by Mary Gentle
Floria, behind her, called, “What the hell do they think they’ve found?”
“This late in the day?” Ash jerked her thumb at the sun, low through the trees behind them, close on mid-morning. “Nothing! There isn’t a bloody rabbit left between here and Bruges. Get up ahead with your aunt.”
“I’ll ride with you – go ahead in a minute—”
“Thomas.” Ash signalled. “Start sending them off. Lance at a time. North first, then west through the woods.”
The man-at-arms nodded, turning his mount awkwardly among wilted banks of briar and dead goldenrod; and spurred back into the company cavalry. She watched the few seconds necessary to see him approach the lance-leaders.
“Florian.” She checked position of her banner, the tag-end of the running crowd among holly, hornbeam, and oak wood; the standard of the Visigoths – out of sight, somewhere back at the edge of the wood. “Get your ass up there with the hunters. When you get back to the city, have everything ready for wounded.”
The surgeon ignored her. “They’re coming back!”
A throng of men on foot and on horse went past, couples of hounds tugging away from their handlers, moving too fast for the rough ground underfoot. Swept back towards a holly thicket, Ash shifted her weight forward and hauled on the rein.
The pale gelding turned. Ash shifted her weight back, tassets sliding over cuisses, and brought the horse around. Apart from Rochester’s sergeant with her banner, a yard or two off her flank, all the riders and people on foot around her now were strangers. She risked a glance off to the far right – to see the backs of men in Lion livery riding out into thicker woods that way – and another look behind her.
Two heavy cataphracts in scale armour, that flashed in the slanting light under the trees, were riding up close behind; the Visigoth company standard caught up somewhere in branches behind them, and fifty or more serf-troops with spears running on foot with the riders.
“It is not their business to be here!” a tight-lipped voice said, at her right side. Ash, turning in her saddle, found herself right beside Jeanne Châlon’s palfrey.
“It is not yours, either!” the woman added, her tone not hostile, but disapproving.
Ash could not now see Soeur-Maîtresse Simeon, or Floria, in the mob. She kept the gelding tightly reined in as he rolled his eye, shifting his hooves on the bank that sloped down ahead of them.
“Better hope the chase doesn’t come back this way!” Ash grinned at Mistress Châlon, and jerked her thumb at the serf-troops running past them through briar and tree-stumps. “What happens to Burgundy if a Visigoth kills the hart?”
Jeanne Châlon’s pursed mouth closed even tighter. “They are not eligible. Nor you, you have not a drop of Burgundian blood in your veins! It would mean nothing: no Duke!”
Ash halted the pale gelding. Water ran black under the leafless trees. A pale sun, above, put white light down through the tall branches. Ahead, men with hose muddy to the thigh, and women with their kittles kilted up and black at the hem, waited patiently to cross a small stream. Ash thumbed the visor of her sallet further up.
A strong smell hit her. Made up of horse – the gelding sweating, as it fretted in the moving crowds of peasants – and of wood-smoke, from distant bonfires, and of the smell of people who do not bathe often and who work out in the air: a ripe and unobjectionable sweat. Tears stung her eyes, and she shook her head, her vision blurring, thinking, Why? What does—
What does this remind me of?
The picture in her head is of old wood, that has been faded to silver and cracked dry by summer upon summer in the field. A wooden rail, by a step.
One of the big roofed wagons, with steps set down into grass; the earth trodden flat in front of it, and grass growing up between the spokes of the wheels.
A camp, somewhere. Ash has a brief associational flavour in her mouth: fermented dandelion, elderflower; watered down to infinitesimal strength, but enough to make the water safe for a child to drink. She remembered sitting on the wagon steps, Big Isobel – who could only have been a child herself, but an older child – holding her on her knee; and the child Ash wriggling to be set down, to run with the wind that ruffled the grasses between lines of tents.
The smell of cooking, from campfires; the smell of men sweating from weapons practice; the smell that wool and linen get when they have been beaten at a river bank and hung out to dry in the open air.
Let me go back to that, she thought. I don’t want to be in charge of it; I just want to live like that again. Waiting for the day when the practice becomes real war, and all fear vanishes.
