by Mary Gentle
The slash of rain against flint-embedded walls grew heavier. Streamlets of water dribbled down between the planks of the roof above, splattering them and the floorboards irrespectively.
I know what to say, Ash thought. Why can’t I say it?
“So,” he said harshly, “this is where you relieve me of my rank, ain’t it? You know you can’t trust me in combat any more. You think I’ll be watching your back, not doing my job.”
Some tension in her reached crisis. She snapped, “What do you want me to tell you, Robert? The same old stuff? ‘We can all get killed, here and now, any time, better get used to it’? ‘That’s what we do for a living, war gets you killed’? I can sing that song! Six months ago, I’d have said it to you! Not now!”
Robert Anselm reached up and unbuckled his helmet, dipping his head to remove it. The helmet-lining and his body-heat had left his stubbled head slick with sweat. He breathed out, hard.
“And now?”
“It hurts,” Ash said. She pressed her bare knuckle against the wall, grinding skin against stone, as if the physical pain could give her release. “You don’t want to see me hacked up? I don’t want to send you and Angeli and the others up on the walls. I brought these guys back through country like nothing on earth! I don’t want them getting cut up raiding the Visigoths’ camp, or whatever idea de la Marche is going to come up with when I see him. I want to hold us back, go sit in the tower, out of the bombardment – I’m starting to be afraid of people getting hurt.”
There was a long pause. The rain grew louder.
Robert Anselm gave a small, suppressed snuffle. “Looks like we’re both in the shit, then!”
As she stared at him, startled, he burst into a full guffaw.
“Jesus, Roberto—!”
The snuffle caught her by surprise. An emptiness in her chest made her choke, spurt out a giggle; laugh, finally, out loud. It would not be denied: a bubbling thing that made her sputter, wet-eyed, unable to get a coherent word out.
Shuddering to a rumbling halt, Robert Anselm reached across, putting his arm around her shoulders and shaking her.
“We’re fucked,” he said cheerfully.
“It’s nothing to laugh about!”
“Pair of fucking idiots,” he added. His arm fell away as he straightened himself up, plate sliding over steel plate. His eyes still bright; his expression sobered. “Both of us should get out of this game. Don’t think the rag-heads are going to give us the option, though.”
“Fuck, no…” She sucked at her knuckle, and a trickle of blood. “Robert, I can’t do this if I’m afraid of people getting hurt.”
He looked down at her, from where he stood on the flint steps. “Now we find out, don’t we? Whether we’re good at this when it’s really hard? When you have to not care?”
Her nostrils are full of the smell of wet steel, his male sweat, sodden wool, the city’s midden heaps far below. Rain spattered in, spraying her cheeks with a fine, freezing dew. As the wind gusted sharply, she and Anselm turned simultaneously towards the arrow-slit again.
“There’s nobody in charge in here. They must know that! Why isn’t she attacking now!”
She sent a stream of messengers to the ducal palace in the next hour, who came back one after another with word of not being able to get through to the new Duchess, to the Sieur de la Marche, to Chamberlain-Counsellor Ternant; with news of the palace being a chaotic horde of courtiers, undertakers, celebrants, priests and noblemen; simultaneously torn between arranging a crowning and a funeral.
“Captain Jonvelle told me something!” Rickard added, panting, soaked to the skin in the cold wall-tower’s room.
Ash considered asking why he had stopped to gossip with de la Marche’s Burgundian captains; saw his bright face, and decided against it.
“Saps. The rag-heads are still mining. His men can hear them! They’re still digging!”
“Hope they drown,” Ash growled under her breath.
She spent her time pacing the crowded floors of the Byward Tower, among men armed and ready to go out if the walls were threatened; a lance here and there being sent out to watch, to listen, for anything that might be seen or heard in devastating rain.
Forty miles south, down that road – cold darkness, twenty-four hours a day. Given what surrounds Burgundy’s borders… Is it any wonder we’re getting shit weather here?
“Boss…” Thomas Tydder, elbowed forward by his brother Simon, looked at her from under streaming dark hair. When he spoke, a drop of water hanging off the end of his nose wobbled. “Boss, is it true? Has Saint Godfrey deserted us?”
