Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  “It’s been dark over Christendom for five months. We can be sure of one thing while we’re here. This weather isn’t going to get any better.”

  The effect of her words was immediately visible on the faces of the men around her. Ash contemplated some jovial or profane remark, caught sight of Thomas Rochester’s superstitious scowl, and changed her mind.

  “You keep one thing in mind,” she said, loudly enough to be heard over the gusting wind. “That’s one fuck of a big army out there. Soldiers, engines, guns; you name it. But we’ve still got one thing they haven’t.”

  Evidently regretting her unguarded remark, Florian provided the required question. “What have we got that they haven’t?”

  “A commander who isn’t cracking up.” Ash cast another glance up at the heavy bellies of the clouds, aware of the men-at-arms listening. “I saw her last night, Florian. Trust me. The woman’s going completely bug-fuck.”

  III

  The banner and escort moved forward, under the arch of the tower’s guard-wall.

  “Sorry,” Floria del Guiz murmured. “That was stupid of me.”

  Ash kept her tone equally low. “Let’s deal with current problems. We’re in here now. Now we worry about what happens next! You’re Burgundian – what’s this ‘siege council’ likely to be?”

  The woman frowned. “I don’t know. He didn’t mention the Duke?”

  “No. But no one except Duke Charles will be giving orders for the defence.” Ash huddled her cloak around her as they strode towards the tower entrance. “Unless he’s not here. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he did die at Auxonne, and they’re keeping it quiet. Shit… Florian, go talk to the physicians.”

  The tall woman nodded, said breathlessly: “If they’ll let me.”

  “You try it while I go to this ‘council’. We haven’t got much time. C’mon.”

  Over the arched main gate of the tower, a painted heraldry plaque bore the arms of an obscure Burgundian noble – obscure enough not to be here, Ash thought. Or maybe his household are up north, besieged in Ghent or Bruges?

  This situation is looking stickier by the minute.

  Loping from the courtyard up the steps to the first floor, she met Angelotti, Geraint ab Morgan and Euen Huw at the keep door.

  “We got everybody?” she questioned sharply. “Everybody inside, last night?”

  “Yes, boss,” Geraint nodded breathlessly.

  “Baggage train as well?”

  “All of them.”

  “Casualties? John Price’s lot?”

  Antonio Angelotti said, “We’re picking Price up tonight, after sunset. We have no one lost that we know of.”

  “Fucking hell, I don’t believe it!” Ash looked to Euen Huw. “Robert’s lot put in an attack, too, didn’t they? They all get back?”

  “Been checking ’em on the roll, boss, haven’t I? The attack force is here.”

  “And Anselm?”

  “He was leading it.” Euen’s unshaven face creased in a grin. “He’s upstairs, boss.”

  “Okay, let’s go. I’ve got to be at this damn ‘siege council’ in half an hour.”

  The inside of the keep was darker than the morning outside, but less chill. She nodded a brief greeting to the startled guards, loping with her officers up the steps as her sight adjusted to the lanterns. Rough grey masonry and brick lined the stairwell, bleakly strong. Walls fifteen or twenty feet thick, she gauged. Old, solid, undecorated, unsubtle.

  Behind her, she heard bill-shafts thumped against the flagstones; someone bawling “Ash!” as loudly as they called it on a field of battle.

  Guards pulled leather hangings back at the second floor entrance. She had one moment to take it all in: nothing but one hall, wooden-floored, as wide as the keep itself, stinking of humanity. Men and women crowded it, wall to wall. She rapidly identified faces – troops she has brought from Carthage – and saw no immediately apparent absences. There are men missing – casualties of Auxonne, but Rochester has warned her about them; and inevitably there will be some from the attrition of the siege.

  Nine dead at Carthage, a score of deserters on the way here; with what we’ve got in Dijon, are we four hundred, four-fifty strong? I’ll call a muster.

  “Ash!” Baggage-train officers not seen for months – bowyer, tailor, falconer, Master of Horse – jumped to their feet.