“Cy va!”
Hounds gave tongue, somewhere far ahead in the wood. The crowd at the stream surged forward, water spraying up. Both her sergeant and banner were gone. Ash swore, unbuckled the strap under her chin, and wrenched her sallet off. She pushed the cropped hair back from her ears, tilted her head, and listened.
A confused noise of hounds echoed between the trees.
“That’s not a scent – or they’ve lost it again.” Ash found that she was speaking to the empty air: the Châlon woman vanished into the throng.
Visigoth serf-troops pounded past on foot, either side of her; most of them with nothing but a helmet and a dark linen tunic, running bloody and barefoot on the forest floor. Skin prickled down the whole length of her spine. She dared not put her hand to her riding sword. She sat poised, bareheaded, waiting, ears alert in the cold wind for the sound of a bow—
“Green Christ!” a voice said at her stirrup.
Ash looked down. A Visigoth in a round steel helm with a nasal bar, arquebus clutched loosely in a dirty hand, had stopped and was staring up at her. Boots, and a mail shirt, marked him out as a freeman; what she could see of his face was weather-beaten, middle-aged, and thin.
“Ash,” he said. “Christ, girlie, they did mean you.”
In the rush of people, the two of them went unnoticed; Ash’s gelding sidling back into the shelter of a beech tree with a few last brown leaves still curled like chrysalides on its twigs; the Visigoth’s mounted officer too busy yelling his men back into some kind of order and off the trail of the hounds.
Alert, safe in her armour, she tucked her sallet under her arm and looked down from the high saddle. “Are you one of Leofric’s slaves? Did I meet you in Carthage? Are you a friend of Leovigild or Violante?”
“Do I sound like a bloody Carthaginian?” The man’s raw voice held offence, and amusement. He cradled the arquebus under one arm and reached up, pulling his helmet off. Long curls of white hair fell down around his face, fringing a bald patch that took up almost all his scalp, and he pushed the yellow-white hair back with a veined hand. “Christ, girl! You don’t remember me.”
The belling of the hounds faded. The hundreds of people might as well have not been present. Ash stared at black eyes, under stained yellow eyebrows. An utter familiarity, coupled with a complete lack of knowledge, silenced her. I do know you, but how can I know anyone from Carthage?
The man said rawly, “The Goths hire mercenaries, too, girlie; don’t let the livery fool you.”
Deep lines cut down the side of his mouth, ridged his forehead; the man might have been in his fifties or sixties, paunchy under the mail, with bad teeth, and white stubble showing on his cheeks.
The gulf that she felt opening around her was, she realised, nothing but the past; the long fall back to childhood, when everything was different, and everything was for the first time. “Guillaume,” she said. “Guillaume Arnisout.”
He had shrunk, and not just by the fact that she sat so high above him. There would be scars and wounds she knew nothing of, but he was so much the same – even white-haired, even older – so much the gunner that she had known in the Griffin-in-Gold that it took her breath: she sat and stared while the hunt raged past, silenced.
“I thought it had to be you.” Guillaume Arnisout nodded to himself. He still wore a falchion; a filthy great curved blade in a scabbard at
his waist, for all he carried a Visigoth copy of a European gun.
“I thought you died. When they executed everybody, I thought you died.”
“I went south again. Healthier overseas.” His eyes squinted, looking up at her, as if he looked into a light. “We found you in the south.”
“In Africa.” And, at his nod, she leaned down from the saddle and extended her hand, grasping his as he offered it; forearm and forearm; his covered in mail, hers in plate. A great smile spluttered out of her, into a laugh. “Shit! Neither of us has changed!”
Guillaume Arnisout looked quickly over his shoulder, moving back into the scant concealment of the branches. Thirty feet away, a Visigoth cataphract bawled furiously and obscenely at the standard-bearer, the eagle still tangled between hornbeam clumps.
“Does it matter to you, girlie? Do you want to know?”
There was no malice, no taunt, in his tone; nothing but a serious question, and the rueful acknowledgement of a nearby sergeant likely to exercise proper discipline for this infringement.
