Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  Two complete metal legs lay in the blanket, together with a tangle of shoulder defences: pauldrons, spaulders, and a gorget. One arm defence was unpointed, the butterfly-shape of the couter taking the light and splintering it. Ash put her cuirass down and picked up a gauntlet, flexing it, letting the laminations slide over each other. A few spots of rust, and some scratches, were new.

  Incredulous, Ash said, “Shit! She must have been impressed by us holding the wall! If I’m worth bribing— Does she still think we’ll betray Dijon? Open a gate?”

  Half of her furiously thinking, What does this mean?, the other half can only stroke metal, examine linings for tears, remember each field that earned her the money to say to an armourer Make me this.

  “Why now? If she’s thought better of direct assault—”

  What has she – heard?

  Turning her head, Ash confronted Rickard’s immense, utter pride. “Uh – right. Better get it cleaned up, hadn’t you? Finish the job.”

  “Yes, boss!”

  Under the curved plates, with its long belt wrapped up neatly around the hilt, a wheel-pommel, single-handed sword lay in its scabbard; her own sweat-marks still dark on the leather grip.

  “Son of a bitch.” Ash’s fingers continued to slide over the gauntlet. She squatted, touching cold metal: sword, breastplate, backplate, visored sallet; checking leathers and buckles; as if only touch and not sight could confirm its reality. “She sent my sword and harness back…”

  And Carthage didn’t tell her to do this – if what Godfrey says is true, she’s not talking via the Stone Golem!

  Rickard sat back on his heels and wiped his running nose.

  “Sent a message, too.” He waited, a little self-importantly, until Ash’s attention focused solely on him.

  “A message from the Faris?”

  “Yeah. Her herald told it to me. Boss, she says she wants to see you. She says she’ll give you a truce, if you come out to the northside camp at dawn.”

  “A truce!” Robert Anselm guffawed coarsely.

  “Tomorrow morning, boss.” Rickard himself looked sceptical. “She says.”

  “Does she, by God?” Ash straightened up, one gauntlet still in her hand. She stared thoughtfully at the knuckle-plates. “Florian, the Duke – you said it could be as early as tonight?”

  The surgeon, behind her, said, “It could be any time. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear the mourning bells right now, if it comes to it.”

  “So we don’t have any argument.” Ash turned to her command group. “And we don’t get the idea that this is a democracy. Rickard, send a page to find the herald again. Roberto, get me an escort for dawn – I want people who aren’t trigger-happy. You’re in command until I get back into the city.”

  Robert Anselm said, “Yes.”

  Floria del Guiz opened her mouth, shut it, stared at Ash’s expression for a moment, and snapped, “If you get back.”

  “I’ll come with you, madonna.” Antonio Angelotti stood up lithely. “Ludmilla’s burned but she can walk, now: she’ll command the guns. You may need me. I know their scientist-magi. I may see things that you won’t.”

  “True.” Ash rubbed the heel of her hand against her gauntlet. “Rickard, let’s armour me up, shall we? Just for practice, before morning…”

  Robert Anselm said, “You’ll get stopped at the city wall. Mercenary captain, off to see the enemy as soon as she hears the Duke’s dying? They won’t like it.”

  “Then I’ll get a written pass from Olivier de la Marche. I’m the hero of Carthage! He knows Duke Charles trusts me. More to the point, he knows I wouldn’t be leaving my movable valuables – that is, you lot! – unless I was coming back. You can work out a sally-and-rescue with him, if the Visigoths turn treacherous.”

  “‘If’?” Floria spat. “Have some sense in that pointy head of yours, woman! If you’re on the other side of these walls, she’ll kill you!”

  “That must be why I’m shitting myself,” Ash said dryly, and saw the creases at the corners of Floria’s eyes as she unwillingly smiled.

  As Ash began to strip off, and Rickard dug her arming doublet and hose out of one of the oak chests, she said quietly, “Robert, Florian, Angeli. Remember – it’s different now Charles is dying. Don’t lose sight of the objective. We’re not here now to defend Dijon. We’re not here to fight Visigoths. We’re here to survive – and, since we can’t get away from here, right now that means we’re here to stop the Faris.”

  Robert Anselm gave her one keen glance. “Got it.”

  “We mustn’t get caught up in fighting to the point where we forget that.”