  Washerwomen hugged each other, talking; children scrambled about; two or three couples were industriously having sex. The floor was hidden under their new heaps of baggage rolls, wicker baskets, mail shirts in rusted heaps, bills propped up against the stark walls. Wet clothes hung from makeshift lines, steaming dry after immersion in the Suzon river. A fire smoked in the hearth. As, one by one, lance by lance, they saw the banner at the doorway, saw her, men and women scrambled to their feet, the sound of a ragged cheer battering back off the stone walls:

  “Ash! Ash! ASH!”

  “Okay, pack it in! ”

  A brace of mastiffs ran across the hall, splaying plates, cups and costrels aside in their enthusiasm.

  “Bonniau! Brifault! Down!” Ash neatly grabbed their studded collars, forcing the mastiffs down. They wriggled at her feet, growling happily, smelling of dog.

  Despite the lanterns, and the light from the arrow-slit windows, it was a second before she saw Robert Anselm stomping across the cluttered floor towards her. She was at the centre of a crowd in seconds: Anselm shouldered through them without effort.

  “Green fucking Christ up a Tree!” he snarled.

  Ash snapped her fingers, quieting the mastiffs.

  Three months – or hunger – had put lines in his face. Other than that, he was no different. His hose were torn at the knee, and his demi-gown had half its lead buttons ripped off; there was the glint of a mail standard at his throat. Stubble blackened his cheeks. His shaven head shone with sweat, despite the chill morning. She met his dark gaze.

  If he’s going to challenge my authority, now’s the time. It’s been his company for three months; I’ve been dead.

  “Fucking hell, woman!”

  At his tone, at his expression, she couldn’t help but laugh.

  “You wouldn’t like to try that again, would you, Roberto?”

  Euen Huw had his hand over his mouth; some of the others were openly grinning.

  “Fucking hell, Captain Ash.” Robert Anselm shook his head, bear-like, and for a second she did not know whether he was about to yell at her, attempt to hit her, or laugh. He reached out. His strong hands gripped her shoulders painfully hard. “Christ, girl, you took your time! Just like a bloody woman. Always late!”

  “Too right!” Ash, when the gale of laughter died down, added, “Sorry, I dragged it out as long as I could – I hoped the war’d be over before we got back here!”

  “Damn right!” one of the archers yelled.

  “We’ve been waiting three months.” The big man looked down at her with a familiar, amazed amusement. Robert Anselm, battered and broad-shouldered; the familiar rasp of his rosbif accent unbelievably welcome. “You’re getting a reputation. ‘Ash always comes back.’”

  “I like it. Let’s try and keep it that way,” Ash said sardonically. She looked at him, at the men around him, was aware of no friction yet between those who had gone to Carthage and those who had stayed in Dijon. “Find me one of the clerks. I need to write some retrospective commissions of array – Euen Huw and Thomas Rochester to be made sub-captains; Angelotti in overall charge of all missile troops as well as guns, Rostovnaya and Katherine as his subordinates to take over the crossbows and longbows.”

  There was a murmur of pleasure and approval. She kept her face bland when Geraint ab Morgan looked at her.

  “Geraint, I want you to take over as head of the provosts. I need a man I can trust to keep discipline in the camp.”

  Morgan’s face flushed with pride. “I’ll do that, boss, don’t you worry!”

  I won’t worry – not with you out of the combat line. Let’s keep you and y
our doubts where they can’t do any damage – and see if you can learn something about discipline while you’re enforcing it…

  “Robert, you’ll have your own recommendations for promotions with the guys here,” she added, “consider them okayed. Now we get our asses in gear, the city council want to talk to me, and I want an officer meeting before we go, Robert, what’s that?”

  She finished, breathless, staring at a horse.

  Snickers sounded from the men-at-arms; she could feel them grinning without looking at them. The ones that grinned were mainly the troops who had stayed in Dijon.

  “It’s a horse,” Robert Anselm said unnecessarily.

  “I can see it’s a fucking—” Ash took a quick glance under the beast, where it stood by one wall, head contentedly down in a feed-bag. “—a mare. What’s it doing here?”

  Robert Anselm lifted bland brows. A couple of the resident lance-leaders chuckled.

  Ash picked her way between people’s kit, across the dormitory floor, to the straw-strewn area liberally dotted with horse-dung that housed the large chestnut mare. The beast flickered a dark eye at her. “I’m not even going to ask how you persuaded it up the stairs…”

  “Blindfolded,” Anselm answered, striding up beside her. “We picked her up in the early hours of this morning.”

