by Mary Gentle
“Here! Get the ones below, on the ladder!”
An archer, whose greasy ringlets and unshaven face shone with sweat, loped up and ducked his head down through the gap in front of her. Within seconds, he bawled at his pavise-mate for more shafts; stood astride the gap, drawing his bow with difficulty in the confined space, shot down at the foot of the siege ladder, fifty feet below.
Two crossbowmen rapidly elbowed him out of the way: more room for their weapons in the gap.
Ash bent her head for a quick squint out through an archery port in the planks. If they can storm—If they come over the wall, it’s all irrelevant: voices, everything!
A constant thunk! of bolts and shafts echoed along the brattice now; points hitting wood and stone. Her body tensed against the searing rush of Greek Fire. No, not while their own men are scaling the walls—
The hook of a scaling ladder thumped into another brattice, further along the wall; she had a bare second to see that the men with swords and axes beginning to swarm up it were not Visigoth auxiliary troops, but men with Crescent Moons on blue livery jackets.
She’s seen my banner on this section of the wall – this is deliberate – sending men we’ve fought beside – a psychological attack: getting Frankish mercenaries to kill each other—
“Look who it ain’t!” Euen Huw bellowed, slamming his wiry body between the wall and her. Over his shoulder as he ran on, he bawled, “Been having it easy, ’aven’t they? See about that!”
A glance back along the hoarding showed her Angelotti’s brilliant curls under the edge of a sallet, his heavy-bladed falchion rising and falling in an appalling, close-combat press of bodies jammed together. His left arm hung, bleeding, buckler gone somewhere. His men crowded that side: warding him.
Christ, half the Visigoth army’s on its way!
“Boss!” Robert Anselm, Rickard, and the banner appeared at the embrasure behind her; the older man limping, his face twisted in a bellowed warning.
Ash swung around, saw in a second that the dead auxiliary’s’ body was dislodged now, two soldiers wearing the Crescent Moon scrambling up scaling ladders and through the openings in the plank floor.
Euen Huw parried the first man’s sword down with his own in a shower of sparks and kicked the man’s leg under the edge of his mail hauberk. Two or three pounds pressure will pop a kneecap. The man – no time to guess at the face; if this is someone known, or someone Joscelyn van Mander has picked up in the months since he left the Lion Azure – the man fell forward dead-weight, like a sack of grain.
The roof and beams cramped her. Ash stuck the shaft of her poleaxe forward past Euen as he recovered his balance. She hooked the curved back edge of the blade behind the second man’s knee. Bracing both feet, she yanked.
The razor edge of the axe hooked the man’s knee forward, his mouth opening in a scream as the cut hamstrung him. He went over, on to his back, crumpling against the front wall of the brattice. Euen Huw stabbed with his sword, up between the legs, under his hauberk, into his groin.
The first man struggled upright, on to one knee, his other leg jutting at a twisted angle. Too close. Ash dropped the axe, grabbed her dagger out of its scabbard with her right hand, and threw herself down on to his back.
She wrapped her forearm around his helmet, twisted his head around, and slammed the blade down into his eye-socket, straight into the brain.
Despite helmet, despite blood and the scream and the disfigurement of his face, she had a moment to recognise the man. Bartolomey St John – Joscelyn’s second – I know him!
Knew him.
Anselm bellowed something. Two or three dozen men in Lion livery piled over the battlements into the brattice, iron cook-pots manoeuvred gingerly between them on bill-shafts. The first two tipped their cauldrons, and a white mist of steam hissed up: boiling water spilling through the gaps and planks alike. More men: Henri Brant and Wat Rodway heaving a cauldron between them, laughing under the clamour, tipping hot sand down through the nearest opening—
A yard under Ash’s feet, men screamed, shrieked; there was the recognisable crack of a siege ladder shattering under panicking men’s weights. Screams diminishing, bodies falling into the bright air.
“Shit, boss, that was close!” Euen bellowed, mouth at her ear, one hand reached out absently to pull her to her feet.
Ash grabbed the axe with her free hand, hauling it out from under Bartolomey St John’s dead body. Her hands were, she realised, shaking; with the same uncontrollable tremor that one has when badly injured. But nothing’s touched me: the blood isn’t mine!