“Do I?” Ash straightened, looking down at him. She abruptly put her sallet back on, unbuckled, and swung down from the saddle. She looped the gelding’s reins around a low branch. Safe, unnoticeable among the passing heads, she turned back to the middle-aged man. “Tell me. It makes no difference now, but I want to know.”
“We were in Carthage. Must be twenty years ago.” He shrugged. “The Griffin-in-Gold. A dozen of us were out in the harbour, one night, drunk, on somebody’s stolen boat. Yolande – you never met her, an archer; she’s dead now – heard a baby crying on one of their honeyboats, so she made us row over there and rescue it.”
“The refuse barges?” Ash said.
“Whatever. We called them honeyboats.”
A shrill horn sounded close by. Both she and the white-haired man looked up with identical alertness, registered a Burgundian noble carrying a lymer across his saddle-bow; and then the rider and hound were past, gone into the people still massing to cross the stream.
“Tell me!” Ash urged.
He looked at her with a pragmatic sadness. “There isn’t much more to tell. You had this big cut on your throat, bleeding, so Yolande took you to one of the rag-head doctors and got you sewn up. Hired you a wet-nurse. We were going to leave you there, but she wanted to bring you back with us, so I had the charge of you in the ship all the way over to Salerno.”
Guillaume Arnisout’s creased, dirty face creased still further. He wiped at his shiny forehead.
“You cried. A lot. The wet-nurse died of a fever in Salerno, but Yolande took you on into camp. Then she lost interest. I heard she got raped, and killed in a knife-fight later on. I lost track of you after that.”
Open-mouthed, Ash stood for a short time. She felt stunned, conscious of the leaf-mulch under her feet, and the warmth of the gelding’s flank at her shoulder; for the rest, was numb.
“You’re saying you saved my life casually and then got bored.”
“Probably wouldn’t have done it if we hadn’t been drunk.” The man’s worn, livid face coloured slightly. “A few years later, I was pretty sure you were the same kid, no one else had that thistledown-colour hair, so I tried to make up for it, a bit.”
“Sweet Christ.”
There’s nothing in this I didn’t know or couldn’t have guessed. Why are my hands and feet numb; why am I dizzy with this?
“You’re the big boss, nowadays.” Guillaume’s rasping voice held scepticism, and a hint of flattery. “Not that I wouldn’t have expected it. You were always keen.”
“Do you expect me to be grateful?”
“I tried to show you how to look after yourself. Stay sharp. Guess it worked. And now you’re this general’s sister, and a big shot on your own account, from what I hear.” His lined cheeks twisted into a smile. “Want to take an old soldier into your company, girlie?”
She wears a fortune on her back, strapped around her body: forged and hardened metal that it would take Guillaume Arnisout decades to buy – if, indeed, he could buy a whole harness in his lifetime. Hers comes from third-share enemy ransoms: one third for the man who makes the capture, one-third for his captain, and one-third for the company commander. At this second, it is nothing but a prison of metal that she would like to shuck off, run through the woods as freely as she did as a child.
“You don’t know the half of it, Guillaume,” Ash says. And then: “I am grateful. There was no reason for you to do any of it. Even casual interest, at the right second – believe me, I’m thankful.”
“So get me out of this bloody serf-army!”
So much for disinterested information.
The wind rubs bare branches together above their heads. The ammoniac stench of disturbed leaf-mulch comes up from the bed of the stream, the black water churned into grey mud by passing men. Ash’s gelding whickers. The flow of people is becoming thinner, now; the Visigoth eagle glints under the thickets of evergreen holly.
I would do it for any man – any mercenary – if he asked me at this moment.
“Lose the kit.” She scrabbled with gauntlet-fingers at the ties of her livery tabard, and gown, that she wears over her armour. By the time the ties loosened, she looked up to see the Carthage-manufactured gun gone who-knows-where, the helmet slung overarm into the stream, and Guillaume with his dirty linen coif tied tight down over his balding head.
She thrust her demi-gown and the crumpled blue-and-gold cloth at him, turned, and sprang herself up into the saddle, the weight of the armour ignored.
“Burgundian!” a harsh voice bawled.
