by Mary Gentle
“As the deputy of the Duke,” Olivier de la Marche said without preamble, “I welcome the hero of Carthage into our company. Demoiselle-Captain Ash, we bid you and your men welcome. Welcome!”
De la Marche bowed, formally, to her.
“The—” Ash kept her face expressionless with an effort. Hero of Carthage! She returned the bow; awkward; as ever, not knowing whether a curtsey would have been better. “Thank you, my lord.”
Seats towards at the head of the table were rapidly vacated. She sat down, muttering under her breath to her officers, “‘Hero’ of Carthage? ‘Hero’!”
Robert Anselm’s grim face looked twenty years younger as he snuffled back a laugh. “Don’t ask me. God only knows what rumours have been spread here!”
“Inaccurate ones, madonna!” Angelotti said softly.
Ash finally grinned. “So. A hero, by accident. Well – that makes up for the dozens of utterly splendid things I’ve done that nobody ever noticed!” She sobered. “Trouble with being a hero is, people expect things of you. I don’t think I do ‘hero’, guys.”
Anselm punched her shoulder, briefly and very fast. “Girl, I don’t think you have a choice!”
Thomas Rochester and the escort took up places behind them. Ash looked around, grateful for Angelotti’s evidently blisteringly expensive demi-gown; seeing every reaction from contempt to awe on the faces down the table. She beamed, broadly, at the man across the table, with the Viscount-Mayor of Dijon’s chain resting on his rich robes; a man bundled up in furs and velvets, who was glowering covertly at ‘the hero of Carthage’.
“Yes, madonna,” Angelotti said, before she could speak, “that is the man who would allow no merchant to give us credit, when we first arrived here from Basle and you were sick. The Viscount-Mayor, Richard Follo.”
“Called us ‘scruffy mercenaries’, didn’t he?” Ash beamed. “Which I doubt he repeated to John de Vere! Well, that’s Rota Fortuna14 for you…”
Ash looked around at the assembly of Burgundians and the foreign nobles present, those who had precedence sitting at the long table, those who had not crowding the room to the walls behind them. An air of aggressive desperation, familiar to her from other sieges, hung about them. What friction there might be between lords, burghers, the Viscount-Mayor, and the people of Dijon itself, she decided she would not concern herself with at the moment.
“We bid you welcome,” de la Marche concluded, seating himself.
She caught his eye, thought, Let’s throw the cat in the fire, then! and spoke. “My lord, it’s taken me and my men more than two months to get here from Carthage. My intelligence isn’t current or good. I need to know, on behalf of my company – how strong is this city, and how much Burgundian territory is still holding out against the Visigoths?”
“Our lands?” de la Marche rumbled. “The Duchy, Franche-Comté, the north; Lorraine is not certain—”
A thin-faced noble hammered his hand on the table, turning to Olivier de la Marche. “You see! Our Duke should consider. I have lands in Charolais. Where is his loyalty to our King? If you would only seek King Louis’ protection—”
“—or call on the feudal ties he has with the Empire—”
Ash barely realised the second voice was speaking in German when the two Burgundian knights, almost in unison, finished: “And sign a peace with the King-Caliph!”
Anselm muttered, “Shit, why not? Everywhere else in Christendom has!”
The hundred or so men and women in the hall began to shout, in at least four different languages.
“Silence!”
De la Marche’s full-throated shout – you could hear that over cannon! Ash reflected – banged off the roof-beams and brought a shuffling quiet to the council hall.
“Jesus, what a dog-fight!” Ash muttered. She realised she had been heard, and felt her face heat. Fear – of the army outside, of a twin, of all the incestuous south; of all the lack of answers there or here – made her bad-tempered. She shrugged at de la Marche. “I’ll be frank. I wondered what Cola de Monforte and his boys were doing out there with the Visigoths. I’m starting to see why. Burgundy’s coming apart at the seams, isn’t it?”
Unexpectedly, the chamberlain-counsellor who sat beside de la Marche, Philippe Ternant, chuckled. “No, Demoiselle-Captain, no more than usual! These are family quarrels. They grow heated, when our father the Duke is out of the room.”