  Floria del Guiz bent down and heaved the cuirass clumsily into the air. As Rickard rushed to help her support it, and hinge it open for Ash to put it on, Floria said, “Will you kill her, tomorrow?”

  “It’s under truce!” Rickard protested, scandalised.

  Ash, grimly amused, said, “Never mind the moral question. She’s not going to give me the chance; not on this one. Maybe, if I can set it up for more negotiations, at a second meeting…” She caught the boy’s gaze. “She obviously thinks we have an unfinished conversation. I might stand a better chance when her guard’s – down – oof!”

  The familiar heave clicked the cuirass shut around her body. Rickard cinched the straps tight on its right-hand side.

  “Don’t you forget,” Floria said, standing close by her side, touching Ash’s cheek; her eyes bright. “What you call ‘stopping’ her – I’ve spent five years watching you kill people. This one is your sister.”

  “I don’t forget anything,” Ash said. “Robert? Get Digorie and Richard Faversham back up here. I want my lance-leaders, and their sergeants, and the rest of the command group. Here. Now.”

  “So how’s it look, boss?” Rochester asked.

  “Shite, thanks!”

  Ash shot a quick glance across the map-strewn table at Digorie Paston, his chewed goose-quill pen, and the oak-gall ink blackening both his hands and bony features.

  “—Hold on, Tom— Father, repeat that back.”

  Digorie Paston held up his scribbled page slant-wise to the candle, reading with some difficulty in golden light. “‘Thus fifteen legions were committed in the first phase—’”

  On the tail of his words, stumbling to echo him phrase by phrase, Ash repeated: “‘Fifteen legions, committed in the first phase…’”

  – Yes.

  The voice is mild. She shook her head, cropped hair shifting, as if a fly bothered her.

  “‘With ten remaining, deployed now as I have said—’”

  “‘…ten remaining, now deployed…’”

  The voice of Godfrey, in her head, is not weary – has, in fact, the tireless ability that the machina rei militaris has always had, to speak when any human soul would be dropping from exhaustion.

  Her own voice is rasping, after bellowing on the walls of Dijon. After so much rapid dictation, her throat croaks. “‘…Report made this feast day of St Benignus.’”13

  – Yes.

  “Here, boss.”

  She took a wooden cup of (admittedly sour) wine from Rickard, and drained it. “Thanks.”

  “The others are on their way up, boss.” He turned to serve Rochester.

  Ash stretched her arms, under asymmetric steel plates, feeling the sensation of each leather strap pulling against cloth and the flesh beneath – all of it grown unfamiliar in the space of three months. Her armour shells snug around her body, clattering at her thighs. Weight is nothing, but she finds herself almost forgetting how to breathe, sheathed so close in metal.

  The warmth is welcome.

  “Godfrey – the Wild Machines?”

  – Nothing.

  Shit. Oh, fuck, maybe from their point of view, it doesn’t matter what I know? No: that can’t be right!

  Digorie Paston straightened up from his writing, flicking a sideways glance at her from cherry-rimmed eyes. He held himself upright on the joint stool, ready to read, and
said nothing. He licked his lips.

  “Okay, that’ll do it for now.” Ash placed her palms flat on the trestle table, and leaned her weight on her arms.

  As she stood, momentarily weary, the rest of the lance-leaders and sergeants shoved through the stone doorway into the tower’s upper floor. Their voices rose over the noise of the wind banging at the wooden shutters, and the desultory crash of bombardment from the darkness outside.

  “Shit. Another night when I ain’t gonna get more than two hours’ sleep!”

  “You’re young.” Robert Anselm grinned at her, demonic in the smoky light of the tapers. “You can do it. Think of us poor old men. Right, Raimon?”

  The white-haired siege engineer acknowledged that, briefly; walking in beside Dickon Stour’s apprentice – promoted to chief armourer, now – and behind him Euen Huw and Geraint ab Morgan in close talk, and Ludmilla Rostovnaya, with black-singed hair still not cropped off, but her body and shoulder bound up bulky in linen rags and grease and moving painfully.

  “You been talking to your old machine, boss?” Ludmilla asked huskily. “Thought you didn’t want it knowing where you are?”

  “Bit late to worry about that, now…” Ash grinned ruefully at her. “The rag-heads have already told Carthage I’m right here.”

