by Mary Gentle
Anselm shook his bull head. “Truce be buggered. I’d kill any Burgundian noble who stuck his head outside, if I was Goth commander. De la Marche thinks he can be in and out of here like a rat up a drain-pipe!”
“This whole hunt is mad,” Ash said, lowering her voice, under the noise of the single bell. “That’s good. The confusion will work for us. But I should start praying, if I were you…” A brief grin. “Roberto; I’ll take picked men; volunteers only.”
“Poor bastards!” Robert Anselm gave a glance at the Lion captains sorting their men out into units, in the square. “The ones you took to Carthage. They believe they’re ‘heroes’ now. They forget they got their asses kicked. And the ones that stayed here, they think they missed out, so they can’t wait to get stuck in. They’ll think you’ve got a plan.”
Alert to nuance, Ash said, “I’d planned to leave Angelotti in charge here, the gunners need keeping under control. I think the foot needs an officer, too – maybe you should stay in Dijon, not volunteer to come with me now.”
She expected a protest, along the lines of let Geraint Morgan do it! Anselm only glanced at the city gates, and nodded acknowledgement.
“I’ll put a watch up on the walls,” he grunted. “Soon as I see you attack the camp, we’ll shoot from here, add to the confusion. Sod the truce. Anything else, girl?”
His gaze slid away from hers.
“No. Sort out all the mounts you can for the men who’re coming with me on this.”
Ash stood in the weak sun, watching him walk away; a broad-shouldered man in English plate, his scabbard tapping against his leg armour as he walked.
“Robert’s turning down a fight?” Floria said incredulously, at her elbow.
“I need someone smart to stay in the city.”
The surgeon looked at her with a brief, cynical expression. She did not say his nerve’s gone, but Ash read it on her face.
“He’ll be okay,” Ash said gently. “We all get like that. My nerve isn’t brilliant right now. Maybe it’s something about sieges. Give him a day or two.”
“We may not have a day.” Floria bit her lip. “I’ve seen you talk to Godfrey. I’ve seen you turned around by the Machines – we all have. I know it as well as the rest of this sorry lot: we may only have an hour, now. We don’t know how long until it happens.”
A familiar coldness insulated Ash. “I’ll do this without Robert. He knows what I’m planning here could be a one-way trip. I need people with me who know that – and still come.”
On the far side of the square, the town clock struck ten. Its chimes battered the silence. Ash saw people unwrapping bread from dirty kerchiefs, sitting and eating on heaps of fallen bricks and furniture; all of it done in a contained, reverent practicality.
Floria closed her fingers around Ash’s hand in its chill metal gauntlet. She said, as if the effort were suddenly too great, “Don’t do this. Please. You don’t need to. Leave your sister alive. There’ll be another Duke in an hour or two. You’re going to get yourself killed for no reason.”
Ash turned her hand so that she could clasp the woman’s hand, carefully, between metal and linen. “Hey. I spend my life risking getting killed for no reason! It’s my job.”
“And I get sick of stitching you back together!” Floria scowled. She looked, despite the dirt lining her face, very young: a youth wrapped in doublet and demi-gown, candle-wax drippings white down the front of her cloak. She smelled of herbs, and old blood. “I know you need to do this. And you’re scared. I know it. You’re not talking with Godfrey, either.”
“No.” The thought of speaking, or listening, brought a dryness to Ash’s mouth. In that part of herself that she has shared for a decade, there is a growing tension; an oppression, like the pressure before a storm. The silent presence of the Wild Machines.
“At least see the Duke chosen, before you try military suicide!” Floria’s voice was gruff, with a raw dark humour. “There’ll be as much confusion in their camp after that as before. Maybe more. They might even be more off-guard. Come on, you’re telling me you don’t want to see de la Marche become Duke?”
Responding to the humour, to the woman’s plain attempt to control her own emotion, Ash said lightly, “I thought no one knew who gets chosen?”
Floria squeezed her hand hard and released it. Thickly, she said, “Technically, no. Technically, anyone with Burgundian ducal blood’s eligible. Hell, with the way the noble families intermarry, that’s about every arms-bearing family between here and Ghent!”