Ash, seeing Ternant’s watery blue eyes and age-spotted hands, weighed up his probable experience of Burgundian politics. She said politely, “As you say, messire,” and flicked a glance at Robert Anselm. I need to take decisions! I thought – if we got here – at least we’d have a breathing-space—
“What is Burgundy?” de la Marche demanded, his weather-beaten face turning towards Ash. “Demoiselle-Captain, what are we? Here in the south, we’re two Burgundies: both the Duchy and the County. Then the conquered province, Lorraine. All the northern lands: Hainault, Holland, Flanders…15 What our Duke does not owe as a French fief to King Louis, he owes as an Imperial fief to the Emperor Frederick! Demoiselle, we speak French in the two Burgundies, Dutch and Flemish in Flanders, and Imperial German in Luxembourg! Only one thing holds us together – one man – Duke Charles. Without him, we would collapse again into a hundred quarrelling properties of other kingdoms.”16
Philippe Ternant looked amused. “My lord, much as I bow to your military prowess, let me say that a single chancellor, chancery, and system of tax binds us equally—”
“And that would last how long, without Duke Charles?” Olivier de la Marche’s hand came down flat on the wooden table, with a bang that startled all of the crowded room. “The Duke unifies us!”
A flicker of green cloth: Ash caught sight of an abbot, his face hidden from her in the crush of bodies further down the guild hall.
“We are the ancient German people of Burgundia,” the abbot said, still invisible; “and we have been the Kingdom of Aries, when Christendom was divided into Neustria and Austrasia. We are older than the Valois Dukes.”
His deep voice reminded her briefly of Godfrey Maximillian: she was unaware of the sharp crease that appeared in the flesh between her eyebrows.
“Names do not matter, my lord de la Marche. Here in the forests of the south, there in the cities of the north, we are one people. From Holland to Lake Geneva, we are one. Our lord the Duke is the embodiment of that, as his father was before him; but Burgundy will outlast Charles of Valois. Of that I am certain.”
Into the hush, Ash found herself saying thoughtfully, “Not if someone doesn’t do something about the Visigoth army out there!”
Faces turned towards her; white discs in the sunlight that now streamed in through the ancient stone windows.
“The Duke unites us.” The Viscount-Mayor, Follo, spoke up. “And therefore, since he is here – the north will come south, and rescue us.”
It will? Restraining a sudden, blind hope, Ash turned towards de la Marche. “What’s the news from the north?”
“The last message spoke of fighting around Bruges; but that news was a month old when it arrived. The armies of the Lady Margaret may have won a victory by now.”
“Will they come? Just for one town under siege?”
“Dijon is not merely ‘one town under siege’,” the chamberlain-counsellor Philippe Ternant said, looking at Ash. “You stand in the heart of Burgundy, here; in the duchy itself.”
“My Duke,” Olivier de la Marche said, “wrote, three years ago, that God has instituted and ordained princes to rule principalities and lordships so that the regions, provinces and peoples are joined together and organised in union, concord and loyal discipline.17 Since the Duke is here – they will come.”
About to ask What strength are the forces in the north?, Ash found herself interrupted.
Olivier de la Marche, briskly now, said, “Demoiselle-Captain. You and your men have more recently seen what lies beyond these walls.”
“In Carthage?”
De la Marche’s weather-beaten face twisted, as if with some pain. “In what you have seen south of Burgundy first, demoiselle. We know little of the lands outside our borders, these past two months. Except that there are refugees every day on the roads outside the city.”
“Yes, messire.” Ash got to her feet, and realised that was out of pure habit, to let them see that she was a woman wearing a sword, even if it was without armour and thus not a customary thing to do.18 I’m not used to being a hero of anywhere…
“We came in through the French King’s territories, under the Darkness,” she began. “They say there that the dark extends north to the Loire – at least, they were saying that two or three weeks ago. We didn’t see any fighting—” She grinned, toothily. “Not against the Visigoths, anyway. So I suppose the peace treaty is holding.”
“Motherfuckers!” de la Marche spat, explosively. Some of the merchant princes looked startled at his language, but not, Ash thought, as if they disagreed with the sentiment. There was a rumble from the few refugee French knights present.