Ash signalled Tydder’s lance-leader to leave him be.
“Not deserted,” she said firmly. “He speaks for us now in the Communion of Saints, you know that, don’t you?”
Relieved and embarrassed, the boy ducked his head in a nod.
Past him, Ash caught sight of Robert Anselm; Roberto’s features utterly impassive. Automatically, she prodded at her soul, as a man may prod in his mouth for a tooth that has been drawn, and that has left only a tender, unfilled gap.
Stepping closer, Anselm murmured, “Is he right?”
The thunder of the falling rain has concealed her whisper, every time she speaks aloud to Godfrey, to the Stone Golem, even – Christus! – to the Wild Machines themselves. Anselm knows, though.
“Still nothing I can understand,” she said succinctly.
“Lion and Boar preserve us,” Anselm rumbled. “Is that good or bad?”
“Fuck knows, Robert!”
The frustration of waiting seared through her: she would have welcomed anything, even the anticipated thump of siege-ladders and flood of Visigoth men over the city wall. She stomped towards the tower’s open doorway.
The roar of fuse-flames and the shatter of clay pots echoed along the wall, and blue-and-yellow fire spread in a ripple across the stone surface of the parapet, and burned unhindered by the torrential rain. All the leather buckets of earth and sand that lined the walls grew sodden and too heavy to lift.
Ash signalled her men to leave it alone, and watched the gelatinous flaming mixture gradually washed over the flagstones and down the inside of the city walls. There’s nothing much left to burn down there anyway: we won’t have a city-fire.
Some forty minutes or so before she judged the last light might leave the iron-grey, pelting sky, two very solidly built Burgundian men-at-arms appeared in the tower doorway, with a slighter man between them.
“Boss!” Thomas Rochester, running along with them - ducking at every embrasure, stumbling into the dark shelter of the tower – bawled a report. “Euen’s back!”
Heads turned in the tower room, and all along the rows of Lion men-at-arms settled in the brattices, and behind merlons, in the pouring rain; men crowding to see the small, wiry figure trot along the stone parapet in Burgundian custody.
“He’s one of ours, Sergeant.” Ash broke into a tremendous grin. “Son of a bitch…”
The Burgundians saluted, a little cautiously, and made their way back out into the rain. Ash gave a laugh of sheer relief at the bedraggled Welshman dripping water, shivering in the icy wind, but with a grin brilliant enough to shine through the growing twilight.
“Somebody get this idiot a cloak! Euen, in here!”
She waited as one of the baggage women handed Euen Huw a bowl of tepid soup.
“You’re wet, Euen … really wet.”
“Came in through a water-gate, didn’t I?” he said gravely, soup spilling down his unshaven chin. “Down by the mills. Swum the moat. Some Burgundian bastard nearly nailed me with an arrow, too. They keep a good watch down there.”
“Information,” Ash said.
Euen Huw sighed, leaning back against the flint-embedded wall, and relaxing with immeasurable relief. “When we were out on that hunt? I got as far as the rag-head camp, see, all ready to take out their boss, but no one was with me. Then they Carthaginian bastards all come back in a hell of a rush; I got separate
d from my lance, and it’s taken me the rest of today to sneak back out of their camp.”
Ash pictures the man with his betraying livery stuffed into a bundle, eating (and no doubt, drinking) with Visigoth freemen and slaves and mercenaries; paying close attention to camp-rumour and official statements.
“Jesu Christus! Okay. First thing. Are they deploying for an attack?”
“Can’t tell, boss. I had to come out through the siege-engine park, didn’t see what they was doing up the north end.”
Ash frowned. “Is the Faris still alive?”
“Oh, she’s alive, boss, she just fell over, that’s all.”
“‘Fell over’?”
“A God-touched fit,2 boss. Foaming! They say she’s back up again now, but a bit groggy.”
Unaware that she was scowling, Ash thought, Shit! If she’d died, all our problems would be solved—!
“Someone said she gave orders she was going back to Carthage, then she cancelled them,” Euen added.
A hope that Ash was not aware of holding shrivelled up, in that second.