  “Robert – where from?”

  “The Visigoth horse lines.” The big man kept a straight face. “No one wanted her at the time. Even with this.”

  At his signal, a billman and a groom unfolded between them a filthy length of cloth. Horse caparisons, she saw. With the Brazen Head livery still visible through the filth.

  “Great Boar! That’s the Faris’s horse!”

  “Is it? Well, well. Who’d have guessed?” Anselm smiled down at her. “Welcome home.”

  Their pleasure was noisy, and extensive; and she gave way to it wholeheartedly. She slapped Robert Anselm on the arm. “Everything they ever said about mercenaries is true! We’re nothing but a bunch of horse-thieves!”

  “Takes talent to be a good horse-thief,” Euen Huw remarked professionally, and flushed. “Not that I’d know, see.”

  “Perish the thought…” Ash did not approach the mare too closely, reading war-horse in her conformation. “Where’s Digorie Paston?”

  “Here, ma’am.”

  As the clerk pushed his way to the front of the men, she said, “Digorie, write me a message. To the Faris. Have a herald take it down to the Visigoth camp. ‘Chestnut mare, thirteen hands, Barb blood, livery supplied – will exchange for one harness, Milanese plate, complete; and my bloody best sword!’”

  A roar.

  “I’ll take it!” Rickard emerged from the press of men, flushed.

  “Yeah, okay, you and Digorie, but I’ll need you for the council first. Take a parley flag. Don’t be cheeky, and wear a clean livery. She’ll be expecting a message from me—” Ash stopped, grinned cynically, and added: “—just not the one you’re taking her. Meanwhile…”

  She lifted her head, looking at her company.

  “Food,” she announced, pointedly.

  Within a few minutes, sitting on someone’s wicker rucksack, she was tearing dark bread apart with her teeth, greeting men and women not seen for twelve weeks, alert to any signs that they might now be two different companies. They sat or knelt around her, on the floor; the hall full to the point that the window embrasures were crowded with sitting men, swapping stories at full volume.

  “Is the Earl still out there?” Robert Anselm asked, squatting beside her.

  He smelled of wood-smoke condensed in confined quarters, eye-wateringly strong. Ash grinned at him through a mouthful of bread. “Oxford’s not in Burgundy as far as I know.”

  Anselm’s jerk of the head took in all the company occupying the hall. “If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t be here. He made it a retreat, not a rout. Four days back from Auxonne, all the Burgundian leaders dead or wounded, Oxford holding everybody together, step by step by step.”

  “With the rag-heads snapping at your ass all the way?”

  “Yeah. If we hadn’t held together as fighting units, they’d have wiped out the rest of the Burgundian army right there.” Anselm rubbed his hands together, and reached out for some of the bread. Through it, thickly, he added, “If not for de Vere, there wouldn’t be a siege going on here. All of south Burgundy would be overrun.”

  “The man’s a soldier.” Ash, aware that they were being listened to, said carefully, “As far as I know, and if he’s been lucky, my lord of Oxford is currently in the court of the Sultan at Constantinople.”

  Anselm sprayed wet crumbs. “He’s what?”

  Over a general murmur, Ash said, “Don’t bust your points. If Burgundy is weakening, now’s a good time for the Turks to hit the Visigoths. Before they get too strong. Make the rag-heads fight a war on two fronts.”

  “Make them the jam in the shit sandwich.”

  “Robert Anselm, you have a real way with words…”

  His brow furrowed. “How much chance of my lord Oxford getting Turkish help?”

  “God in His mercy knows, Robert. I don’t.” Ash made a rapid change of subject, jerking her thumb at the nearest window and the greying sky. She said briskly, “I see there’s a tilt-yard down the end there. Some of the lads could do with getting up to speed on weapons practice. After that hike, I’d like to give them a day or two training before we put them into the field.”

  Robert Anselm shook his head. “Boss, you didn’t see Auxonne.”

  “Not the end of it, no,” Ash remarked dryly. “What’s your point, Captain?”

  “As far as casualties are concerned, Auxonne was Agincourt and the Burgundians went down like the French.”7

  Blankly amazed, Ash said, “Fuck me.”