Ash shrugged. “That’s the Universal Spider19 for you.”
“God rot him,” de la Marche observed, in his battle-loud voice. Merchants and noblemen who would have winced at the champion’s loudness in peace now looked, Ash thought, as if the big Burgundian were their last hope.
“God rot him, and German Frederick!” de la Marche finished.
She has a brief memory of some of these noble German and French refugees when they stood in the cathedral at Cologne, at her marriage to Fernando del Guiz: all of them in bright liveries, then, and with well-fed faces. Not now.
“Messire—”
Getting a second wind, de la Marche thumped the long table. “Why should their lands be spared, treacherous sons of bitches? Just because the grovelling little shits signed ‘treaties’ with these Visigoth bastards!”
“Not all of us are traitors!” A knight in Gothic armour sprang to his feet, crashing his plate gauntlet down on the table. “And at least we do not wish to continue to cringe behind these walls, Duke’s man!”
De la Marche ignored him. “What else, Demoiselle-Captain?”
“Their lands aren’t being ‘spared’ much of anything. Whoever wins this war – there’s going to be major famine.” Ash looked around the table, at jowled faces somewhat bitten by short rations.
What had been prosperous townships, on the rivers of southern Burgundy; what had been rich abbeys; all of these are in her memory, under weak autumn sunlight. Burnt-out, deserted.
“I don’t know what stores are like here in Dijon. There’s nothing going to come in to you, even if the Visigoth army didn’t have this place sewn up tight. I’ve seen so many deserted farms and villages on the way north that I can’t count them, messires. There aren’t any people left. Cold’s ruined the harvest. The fields are rotten. There are no cattle or swine left: they’ve been eaten. On the march, we saw babies left out, exposed. There isn’t a surviving township between Dijon and the sea”
“This isn’t war, this is obscenity!” one of the merchants snarled.
“It’s bad war,” Ash corrected him. “You don’t wipe out what makes a land productive if you’re trying to conquer it. There’s nothing left for the winner. My lord, I’d guess your refugees out there are turning for Savoy, or southern France, or even the Cantons. But it’s no better there – and they’ll be under the Darkness. There’s still sun over south Burgundy. But outside, it’s already winter. Has been since Auxonne, as far as I can see. And it’s staying that way.”
“Winter like in the Rus lands.”
Ash turned her head, recognising Ludmilla Rostovnaya’s voice from where the crossbow-woman stood with Thomas Rochester. She signalled her to continue.
Ludmilla Rostovnaya’s red hose and russet doublet were thick with candle-grease, under her cloak. She shifted from foot to foot, conscious of eyes on her, and spoke more to Ash than to the assembled nobles.
“Far north, the winter comes with ice,” she said. “Great sheets of it, eight months of the year. There are men in my village who can remember Czar Peter’s port20 freezing one June, ships cracking like eggs. That’s winter. That’s what it’s like at Marseilles, when we landed.”
A priest at the far end of the table, between two Burgundian knights, spoke up. “You see, my lord de la Marche? This is what I have said. In France and the Germanies, Italy and eastern Iberia, they no longer see the sun – and yet he has not entirely forsaken us, here. Some of his heat must touch our earth, still. We are not yet Under the Penance.”
Ash opened her mouth to say Penance be damned, it’s the Wild Machines!, and shut it again. She looked to her officers. Robert Anselm, lips pushed together, shook his head.
Antonio Angelotti first glanced at her for permission, then spoke aloud. “Messires, I am a master gunner. I’ve fought in the lands Under the Penitence, with Lord-Amir Childeric. There was warmth there, then. As of a warm night. Not enough for seed, but still, not winter.”
Ash nodded thanks to the crossbow-woman and the gunner.
“Angelotti’s right. I’ll tell you what I saw, not two months ago, my lords – it isn’t warm in Carthage any more. There’s ice on the desert. Snow. And it was still getting colder when I left.”
“Is it a greater Penance?” The priest – another abbot, by his pectoral Briar Cross – leaned forward. “Are they the more damned, now that they take their guidance from demons? Will this greater punishment spread with their conquests?”