She lifted her head, couldn’t see Anselm, could hear him and her sergeants yelling orders back on the battlements – he’s done it, we’re holding!
“Euen, send a runner! The Byward Tower, now. What the fuck are the Burgundians doing up there? We need covering fire! They’ve got no business letting these guys get anywhere near the foot of this wall!”
One of Euen’s squires pelted off down the brattice, regained the battlements, and vanished in the direction of the nearest tower. Can we cover it still, from the Byward Tower to the White Tower?
Ash ducked back, and stepped off the hoardings on to the walls. Only the backs of men visible, now; a hundred or so here: blue-and-yellow Lion livery for the most part; a couple of Burgundian red Xs. Further along, where the brattices had been on fire, and chopped away because of that, she saw swords, axes; men hooking bills over the tops of ladders – no time for anything subtle: slam them into position along the battlements and tip down everything available on the scaling ladders below.
Robert Anselm jogged up in a clatter of armour and hard breathing. “I’ve sent my lance to the tower to kick some sense into the Burgundian missile troops!”
“Good! We got ’em turned round here, Roberto!”
Something bright and burning dropped out of the sky, with the whistle of flames fanned by the wind.
The stench of it warned her.
“Greek Fire!”
Oh, sweet Jesu, they will fire on their own men if it means getting us too, they just don’t care!
She threw herself back across the battlements to the inside of the wall, hauling Anselm with her, yelling orders: “Back! Off the walls! Away from the walls!”
Fire hit and splashed.
Inside a second, the nearer brattices burst into flame. She saw the flaming greasy liquid splash and spread. One high voice shrieked. No use to call for water—
“Cut the hoardings free!” she ordered, swinging her axe up and over, chopping down at the supporting beams, and she stood back as the men of three more lances took over.
The shrieking figure rolled on the stone battlements, Greek Fire clinging, a stench of burning coming from blackened skin. Ash recognised red hose and brown padded jack, and the frizzled hair under the melting steel of her sallet: Ludmilla Rostovnaya, half her torso and one arm coated in gelatinous, burning fire.
Anselm yelled, “Thomas Tydder!”
The boy and the rest of his fire detail rushed up along the wall, doused leather buckets of sand over the screaming woman, scraping the stuff away. Ash glimpsed their hands going red in the process.
“Stand aside!” Floria del Guiz sprinted past her with a stretcher team.
The brattice creaked, tilted; gave way with a rush. Flaming wood collapsed out into the empty air.
Ash moved forward to the wall. Below, she saw siege ladders tipping back, screaming men falling from them. Bodies in twenties and thirties plummeted to the broken ground at the foot of the city wall. Visigoth slaves – without armour, without weapons – ran about on the escarpment, darting forward, lifting and carrying men with broken limbs.
As she watched, one pale-haired slave fell with a bolt in him. A few yards away, a soldier wearing the Crescent Moon knelt down beside another trooper who writhed with a broken back, gave him the coup de grace with his dagger, and ran on, leaving the slave jerking and twitching and alive.
Ash looked up to the Bywa
rd Tower. Archers and crossbow troops surged past to the shuttered embrasures and arrow-loops; some of the Welsh longbowmen recklessly shooting over the merlons.
Another bolt of Greek Fire impacted, further down the wall.
Under her breath, Ash muttered, “Come on. Take that machine out!”
She grabbed the edges of the battlements, staring out from the walls. Under the pale sun, four carved limbs of turning stone flashed white in the November day. Four carved marble cups, on stone beams, like the cups of a mangonel, revolved around a stone spindle. There wasn’t a soldier or a slave within yards of it to wind it. Ash watched it moving, golem-like, of itself.
Stone chips exploded off it, under a hail of crossbow bolts.
A shrill voice from the Byward Tower yelled, “Gotcha!”
As Ash watched, the brass-bound wheels of its carriage began to turn, and it swivelled away from the walls and back towards the Visigoth camp to reload. Blue flickers of fire still burned in the cups at the end of each of its four arms.
“We’re holding!” Ash yelled at Anselm.