Ash flicked a glance towards Adriaen Campin, where he did a last kit-check for Verhaecht’s other Flemish men. “Hey, maybe we’ve got the next Duke of Burgundy riding with the company!”
That made Floria wipe her eyes, and grin cynically. “And maybe Olivier de la Marche isn’t the experienced noble military candidate. Come on. Who do you think they’re going to pick?”
“You mean when they open up the deer and look at the entrails, or whatever it is they do here, it’s going to say ‘Sieur de la Marche’ in illuminated capitals all over it?”
“That’s about the size of it, I guess.”
“Makes life easier.” Ash shook her head. “Why go to the bother of hunting the fucking thing! Christus. I’ll never understand Burgundians – present company excepted, of course.”
When she looked at Floria, it was to see the young woman smiling at her, eyes warm, wiping her nose with a dirty rag.
“You don’t understand a damn thing.” Floria’s voice shook. “For the first time in my life, I wish I knew how to hack someone up with your bloody meat-cleavers. I want to ride with you, Ash. I don’t want to see you ride off on this suicidal, stupid idea and not be there—”
“I’d sooner throw a mouse into a mill-wheel. You’d stand about as much chance.”
“And what chance do you stand!”
That this morning – the clouds thinning in the north, no more flurries of snow; the sun harsh and white in the south; the air full of the scent of broken evergreen – that this may be the last morning she sees: it is not new to her. But it is never old; never something which one becomes used to. Ash took a deep breath, into lungs that seemed dry and cold and constricted with fear.
“If we do take out the Faris, all hell will break loose. Then I’ll get the guys out in the confusion. Listen, you’re right, this is suicidally stupid, but it won’t be the first thing to succeed simply because it is. No one out there is expecting anyone to actually do this.”
She reached out quickly as Floria turned on her heel to stalk off, and grabbed her arm.
“No. This is the hard bit. You don’t go off and cry in a corner. You get to stand here with me and look like we know it’s going to work.”
“Christ, you’re a hard bitch!”
“You can talk, surgeon. You feed my guys up with opium and hemlock,2 and chop their arms and legs off without a second thought.”
“Hardly that.”
“But you do it. You sew them up – knowing they’re coming back to this.”
After a silence, Floria muttered, “And you lead them, knowing they wouldn’t do this for anyone else.”
A flurry of activity among the Burgundian nobles made Ash turn her head. She saw lords and their escorts mounting up, on what nags and palfreys three months’ siege had left in the city; a clarion rang out; and a hunting horn over that shrillness. All across the square, people began getting to their feet.
In the part of her soul that listens, ancient voices mutter, just below the threshold of hearing.
Ash said briskly. “All right – but stay with the hunt, Florian, where it’s safe. I’ll break off immediately the full cry sounds. I can’t wait until the hunt’s over to attack. We can’t wait for anything, now.”
II
Riding out through the zigzag siege trenches that extended due north of the city, Ash’s neck prickled. Silent Visigoth detachments stood and watched them pass.
She swivelled in her war saddle. Black and m
assed as ants, a Visigoth spear-company fell in behind the cavalcade.
“Lousy bloody hunt, this is,” Euen Huw complained.
Ash has an immediate tactile memory: six months ago, riding from Cologne at the Holy Roman Emperor’s own lackadaisical pace towards the siege at Neuss, and stopping for a day’s hunting. Frederick III had had the regulation trestle tables spread with white linen set up in the forest, for his noblemen to have their dawn breakfast at. Ash crammed her mouth full with white bread while lymerers returned from their various quests and unfolded, from the hems of their doublets, fumays, which they spread on the cloth, each debating the merits of his own particular beast.
The hot June sun and German forests faded in her memory.
“They don’t find a hart soon, see,” the Welsh captain added, “and there won’t be a hunt at all. We’ll have scared off the game for leagues around!”
His gaze was febrile. Ash, without appearing to watch, took in Euen Huw, Thomas Rochester and Willem Verhaecht; the armoured escort that rode with her and her banner; and her fifty men riding behind.
It has been a scramble to raise even fifty battle-trained horses.
Is this enough men? Can we break into their camp, with this?
“Watch for my signal,” she said briefly. “Break off by lances as soon as we’re in tree-cover.”