So much for her going back and persuading House Leofric to destroy the Stone Golem.
Ash did not say Godfrey? The unnerving unintelligibility in her mind, constant now for five hours, built towards unbearable tension in her.
“Her officers hate it, though.” Euen’s black eyes twinkled. “By what I heard, every one of their qa’ids is hoping he’s got enough support to make him commander in her place.”
“Well, isn’t that a nice little morale problem for them?” Her mock-sympathy was transparent enough for Euen Huw to chuckle. “That’s why they haven’t mounted any full assaults?”
“Maybe it’ll be down to ‘starve us out’ now, boss.” The Welshman looked thoughtfully at the scraped-clean bottom of his bowl, and carefully placed his spoon in it. “Or blow up them walls. Tell you something, though, boss. I nearly didn’t make it back here. Never mind dodging Mister Mander’s boys, and our Agnes Dei – the rag-heads are reinforcing their perimeter-guards all round the city.”
“They can’t sew the whole place up. Too much ground to cover.”
Euen Huw shrugged. “Jack Price might know more, boss. I saw him in with their spearmen. He back yet, is he?”
“Not yet.” Ash shifted, noting Rickard at the tower door, and two or three lance-leaders with him; obvious questions on their faces. “Get your lads to make you comfortable, Euen. That was some trick you pulled.” She let him turn away before she said, “Good to have you back…”
“Oh yes.” The Welshman lifted his arms, encompassing all the pounding rain, fire-scarred stone, and demolished houses of the besieged city. With breath-taking sarcasm, he said, “Can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be, boss.”
“Yeah, well.” She grinned back at him. “You never were too bright.”
Slow darkness fell: the rain continued to pound.
There was no word from the ducal palace.
The Faris isn’t attacking. Why?
What have the Wild Machines done to her?
She went back at last to the company’s tower, where her pages snipped her points, unshelling her from her armour, and slept a black sleep without dreams of boars. Before dawn she was up and armoured again, blundering around in the candlelit darkness to the noise of thunder and sleeting rain, riding out with the next shift of men-at-arms to the walls.
An hour or so after an indistinguishable dawn came – the rain growing brighter – she and an escort rode back through the streets of Dijon. Visibility was no better in this morning light: rain bounced back up off the cobbles, everything more than twenty yards off was a mist. Heading towards the ducal palace, they got lost.
Her nameless pale bay war-horse picked its hooves delicately up out of shit. The rain that flooded the streets flooded middens, too. Ash wrinkled her nostrils at the acrid stench, guiding the horse carefully on the thin film of liquid muck that spread over the cobbles.
Jan-Jacob Clovet lifted a soaking wet arm. “Down that way, boss! I recognise that tavern.”
She grinned at the crossbowman who, having been with the part of the company that stayed in Dijon, had an intimate knowledge of its inns, taverns and ordinaries. “Lead on…”
She spent two hours not getting in to the ducal palace to see Floria del Guiz, or the Viscount-Mayor, or Olivier de la Marche; being asked to wait among crowds of civilian and military petitioners by embarrassed Burgundian men-at-arms at whom she did not choose to shout, since they were obeying the orders of people much like herself.
But at least there are people here. They haven’t stolen the arms, the plate, the linen, and the furniture, and legged it over to the Visigoths. Good sign?
Back at the city wall, she had to stand aside for a procession of her men coming down, two Greek Fire casualties with them; and Father Faversham treading the wet stone steps carefully in their wake.
He put his hood back from his bearded pale face, gazing down at her. “Captain, will Florian come back to the hospital soon? We need her!”
I didn’t even think of that.
Every muscle in her body ached, the rain seeped in and made her silk arming doublet sodden, and a film of rust browned the Milanese white harness. She shook her head, giving a great whuf! of breath that blew the rain out of her face.
“I don’t know, Father,” she said. “Do what you can.”
Treading up the rain-slick flint steps to the Byward Tower again, she thought, That isn’t the only reason I’ve got to talk to Florian! Shit, what’s happening here?