De la Marche met Ash’s gaze, his eyes shrewd. “The last news I have is that impenetrable darkness covers France as far north as Tours and Orleans, now; covers half the Black Forest; stretches as far east as Vienna, and Cyprus. Only our middle lands, as far as Flanders, still witness the sun.”21
Aw, shit! “Burgundy is the only land—?”
“I know nothing of the lands of the Turk. But as for what I do know – yes, Demoiselle-Captain. Daily, the dark spreads north. The sun is seen over Burgundy alone, now.” Olivier de la Marche grunted. “As well as what you see fleeing away, we have hordes of refugees travelling into our lands, Demoiselle-Captain. Because of the sun.”
“We cannot feed them!” the Viscount-Mayor protested; stung, as if this were part of a long debate.
“Use them!” the German knight who had spoken before snarled. “War will cease over winter. We might win free of this poxy town, as soon as spring comes, and fight a decisive battle. Take them in as levies and train them! We have the Duke’s army, we have the hero of Carthage here, Demoiselle Ash; in God’s name let us fight!”
Ash winced, imperceptibly, both at the mention of her name, and at Robert Anselm’s snort. She waited for the Duke’s deputy to build on it; propose some heroic and doubtless foolhardy exploit for the hero of Carthage to perform to help raise the siege.
We ain’t going to fight a hopeless war. There ain’t enough money to pay us for that.
What are we going to do?
Olivier de la Marche, as if the German knight had not spoken, demanded abruptly, “Demoiselle-Captain Ash, will the Visigoth army stay in the field now? How much of Carthage is destroyed?”
The white masonry of the ogee windows glittered, sun flickering between clouds. Frost starred the stone. A scent of something burning drifted in on the chill air, over and above the great fire that the servants kept burning in the hearth. Ash tasted coldness on her lips.
“Nothing like as much as rumour says, my lord. An earthquake threw down the Citadel. I believe the new King-Caliph, Gelimer, to be alive.” She repeated, for emphasis: “My lord, it’s snowing on the coast of Africa – and they didn’t expect it any more than we did. The amirs I met are shit-scared. They started this war on the word of their King-Caliph, and now the countries they’ve conquered are under the Darkness, and back home in Carthage they’re freezing their asses off. They know Iberia’s the grain-basket of Carthage – and they know that, if the sun doesn’t come back, they won’t have a harvest nex
t year. We won’t have a harvest. The longer this goes on – the worse things will be in six months’ time.”
Near a hundred faces stared back at her: civilians and soldiers; some of the nobles’ escorts probably, inevitably, in the pay of men outside the walls of Dijon.
“Anything else,” she said flatly, “isn’t for open council; it’s for your Duke.”
At her dismissal, a hubbub of noise filled the room, particularly from the foreign knights and nobles. Olivier de la Marche spoke over it effortlessly:
“This cold, does it come from the demons your men speak of? These ‘Wild Machines’?”
Exchanging glances with Robert Anselm, Ash thought, Damn. My lads have got big mouths. I bet there’s half a hundred garbled stories going the rounds.
“I’m trying to stop rumour. The rest’s for your Duke,” she repeated doggedly. I’m not going to be palmed off with underlings!
De la Marche looked bluntly unwilling to let it go at that. Tension painfully tightened her shoulders. Ash rubbed at the muscles of her neck, under the back of the demi-gown’s collar. It did not ease the ache. Regarding their white faces, all turned to her in the morning light, she felt a pulse of fear in her bowels. Memory chills her: voices that say, WE HAVE DRAWN DOWN THE SUN.
“Fucking mercenary whore!” someone shouted, in German.
There was no hearing anything for the next few minutes, the council and the foreign knights raising their voices in ferocious, excited discussion and argument. Ash put her hands on the table and leaned her weight on them, momentarily. Anselm put his elbow on the back of her chair, leaning behind her to talk to Angelotti.
I should sit down, she thought, let them get on with it. This lot are hopeless!
“My lord de la Marche.” She waited until the Duke’s deputy turned his attention to her again.
“Demoiselle-Captain?”
“I have a question, my lord.”