And hope we can go without an alarm going up.
The wind outside Dijon’s walls blew chill from the two rivers. Sun winked from Visigoth helmets – the amazing, still-new, still-welcome sun. Ash wore her demi-gown over her harness, the thick wool belted at the waist so that her arms would be unencumbered. The pale sun shone back also from the armour of her men, and from the rich, dirty reds and blues of the Burgundian liveries a few yards ahead.
Thin, across the cold air, the noise of clapper against bell struck, singly.
“I can hear the abbey bell, boss,” Thomas Rochester said. “Charlie’s still with us.”
“Not for long. Our surgeon had a word with his – he’s in a coma; has been since Matins—” Seeing de la Marche stopping, on the verge of the trees, Ash reined in, checking the pale bay with a curse. Silent people on foot crowded the horses: peasants, townsmen, huntsmen. An anxious whining rose from the hounds.
“Wait here.” She shouldered the gelding forward with only Thomas Rochester and a lance escort. The Duke’s deputy had dismounted. He stood, surrounded by a dozen men with silent square-muzzled lymers.
“Bloody Burgundians. Ought to have my old granddad here,” Thomas Rochester muttered. “Used to reckon, boss, if you showed him a fumay, he could tell you if the beast was an old or a young one, a male or a female. Just from a turd. ‘A fat long and black ’un’s a hart often.’ That’s what he used to say.”
Fifty men’s nowhere near enough. But the foot troops couldn’t keep up. Fifty cavalry, medium and heavy; we need to smash our way into the camp – I need to know how she’s deployed her troops; where she is—
She bit down on her lip, within a split second of automatically speaking aloud to the machina rei militaris.
No! Not to the Stone Golem, not to Godfrey: because the Wild Machines are there, I can feel them—
A swelling pressure in her soul.
The Faris won’t have reported through the Stone Golem anyway.
“Is that the word of you all?” Olivier de la Marche asked. The bluff armoured man had the look of someone who would far rather be organising a tournament or a war. Ash wondered briefly if the Duke’s deputy would be a Duke who could keep control of an invaded country: war here, war in Lorraine, war in Flanders…
The white-bearded lymerer looked around for confirmation at his fellows. “True, my lord. We’ve been out on foot since before dawn. Downriver, to the plains, and east and west to the hills. West and north, to the forests. All the hollows are cold. All the fumays are old. There are no beasts.”
“Oh, what!” Ash exclaimed under her breath. She risked a glance back. No more than quarter of a mile outside the Visigoth camp: too soon to break off.
But if there’s not going to be a hunt—
Olivier de la Marche stomped around and held up both hands, in an unnecessary demand for silence. He bellowed: “The quest has found no beasts! The land is empty!”
“’Course it’s bloody empty!” Thomas Rochester snorted with self-disgust. “Shit, boss, think about it! They’ve got a bloody army camped here. The rag-heads probably ate everything in sight months ago! Boss, you can forget this, it ain’t gonna happen.”
From the men and women around them, like the mumbled response of a mass, many voices echoed: “The land is empty.”
Olivier de la Marche swung himself back up into his saddle in a clatter of armour. Ash heard him order the huntsmen.
“Send the lymers back. We will have no scent to follow. Bring the running-hounds. Send the greyhound relays to the north.” He raised his voice: “North, to the wildwood!”
A swirl of people went past Ash. The pale bay gelding whickered, half kicking out; and she brought him back under control in time to see all the men, women and children on foot streaming past, in the wake of the mounted Burgundian nobles. The black standard of the Visigoth company bobbed at their rear. She saw a number of cavalry with the spearmen: mounted archers.
Archers. Shit.
“Let’s go!” She raised her arm and jerked it forward. The bay wheeled, and she brought it up with the mounted men-at-arms and archers of the Lion, falling in beside her banner and Euen Huw.
“Go where, boss?” Thomas Rochester demanded.
Ash rapped out crisp orders. “North. Ride for the trees. Once in cover, break off; then rendezvous at the ford on the west river.”
Verhaecht’s Flemings pushed ahead, so that she rode towards the rear of the company, among faces she knew. A thin youth turned his head away: she recognised Rickard, forbidden to ride on this assault, and said nothing – too late, now.