Towards Nones, a runner brought her back from patrolling that corner of the city that includes the north-west gate and two towers of the northern wall. She stopped briefly with bowed head in the rain as one of the Burgundian priests led prayers for the feast of St Gregory.3 Entering the Byward Tower, she was momentarily free of the spatter of rain on armour. She climbed up the stout wooden steps to the top floor, emerging out into the water-blasted air, where Anselm and his sub-captains stood at the crenellations, in draggled Lion liveries turned from yellow and blue to black by the rain.
“It’s easing off!” Anselm bellowed, over the noise of the wind.
“You say!”
Walking forward, she did feel the drenching hiss of the rain lessen. She stood beside Anselm and looked out from the tower. Across the empty air, she realised she was seeing several hundred yards more of broken earth, to the rain-shrouded movable wooden barriers protecting the Visigoth saps.
“What the fuck is that?” she demanded.
Visibility shifted. She became aware of the shrouded grey lumps of Visigoth barrack-tents, five hundred yards north of the city walls; and the glimmer of grey brilliance beyond that marked the Suzon river, emerging from the concealing rain.
Beyond Dijon’s moat, beyond the no-man’s-land of ravaged ground between the city and the enemy, something was new. Ash squinted. In front of the Visigoth tents and defences – wet, raw, obviously newly turned – great banks of earthworks surrounded the north side of Dijon.
“Fucking hell…” she breathed.
“Fuck,” Anselm said, equally blankly. “Trenches?”
Men moved, as the rain lessened. Emerging from trenches, mud-soaked and exhausted, hundreds of Visigoth serfs were collecting in the open spaces of the enemy camp. Even at this distance, she could see some men holding others up.
She could just make out that they were kneeling, to be blessed.
Brightly visible, animal-headed banners and eagles bobbed between the canvas walls. Arian priests with their imaginifers4 were walking in the muddy lanes between the tents, in procession – the sound of cornicens5 shrilled out. As she watched, armed men came piling out of wet, sagging canvas shelters, to also stand and wait for a blessing. More than one procession! Ash realised; her eye caught by another imaginifer down towards the western bridge.
The incessant noise of rain thinned, died. Ash stared out through her steaming breath at a light-grey sky, and high, moving cloud. At
the expanse of river, river-valley, and enemy camp; sodden under the afternoon sky.
“Frigging hell…”
Her gaze came back to the earthworks. Beside her, Anselm’s sergeant snarled to keep order among the escort. Anselm gripped two merlons and leaned out between them. She turned and stared to the east, trying to take in as much of the camp outside the city as she could see.
“Son of a bitch,” Robert said flatly, at her ear.
Over on the west bank of the Suzon, men were taking covers off siege-machines; she could see crews winding the winches. Golem-crewed Visigoth trebuchets hurled rocks in high arcs – she could not see where they were landing; south, probably; stone splinters shrapnelling the streets. It was not what she looked at.
Dozens of palisade-sheltered trenches zigzagged out to the east, and to the west. She stared out at great mazes of diggings, shored up in the wet; rank upon rank of them, stretching along as far as she could see.
Ash leaned herself out, to see as far as possible either side.
“Even if they dug for the last forty-eight hours—!” Anselm broke off. “It’s impossible!”
“Disposable serf labour. They don’t care how many hundreds they kill.” Ash slammed her palm against the stone. “Jonvelle heard digging! It wasn’t saps. It was this. Golem-diggers, Robert! If they used everything—”
She sees again the marble and brass of the messenger-golems in the Faris’s tent: their impassive stone faces, their tireless stone hands.
“—who knows how many golems they’ve got! That’s how they did this!”
There is no break in the walls of thrown-up earth, no interrupted part of the trench-system that now zigzags from the Suzon clear across these acres upon acres of land north of the city wall, maybe clear to the Ouche river in the east. And they have chained boats across the river at this bridge, too.
“Robert.” Her voice was dry; she swallowed. “Robert, send a runner to Angelotti, and to de la Marche’s ingeniatores. Ask how far these earthworks and trenches extend. I want to know if they do cover the east and the south, the way it looks like they do.”
Anselm leaned back from staring westwards, at the earthworks defending the siege-engine camp. “No breaks that I can see. Christus! They must have worked through the nights—”