  “I’d be out with the Goths,” Anselm said grimly, “if I didn’t know what treatment the Lion Azure can expect. We got about a tenth left of the Duke’s army – between two and a half, three thousand men. And the city militia, for what they’re worth – I give ’em this: on their home ground, they’re determined. And we got an entire city wall to defend.”

  Ash looked at him in silence.

  “You brought back two hundred fighting men,” Robert Anselm said. “Girl, you don’t know how much of a difference two hundred men can make right now.”

  Ash raised silver brows. “Man, I thought I was popular! So that’s why this ‘siege council’ wants to talk to me.”

  “That and the fact that ‘Carthage fell down’,” Anselm completed her thought.

  Ash nodded, consideringly, and looked at the men around her.

  “Robert, I don’t know how much Angelotti and Geraint have told you—”

  “These new demon-machines in the south?”

  Warmed by his quickness, and by the lack of any alteration in the way he spoke to her, Ash nodded and moved closer to the hearth. There was a scurry of men-at-arms moving their kit out of the way; the escort sitting down on the floorboards a yard or two off, giving at least an illusion of privacy. Ash sat down on a joint stool, resting her elbows on her knees, and letting her cloak fall open to the fire’s warmth.

  “Sit down, Robert. There are things you need to hear from me.”

  He squatted beside her. “Are we staying?”

  It was blunt.

  “You came back for us,” Anselm elaborated. “What’s the options now, girl? Do we stick with this siege? Or try to negotiate a way out past the Visigoth lines?”

  “You saw what food we brought in, Robert. Fuck-all. It took a lot longer getting here than I’d bargained for… We’d have to negotiate with the Visigoths themselves for supplies, for a forced march. I know the Faris is anxious for a quick end to the siege. As for leaving here…” Ash turned her gaze away from the burning wood’s scarlet buttresses, on the hearth. She looked at Robert Anselm’s sweating face.

  “Robert, there’s stuff you need to know. About the ‘demon-machines’, yes; and the Stone Golem. About my si
ster, the Faris – and why she’s so damn determined to keep this crusade here in Burgundy.”

  Distant in her memory, her own voice asking a question comes to her: why Burgundy?

  She reached out; touched Robert Anselm’s dirty sleeve. “And about Godfrey Maximillian.”

  Anselm rubbed both bare hands back over his scalp; she heard stubble rasp.

  “Florian told me. He’s dead.”

  Aware suddenly of the three-month hiatus between them – aware that she may not know, yet, how Robert Anselm has changed, three months in command of his own men – Ash nodded, slowly.

  I could wait. Leave it; tell him later.

  We’re either one company, or we’re not. I either trust him, or I don’t. I have to risk it.

  “Godfrey’s dead,” she said, “but I’ve heard his voice, Roberto. Exactly the way I’ve always heard the Lion – the machina rei militaris. And – so has the Faris.”

  Some fifteen minutes later, Ash moved back into the main body of the hall.

  To Baldina, Henri Brant, and a woman called Hildegarde, a sutler who appeared to have stepped into Wat Rodway’s place in his absence from Dijon, she said, “How are we off for supplies, here?”

  “I’ve shown Henri the cellars, boss.” Hildegarde’s red face creased. “Town supplies aren’t good.”

  “They’re not? I thought they’d have a year’s supplies put by – they’ve had sieges here before.”

  Henri Brant said sardonically, “They had all of the Duke’s standing army billeted here for weeks before Auxonne. I’ve been checking – it’s bloodmonth, and they’ve had fuck-all to slaughter!8 They ate the place all but bare, boss.”

  Hildegarde put in, “But we won’t need to worry, will we? Not now the Goths are beaten.”

  “Beaten?” Ash exclaimed.

  The woman shrugged, a movement which strained the laces of her bodice. “Only a matter of time, my dear, isn’t it? With their demon-city fallen in bits about their ears. What’s their army to do? They’ll lift the siege before solstice.”

  By the nods of agreement around her, Hildegarde was not the only one of that opinion. Ash caught Floria’s eye, where the surgeon sat with her long legs sprawled out on the floor – and a rapidly emptying wine jug beside her.