“This is stupid!” Rochester fumed, riding by her side. “How can he send the hounds out, when he doesn’t know which way the beast is likely to run? And there isn’t a beast! How can they hunt when there isn’t a quarry, boss?”
With automatic cheerfulness, Ash said, “That’s Burgundians for you.”
A low chuckle went around the riders. She sensed their apprehension, the immediate excitement of daring oozing away. She glanced up at her banner. There’s a reasonable chance they won’t follow me for this. It’s murder. Can I get to the Faris on my own? Ride back, give myself up, smuggle a dagger in – no. No. She knows she’s the target.
Pushing the gelding across, she rode out to the edge of her company, to where ladies in padded headdresses and veils rode sidesaddle on underfed palfreys. Floria’s big-boned scrawny grey stood out like a mercenary in church. The surgeon spurred across to her from Jeanne Châlon’s side.
“What are we doing?” Ash called.
“Fuck knows!” Coming closer, ignoring the appalled stares of the crowd on foot, Floria lowered her voice. “Don’t ask me, ask de la Marche, he’s Master of Game for this one! Girl, it’s November. We won’t find so much as a wren out here. This is mad!”
“Where’s he taking us?”
“North-east, upriver. Into the wildwood.” Floria pointed from the saddle. “Up ahead, there.”
The head of the column was already in the edge of it, Ash saw. Riding among leafless trees, brown branches stark against the pale sky. She slowed the gelding’s pace as they began to come among tree-stumps. Chopped bark displayed weeping pale wood. The scent of wood-smoke went up from a number of campfires; one stump had a rusting axe left sticking in it. Of the wood-gatherers and charcoal burners and swine-herds she would have expected to see, in peacetime, there was no sign. Gone, weeks before, as refugees.
“There,” Floria said, as if she realised what Ash had been looking for.
Where she pointed, men in black coifs and sodden wool tunics and bare legs walked with the hunters, talking animatedly to the men with their le
ashed couples of hounds. One elderly, stout man carried a taper, its flame all but invisible in the sunlight.
This cultivated edge of the forest was all hornbeam, coppiced down to thin thumb-width growth; and ash, for staves, and hazel, for nuts in season. All the winter-dark branches stood equally bare. The last chestnuts and leaves hung from bigger trees. Ash glanced down to bring the gelding around a stump, lifted her gaze, and found that she had lost the walkers and riders at the edges of the cavalcade in the multiple thin thickets. The horses’ hooves sounded softer on leaf-mulch and muddy moss.
Ahead, with de la Marche’s banner, the bearded huntsman lifted his horn to his lips. A shattering call split the silent, crowded wood. Handlers bent down to the leashes of the running-hounds, uncoupled them; and a bellow went up: “Ho moy, ho moy!”
Another handler shouted at his hounds by name: “Marteau! Clerre! Ribanie! Bauderon!”
The Soeur-Maîtresse of the filles de pénitence dug her heels into her palfrey and shot past Ash. “Cy va! Cy va!”
“Ho moy!” Jeanne Châlon wheezed. Her little wheat-coloured mare dug in its heels, among the fallen sticks under the chestnut trees and oaks. She gestured energetically at Floria. “Ride for us! Be my witness!”
“Yes, Tante!”
A surge of men running pushed them apart from the women riders, Ash with Floria’s rangy beast shoving close to her gelding’s rump. Heart thumping, she all but gave in and spurred over the cut trees and rough ground in the wake of the Burgundians, caught up in the chase. She leaned her weight in, turning back towards Thomas Rochester and Willem Verhaecht and the men.
“Get in among the trees!” she yelled. A glance back south showed her more riders, more men running on foot, and the Visigoth banner just entering the line of the wood.
Floria yelped, “Ho moy!” at the hounds, streaming away through bush and briar, and reluctantly reined in back beside Ash, cheeks flushed. Bare branches rubbed together over their heads, creaking, audible over the clink of tack and the rapid footsteps. The hounds’ shrill baying ran ahead. The press of men and women running up from behind forced Ash into a trot, ducking low branches, careful on the broken earth.