“Only just!” Ordering the sergeants back to the wall, Robert Anselm broke off to add: “They got the ram going against the main gate! This is just a diversion!”
“Yeah, I could’ve guessed that!” Ash wiped her mouth, took her hand away bloody. “Are they holding the gate?”
“Up till now!”
Breathless, Ash could only nod.
“Motherfuckers!” Robert Anselm narrowed his eyes against the light. “’Ere they come again. Auxiliaries and mercenaries again. Wait till they fucking mean it.”
Aware now that her chest was heaving to gain air, Ash snatched a second to look out at the distant enemy camp. Three or four hundred men, massing in preparation for the assault’s success. “No eagles!”
Robert Anselm tilted his sallet down, against the sun that showed the dirt and stubble on his face. “Not yet!”
Another stone machine edged forward out of the makeshift vast city that is the Visigoth camp. Ash watched. The cups were loaded: fragile clay pots with fuses already lit, shimmering with heat.
“Look at that! They’re not supporting that engine. Robert, send to de la Marche, tell him to sally out and take out those bloody engines! Tell him if he won’t, we’ll be happy to!”
As Anselm signalled a runner, Ash narrowed her eyes in the sunlight. Below, the ground before the walls was strewn with the dead, already; in what must be the first fifteen minutes of fighting. The moat was full of bodies, moving feebly, or still and broken, bleeding on to the faggots and mud and shattered rock.
Two or three riderless horses wandered aimlessly. Carts with pavises mounted on them, slave-hauled, began to recover enemy wounded.
And this wasn’t even an attack. A feint. Just so they can get the ram or the saps up to the north-west gate.
It isn’t what we can see. It’s what we can’t see.
With that thought, and almost as she thought it, a great section of the city wall five hundred yards to her right, past the White Tower to the east, first rose up slightly – mortar puffing out between the»masonry – and then slumped by ten or eleven inches.
A hot wind blasted her: a thunderous muffled roar shook the paving stones under her feet.
“Fucking saps!” Thomas Rochester thrust through the command group, joining her. His scream was almost hysterical. “They had another fucking sap!”
The high-pitched painful ringing in her ears began to deaden a little.
Euen Huw yelled, “I thought we were supposed to be counter-mining!”
Now a vast number of men came running forward from the Visigoth lines, obviously at this signal; dozens of scaling ladders carried aloft over their heads. Ash heard Ludmilla Rostovnaya’s lance-mate, Katherine Hammell, yell a shrill “Nock! Loose!” and hundreds of shafts whirred blackly into the middle air from the Lion archers, twelve per minute; vanishing into the mass of men, impossible to see any single strike.
“They’ve fucked it!” Ash slapped her palm down hard on Rochester’s shoulder, grinned at Euen Huw. “They didn’t bring the fucking wall down. You must be right about the counter-mine!”
She stared at the point where the wall now dipped, and the unsafe battlements along it. Hoardings smouldered. Burgundian men with red St Andrew’s crosses on their padded jacks were moving slowly out of the wreckage, a few men being carried.
They may not have brought the wall down. But that’s going to be a hell of a weak spot from now on.
“We’ll have to hold the wall for them while they sort it! Every second man! Robert, Euen, Rochester: on me!”
Reckless of the likelihood of collapsing masonry, she ran lightly down on to the broken section of wall, the company swarming through the White Tower after her. Rapidly hammering out orders, Ash saw the tops of scaling ladders appear; and hand-to-hand fighting start all along the wall. Four hundred men, a line three and four deep in places; war-hats bright in the light, the spiked blades of bills throwing up a fine red mist. Behind, on the parapet, the Burgundian troops regrouped.
“They blew it!” Ash yelled to Robert Anselm, over the shrieks, the harsh bellowing of “A Lion! A Lion!”, and the bang of swivel guns brought down from the far end of the wall. She saw men-at-arms, sunlight glinting off their war-hats, passing up hooked poles, shoving scaling ladders off the walls; and more than one lance were picking up the shattered fragments of trebuchet and mangonel missiles, and dropping chunks of masonry back down off the battlements.
On to the men below.
