a wet, black slick. On the far side, Wat Rodway’s baggage-train helpers clustered around iron cook-pots on tripods. Ash, muddy and wet to the thigh, made first for the banked fires and accepted a bowl of pottage from one of the servers. She stood talking with the women there for a few minutes, laughing, as if nothing in the world could be a worry to her, before handing back a bowl scraped dry.
Angelotti, bright-eyed, huddled his cloak even more tightly around his lean shoulders and pushed in beside her, close to the flames. His face bore the mark of weeks on basic rations, but it did not seem to have depressed his spirits; if anything, there was an odd, reckless gaiety about him.
“Another one of Mowlett’s men has come back here before us, madonna. You could have spared yourself sending those other scouts – he has the answer to your question. Her livery’s been seen, and her person. The Faris is here.”
The blast of heat from a wind-blown flame of the campfire does not make her flinch: she is momentarily lost in memory of a woman who is nameless, whose name is her rank;6 whose face is the face that Ash sees in her mirror, but flawless, unscarred. Who is the overall military commander of perhaps thirty thousand Visigoth troops in Christendom. And who is more than that, although she may not know it.
“I’d have bet money on it. It’s where the Stone Golem will have told her to be.” Ash corrected herself: “Where the Wild Machines will have said, through the machina rei militaris, that they want her.”
“Madonna—”
“Ash!” Another figure shoved in beside Ash, through the press of people. Patches of firelight picked the woman out, the brown and green of her male dress: hose and cloak nearly invisible against mud, bare trees, stacked kindling-wood, and wet crumpled briar.
“I want a word with you,” Floria del Guiz demanded.
II
“Yeah, soon as I’m done here—” Ash wiped her mouth with her sleeve, chewing the crust of dark bread that Rickard shoved into her hand, sipping spring-water from a cup he thrust at her; eating on the move, as ever. She nodded abstractly to Florian, noting also, now, Rickard, Henri Brant, and two of the armourers, all waiting to speak to her
; and turned back to Angelotti.
“No,” Florian interrupted the group. “A word with you now. In my tent. Surgeon’s orders!”
“Y’okay…” The chill spring-water made Ash’s teeth ache. She swallowed down the bread, told Henri Brant and the other men briefly, “Clear it all with Angeli and Geraint Morgan!”, and nodded Rickard towards the warmth of the fires. She turned to speak to Floria del Guiz, to find the woman already striding away through the slopping leaf-mulch and mud and darkness.
“Flaming hell, woman! I’ve got stuff to set up before morning!”
The tall, skinny figure halted, looking over her shoulder. Night hid most of her. Firelight made an orange straggle of her hair, still no longer than a man’s, that curled at the level of her chin. She had obviously raked it back with muddy fingers at some point: brown streaks clotted the blond hairs, and her freckled cheekbones were smeared dark.
“Okay, I know you don’t bother me for no reason. What is it this time? More on the sick list?” Moving too fast, Ash skidded, and put her boot down in a pothole hidden in shadow. Her hose were wet enough that she scarcely felt the cold through the soaked leather.
“No. I told you: I want a word.”
Florian held up the flap of the surgeon’s tent, where it had with difficulty been pitched among the shallow roots of the beech trees. Canvas yawed and sagged alarmingly, shadow and reflected firelight shifting with the movement. Ash ducked, entering the dim, musty-smelling interior; and let her eyes adjust to the light of one of the last candles, set aside for the dispensary. The pallets on the earthen floor appeared empty.
“I’m out of St John’s Wort and witch hazel,” Florian said briskly, “and damn near out of gut for surgery. I’m not looking forward to tomorrow. I shan’t need you, deacon.”
She continued to hold the tent-flap up. One of her lay priests abandoned his mortar and pestle, and nodded to her as he scrambled out of the tent into the darkness. Nothing in his demeanour suggested he was in any way uncomfortable this close to a woman dressed as a man.
“There you are, Florian. Told you so.” Ash seated herself at one of the benches, leaning her elbows on the herb-preparation table. She looked up at the female surgeon in the half-light. “You sewed them up after Carthage – you went to Carthage with them, under fire. You’ve stuck with us all the way back. Far as the company’s concerned, it’s ‘we don’t care if she’s a dyke, she’s our dyke’.”
The woman slung her lean, long-legged body down on a wooden folding chair. Her expression was not clear in the candlelight. Her voice stung with bitterness. “Oh, no shit? Am I supposed to be pleased? How magnanimous of them!”
“Florian—”
“Maybe I should start saying the same about them: ‘so, they’re a bunch of muggers and rapists, but hey, they’re my—’ Hell! I’m not a … not a … company mascot!” Her hand hit the table, flat, making a loud crack in the cold tent. The yellow flame shifted with the movement of the air.
“Not quite fair,” Ash said mildly.
Florian’s clear green eyes reflected the light. Her voice calmed. “I must be catching your mood. What I meant to say was, if I took a woman into my tent, then we’d find out how much I’m ‘theirs’.”
“My mood?”
“We’re going to be fighting today or tomorrow.” Florian did not inflect it as a question. “This isn’t the right time to say this, but then, there may not be a right time later. We might both be dead. I’ve watched you, all the way here. You don’t talk, Ash. You haven’t talked since we left Carthage.”
“When was there time?” Ash realised she still held the wooden cup in her numb, cold fingers. There was no water left in it. “There any wine tucked away in here?”