  Forty or so men and women came in, enough to make the bleak stone-walled upper chamber seem crowded. They brought welcome body-heat. Ash paced around the trestle table where Digorie Paston and Richard Faversham sat among piles of paper.

  “Okay, what we got here is some … intelligence, on Visigoth troop deployment in Christendom. I have to say, it ain’t gonna cheer us up any. As we thought, they’ve got things sewn up tight – with some interesting exceptions,” she added thoughtfully, leaning between the clerks to spread out the spider-scrawled map of Christendom, as the men-at-arms crowded at her shoulder.

  “For example – I can see how we got in from Marseilles the way we just did… When they first landed, the Faris put three legions directly into Marseilles – but they ended up fighting their way up to Lyons, and then Auxonne. I reckon the Legio XXIX Cartenna must be that garrison we were avoiding on the coast… They took heavy casualties. She’s got the remnants of the Legio VIII Tingis and the X Sabratha in Avignon and Lyons, but apart from that, almost nobody holding down the Langue d’Oc.”

  “Then that’s why we could eat,” Henri Brant offered, “there wasn’t half the number of enemy supply parties out that I expected to see.”

  “We were fucking lucky.”

  “Oh yeah, boss,” Pieter Tyrrell said alcoholically, his arm around Jan-Jacob Clovet’s shoulder – it must, Ash realised, have been pretty much the first time he’d seen his fellow crossbowman since he got back from Carthage. He looked up from puzzling over the maps. “Got us here. Real lucky!”

  “You ain’t got no gratitude, Tyrrell! If I’d taken us up here, where the Venetian captains wanted—” Ash tapped the eastern coast of Italy “—we’d be currently enjoying the hospitality of the two fresh legions that are sitting there watching the Dalmatian coast!”

  Tyrrell grinned. Antonio Angelotti, putting wooden plates and an eating-knife down to trap the edges of his map of Christendom flat, murmured, “I make it fifteen Carthaginian legions in the first invasion, another ten for reinforcement of ports like Pescara, madonna – and five more in reserve. Say perhaps a hundred and eighty thousand troops.”

  In the silence that followed, Robert Anselm gave a low whistle.

  Thomas Rochester prodded Angelotti’s map, and the rough sketches that Digorie Paston and Richard Faversham spread out beside it. “This their deployment? How old’s this news, boss?”

  “Beginning of this month. It’s the most recent overall sit. rep.14 from the Faris back to Carthage. Some of her news is going to be out of date, given the problems travelling through the Dark – especially the legions in northern France and the Germanies… But what we’ve got—”

  Ash stopped, took a breath; walked a pace or two forward and back, in the light from the blazing hearth-fire. A brush-haired younger page, at Rickard’s direction, squatted there in case of embers falling on to the timber floor. His eyes reflected silver as she walked past him, the fit of greaves to her calf-muscles not quite right – too much walking, too little riding, in the last few weeks – and the fit of cuisses to thigh muscles a little clip for the same reason, but all in all (and this, also, she sees in the boy’s eyes) beginning to move with her as if the metal plates are part of her body. Part of her self.

  “What we’ve got” she said, turning to face them, “is what happened during the initial deployment of the invasion – and what happened in phase two: the re-supply and re-deployment of fresh troops. We know where we are now.”

  Simon Tydder, promoted sergeant, and with stubble on the angular bones of his face that are growing out of plump adolescence, squeaked, “We know where we are now, boss. In deep doo-doo…” and then blushed at his change of register.

  “Too fucking right!” Ash slapped his shoulder in passing. “But now we know it in detail!”

  There was a strong smell of horse in the room, as is inevitable with knights. Despite lack of sleep, most of the faces watching her as men crowded around the trestle table, or leaned over the shoulders of the men in front, were aggressive, sharp, keyed-up. Ash blinked against the eye-stinging smell of mould on cold stonework, urine, and wood-smoke. She drew her bollock dagger and plonked it down on the centre of the map.

  “There,” she said. “That was their main thrust. In at Marseilles, and Genoa – where we were lucky enough to meet them—”

  “Lucky, my fucking arsehole!” John Price rumbled.

  Antonio Angelotti murmured, “What you do with your arsehole is entirely up to you…”

  Ash glared at the innocent expression of her master gunner. “Okay. The main force, under the Faris, made two landings: the one I mentioned at Marseilles, and seven additional legions at Genoa.”