“The wall didn’t come down in front of ’em!” Robert Anselm bellowed. “They ain’t got nowhere to go!”
Antonio Angelotti, arriving with more swivel guns, showed eyes that were the only white thing in his black face. He yelled to her, “We must have countermined some of their mines! Else this whole section would be down!”
“At least we’re doing something right – let’s hope de la Marche can hold the fucking gate!”
It seemed long - was probably not, probably only another fifteen minutes – before the only things visible on the walls were the backs of her own men, ignoring any wounds, still high on adrenalin, leaning over the battlements and shouting their raw, violent contempt down at the dying men below. One billman stood up on top of the battlement, his cod-flap unlaced, urinating off the wall. Two of his mates grabbed dead stripped Visigoths by wrists and ankles, and slung them out through the embrasures.
She did not draw breath again until the Burgundian combat engineers had shored up the fallen section of wall with forty-foot planks as thick as a man’s arm, supported by wooden buttresses; and the attack on the north-west gate had petered out into a rout, under missile fire, men running back behind the wooden palisades of the Visigoth camp; the golem-ram abandoned, sunk over the axles in mud.
“Shit…”
Standing with her command group, she made an assessment of the sagging wall in front of her, almost without thinking of it. Merlons broken, like jagged teeth. Men-at-arms moving back from the walls as the sergeants stood them down, leaving anything else to the missile troops.
When they come again, this is where they’ll come.
“Can we stand them all down?” Angelotti demanded. He appeared oblivious to the blood dripping on to the stone from the fingers of his left hand. “My boys too?”
“Yeah. Pointless wasting ammunition.”
Her gaze went up and down the parapet. One crossbowman had his foot planted firmly in the stirrup of his crossbow, winding the winch, but with little urgency now. A hand-gunner in breastplate and war-hat was kneeling, leaning over, hook-gun braced against the edge of the crenellation. As Ash watched, her lance-mate touched a slow-match to the touch-hole; then stuck it back in a sand-barrel, unconcerned by the noise of the shot.
The gunner, as she bent her head to re-load and her face became visible, was Margaret Schmidt.
“Stop wasting your fucking ammunition!” Angelotti’s sergeant, Giovanni Petro, bawled, as Ash opene
d her mouth to give the order. “Don’t shoot while they’re running away. Wait till the bastard Flemings come back – with all their little Visigoth friends!”
There was a mutter of laughter along the wall. Ash, approaching the edge, and leaning out, caught glances from her men: most of them in the exultation that comes immediately after an action, which is nothing more than the joy of having survived it. One or two of the billmen were prodding corpses in obviously European livery, their expressions hard.
Conscious of a wired rapture that is her own response to survival – a hard joy that wishes every man in the Visigoth camp maimed and bleeding – she leaned over and looked down at the innocent earth in front of the city. Studied it again for disturbance: saw nothing.
“They must have been counter-mined; if they’d managed to set off all their petards, they’d have breached this wall.”
Not particularly aware of her pronouns, she thought, We nearly lost Dijon in one attack!
The noon sun winked back in sparks from the ground. She realised after a second that she was seeing the caltrops5 that had been thrown down by the defenders.
“Greek Fire, too. Think they’re fucking ’ard,” Anselm grunted cynically. “What’s the rush?”
Ash gave him a breathless, diamond-hard grin.
“Don’t be in such a hurry, Roberto. They’ll be back.”
“You reckon?”
“She wants in here fast. I don’t know why. All she has to do is sit out there and let starvation do it for her. Christ, she even fired on her own men!” Her facial muscles ached, and she realised the grin had gone. Almost inconsequentially, she added, “Dickon’s dead – Dickon Stour.”
His gaze was not unaware of other casualties; nonetheless, there was a deep disgust in his voice. “Ah, fuck it. Poor fucking shite.”
Ash busied herself in the business of clearing up, seeing her men reassembled, and on their way back to their quarters. Groups of men carried heavy, red-soaked blankets between them: Dickon Stour, his two mates, and seven others dead. And Ludmilla not the only screaming survivor of Greek Fire, but what the wounded list was, she would not, she supposed, hear from Florian until later.