“No. If there was, I’d be keeping it for the sick.”
Pupils dilating with night vision, Ash could make out Floria’s expression. Her bony, intelligent face had lines from bad diet and hard marching, but none of the marks of a surfeit of wine or beer. I haven’t seen her drunk in weeks, Ash thought.
“You haven’t been talking,” the other woman said deliberately, “since those things in the desert scared the living shit out of you.”
Cold tension knotted in her gut; released a pulse of fear that left her dizzy.
Florian added, “You were all right at the time. I watched you. Shock set in afterwards, when we were crossing the Med. And you’re still avoiding thinking about it now!”
“I hate defeats. We came so near to taking out the Stone Golem. All we’ve done is make sure they know they need to protect it.” Ash watched her own knuckles squeezing her wooden cup, trying to stop it rattling against the planks of the table. “I keep thinking that I should have done more. I could have.”
“Can’t keep re-fighting old battles.”
Ash shrugged. “I know there was a breach into House Leofric somewhere below ground-level – I’d seen his damn white rats escaped into the sewers! If I could have found the breach, maybe we could have got down to the sixth floor, maybe we could have taken out the Stone Golem, maybe now there’d be no way the Wild Machines could ever say anything to anyone again!”
“White rats? You didn’t tell me about this.” Florian leaned across the table. The candlelight threw her features into sharp relief: her expression intense, as if she pried into chinks in masonry. “Leofric – the lord who owns you? And owns the Faris, one supposes. The one whose house we were trying to knock down? Rats? ”
Ash put her other hand around the cup, looking down into the shadow inside it. It felt marginally warmer in the tent than in the forest, but she yearned for the scorching heat back at the bonfire.
“Lord-Amir Leofric doesn’t just breed slaves like me. He breeds rats. They’re not natural rat-colour. Those ones I saw had to mean the earthquake cracked House Leofric open underground. But, it might not have been the same quadrant of the House that has the Stone Golem in, it might not have been a wide enough breach to get men through…” She left it unfinished.
“‘Coulda, woulda, shoulda.’” Floria’s expression altered. “You told me about Godfrey in the middle of that fire-fight. Just, ‘he’s dead’. I haven’t had any more out of you since.”
Ash saw the darkness in the empty cup blur. It was quite genuinely several seconds before she realised tears were in her eyes.
“Godfrey died when the Citadel palace came down, in the earthquake.” Her voice gravel, sardonic, she added, “A rock fell on him. Even a priest’s luck has to run out, I suppose. Florian, we’re a mercenary company, people die.”
“I knew Godfrey for five years,” the woman mused. Ash heard her voice out of the candlelit darkness of the pre-dawn; did not look up to see her face.
“He changed, when he knew I was no man.” Florian coughed. “I wish he hadn’t; I could remember him with more charity now. But I only knew him a few years, Ash. You knew him for a decade, he was all the family you’ll ever have.”
Ash leaned back on her bench and met the woman’s gaze.
“Okay. The private word you wanted to have with me is: you don’t think I’ve grieved for Godfrey. Fine. I’ll do it when I have time.”
“You had time to go out with the scouts, instead of letting them report in like normal! That’s make-work, Ash!”
Anger, or perhaps fear of the immediate future, kicked in Ash’s belly, and came out as spite. “If you want to do something useful, grieve for your useless shit of a brother, instead – because no one else is going to!”
Florian’s mouth unexpectedly quirked. “Fernando may not be dead. You may not be a widow. You may still have a husband. With all his faults.”
There was no discernible pain in Floria’s expression. I can’t read her, Ash thought. There’s, what, five, ten years between us? It could be fifty!
Ash got her feet under her, pushing herself up from the table. The earth was slick under the soles of her boots. The tent smelled of mould and rot.
“Fernando did try to stand up for me in front of the King-Ca
liph… For all the good it did him. I didn’t see him after the roof fell in. Sorry, Florian. I thought this was something serious. I haven’t got time for this.”
She moved towards the tent-flap. Night air billowed the mildew-crusted canvas walls, shifted the light from the candle. Florian’s hand came up, and gripped her sleeve.
Ash looked at the long, muddy fingers knotting into the velvet of her demi-gown.
“I’ve watched you narrow down your vision.” Florian didn’t relax her grip on the cloth. “Yes, being that focused has got us across Christendom to here. It won’t keep you alive now. I’ve known you for five years, and I’ve watched how you look at everything before a fight. You’re…”
Florian’s fingers loosened, and she looked up, features in shadow, hair brilliant in the candle-shine; searching for words.
“For two months, you’ve been … closed in on yourself. Carthage scared you. The Wild Machines have scared you into not thinking! You have to start again. You’re going to miss things; opportunities, mistakes. You’re going to get people killed! You’re going to get yourself killed.”
After a second, Ash closed her hand over Florian’s, squeezing the chill fingers briefly. She sat down on the bench beside the surgeon, facing her. Momentarily, she dug at her brows with her fingers, grinding the flesh as if to release pressure.
“Yeah…” Some emotion crystallised; pushing to the forefront of her mind. “Yeah. This is like Auxonne; the night before the battle. Knowing you can’t avoid decisions any more. I need to get my shit together.” A memory tugged at her. “I was in this tent then, too, wasn’t I? Talking to you. I … always meant to apologise, and thank you for coming back to the company.”