Ash spurred the gelding out of the low-hanging branches and twigs under the beech tree. At her stirrup, an anonymous man in a demi-gown and Lion livery ran beside her, limping from an ancient wound. Mail and falchion: plainly just another European mercenary.
“Which way rides the hunt?”
“Every way!” the Visigoth nazir yelled, in the Carthaginian camp patois. Ash couldn’t help a grin at his frustration. He threw his arms wide in a gesture of despair. “Lady warrior, what in Christ’s sweet name are we doing in this wood?”
“Don’t ask me, I only work here. You!” Ash ordered Guillaume Arnisout, “let’s find the Burgundians, sharpish!”
Burgundians, hell: let’s find the Lion Azure!
The ground was too bad to push the gelding to more than a walk. She spurred across the stream, Guillaume Arnisout splashing after her, and slowed again, riding forward. The sun through the tree-cover let her see roughly where south might be. Another couple of furlongs, and turn west, try and find the edge of the forest, and the river-ford…
“Fuck of a hunt this is,” Guillaume remarked, from beside her stirrup. “Bloody Burgundians. Couldn’t organise a piss-up in an English brewery.”
“Fucking waste of time,” she agreed. She has enjoyed hunting, when the opportunity has presented itself: a noisy organised riot of a rush through bad countryside, not unlike war. This…
Ash removed her sallet again. She rode bareheaded in the chill wind, that the trees robbed of an edge. Too far, by many leagues now, to hear the bell tolling from the Dijon Abbey, and if there are two bells: if Charles the Bold has breathed his last. A brief solemnity touched her.
And too confusing to be able to tell which of the baying hounds, hunting horns, voices shouting “Ho moy!” and horses neighing – all glimpsed a hundred yards away, between tree-trunks – which might be the main body of the hunt.
“Sod this for a game of soldiers.” Ash checked the position of the Visigoth troops behind her. “Ease off to the west…”
With Guillaume beside her, and the pale gelding picking a careful way between tree roots and badger setts, Ash rode across the trampled woodland floor. Briars held tags of cloth on long thorns, witness to men passing.
The white flash of a hound showed a furlong ahead, for a moment, questing busily.
Guillaume Arnisout, and a rider on a scrawny horse emerging from a holly thicket, bawled “Gone a
way!” at the same moment.
“There it is!” The rider – flushed, standing in her stirrups, hood down and hair thick with twigs – was Floria del Guiz. She spurred in a circle and pointed. “Ash! The hart!”
Within seconds, they were the centre of attention: a slew of riders cantering up, with the red Xs of Burgundian livery on their jackets; two ’arifs and the eagle and a flood of serfs in munition-quality helmets pouring into the clearing; twenty huntsmen with leashed couples of hounds pounding between tree-trunks, over fallen branches and briars, sounding horns. The hounds, freed, quested busily, bayed, and shot off in a long trailing column into the forest ahead.
Shit! So much for sneaking off—
A pale flash of colour, ahead. Ash stood in her stirrups. Floria pointed again, shouting something; the horns blowing to let other huntsmen ahead know the hounds had been released drowned her out.
“There it goes! ”
Two greyhounds tore past, under the gelding’s hooves. The reins jerked through her fingers. Ash swore, blood thumping in her veins, pulled back, and felt the gelding gripping the bit between its teeth. It thrust forward into the crowd of Burgundian noblemen, shouldering aside a grey; and cantered beside a chestnut, partnering it, ignored Ash’s attempt to bring it back by wrenching her weight back.
“Ho moy!” Floria bawled to the running-hounds, riding stirrup by stirrup with Ash. Her face flushed puce in the cold air. Ash saw her dig her spurs into the scrawny grey’s flanks, all caution forgotten, everything else lost in the wild excitement of the hunt. “The hart! The hart!”
With her legs almost at full extension from war saddle to stirrups, Ash could do nothing but grab the pommel and cling on. She flew ahead of Guillaume Arnisout. The rough, broken canter jolted her up and down in the saddle. Armour clattered. The gelding, trained for war, chose to forget his training; stretched out to a full gallop and Ash threw herself down as a branch whipped across her face.