  Ludmilla, moving stiffly, leaned past her sergeant, Katherine Hammell, and studied Paston’s sketch. “Agnes was right, then, boss? Thirty thousand men?”

  “Yup.” Ash drew her finger across the map. “The Faris sent three of those legions to raze Milan, Florence, and Italy, while she took her own four legions over the Gotthard into Switzerland. As far as I can make out, she devastated the Swiss somewhere near Lake Lucerne, over several days, and then moved on into Basle. At that point, with the Germanies surrendered, she moved west, met up with the other legions marching north from Lyons, and advanced towards the southern border of Burgundy.”

  “Fuck me, boss, don’t tell me we were facing seven legions at Auxonne!”

  “Oh, we were – but it looks like the scouts were pretty shit-hot on the figures. The rag-heads took heavy casualties getting to Auxonne. By the time we were facing them, we did out-number them.”

  “Shoulda fucked ’em,” Katherine Hammell growled.

  “Yeah, well, we didn’t…”

  “Fucking nancy Burgundians,” John Price added.

  “Fucking war-golems! We’ve held this place, though!” one of the remaining Flemish lance-leaders said: Henri van Veen, his breath thick with wine. At his shoulder, his sergeants nodded enthusiastically.

  “You should have seen us, boss!” Adriaen Campin blurted. The big Flemish sergeant glanced around, hit the table with his clenched fist. “You shoulda been here! It’s been fucking hot, but they haven’t shifted us yet!”

  “We’re not all like that motherfucker van Mander,” the lance-leader beside him said: Willem Verhaecht, another of the Flemings who had stayed with the Lion Azure. His pale face, in fire- and candlelight, was stubbled and scarred, black in places with small crusts of old blood.

  “We’re the Lion; he’s not,” Ash said brusquely. “Okay, as far as I can work it out from the Faris’s casualty reports, the legions coming up from Marseilles took forty per cent casualties against the southern French lords, and the legions she brought up from Genoa lost
fifty per cent of their men to the Swiss. Most of their legions are amalgamated now. Same goes for the Langue d’Oc. The legions over in France took casualties; most of the German ones didn’t…”

  “Fifty per cent?” Thomas Rochester blinked.

  “I’d say by the time she was at Auxonne, she had not much more than fifteen thousand men, total. They took another twenty-five per cent casualties there – some of them from us.” Ash shook her head. “She doesn’t care how many men she loses… That legion and a half outside here, now, is the Legio XIV Utica in shit-hot shape, and the remnants of the XX Solunto and XXI Selinunte in with the tag-end of the VI Leptis Parva. Nearly seven thousand men. Price, tell your lads they got it absolutely right.”

  Most of the men-at-arms grinned. John Price merely grunted a small acknowledgement.

  “Other than that … there’s the French deployment, and the Legio XVII Lixus garrisoning Sicily, holding the naval base, and keeping the entire west of the Mediterranean Carthaginian. She won’t move them. That was the situation towards the middle of August. She brought the second wave in shortly after King Louis and Emperor Frederick surrendered. One extra legion into middle Italy, so that Abbot Muthari could get his bum on the Empty Chair – the XVI Elissa.”

  “Them? Hardcore nutters, boss,” Giovanni Petro offered. “I met them before, in Alexandria.”

  Ash nodded acknowledgement. “Two more legions into North Italy, around Venice, and Pescara, watching the Turk and the Turkish fleet. Another two to reinforce Basle and Innsbruck: that’s the Cantons nailed down, I guess. And two more to keep order in the Holy Roman Empire – one’s stationed in Aachen, with Daniel de Quesada, but the other’s been given orders to march to Vienna: it should be there by now. And then three more legions were sent in to reinforce the Faris.”

  “Shit. Three? ” Robert Anselm queried.

  Ash scrabbled among the papers, settled at last for Rickard reading one of the lists to her, sotto voce. “—the V Alalia, IX Himera, and XXIII Rusucurru. She ordered them to divert around Dijon, fight their way up through Lorraine, and take Flanders. They’re up in the Antwerp-Ghent area; those are the ones we hope Margaret of Burgundy’s army is knocking seven kinds of shite out of.”