by Mary Gentle
Ash sees it, as if she has been there: the bent backs of serfs, digging wet dirt, illuminated by Greek Fire torches. And the stone golems that man the trebuchets and the flame-throwers and carry messages, all of them set to digging; stone hands invulnerable to pain, unmindful of any need to rest.
Surrounding the entire city.
The horns of the cornicens shrilled through the wet air, and she heard the voice of a cantador chanting.
“They’ve got patrols going into all those defences.” Robert Anselm lifted a plate-covered arm, pointing. “Bloody hell. Looks like most of a legion.”
“Fucking Green Christ!”
Even at Neuss, there were men who could slip the siege lines in either direction; gather information, desert, spread treachery and rumour, raid the besiegers’ supplies, attempt assassination. There always are. Always.
This isn’t a normal siege.
Nothing about this has ever been normal!
“We’re going to have hell’s own job getting anybody past that,” Ash said. “Never mind sallying out for any kind of attack.”
She turned away from the battlements.
“I’m going back to the palace. You, you and you: with me. Roberto – we have to speak to Florian.”
III
As the rain eased off, a chain of men-at-arms passed rock-damaged beams and rafters up the steps from the city below, jamming the makeshift wooden struts in wherever hoardings could be reinforced. Antonio Angelotti, apparently oblivious to the stone splinters now spraying off the outside walls, and the thud and boom of Visigoth cannon-fire, lifted his hand in greeting, standing back from his crews running cannon up the steps to the parapet.
“I wish I were an amir’s ingeniator again, madonna!” He wiped dripping yellow-and-blue dyed plumes away from his archer’s sallet, out of his eyes, smiling at her. “Have you seen what they’ve done out there? The skill—”
“Fuck your professional appreciation!”
The broad excitement in his smile did not alter as another chunk of limestone slammed into the wall ten feet below the battlements, shaking the parapet under their feet.
“Make us up more mangonels and arbalests!”6 Ash raised her voice over the noise of the men. “Get Dickon – no – whoever’s taken over as master smith—”
“Jean Bertran.”
“—Bertran. I want bolts and rock-chuckers. I don’t want us to run out of powder before we have to.”
“I’ll see to it, madonna.”
“You’re coming with me.” She squinted a glance at the clearing afternoon sky; judged how fast the temperature fell now that the sky was clearing. “Rochester, take over here – unless it’s a Visigoth attack, I don’t want to hear about it! You keep Jussey under control, Tom.”
“Yes, boss!”
A continuous shattering bombardment began to split and crack the air – great jagged rocks the size of a horse’s carcass; iron shot that fissured the merlons of the battlements. Ash braced herself and walked down the dripping steps from the wall to street-level, Robert Anselm, Angelotti, and her banner-bearer behind her. She hesitated for a moment before mounting up, gaze sweeping the demolished open space immediately behind the walls.
“Feels more dangerous than the fucking battlements!”
Angelotti inclined his head, while settling his sallet more firmly on his damp yellow ringlets. “Their gunners have got the elevation for this area.”
“Oh, joy…”
She touched a spur to the bay, which skittered sideways on the wet cobbles before she hauled its head around, and pointed it towards the distant, intact roof-lines of the city. Giovanni Petro and ten archers – all drawn from men who had not been to Carthage – fell in around her, bow-strings under their hats in this wet, hands close to falchions and bucklers, wincing away from the sky as they strode though the rubble. The leashed mastiffs Brifault and Bonniau whined, almost under the bay’s hooves.
Robert Anselm rode in silence over the sopping ground. He might have been another anonymous armoured man, one of de la Marche’s remaining Burgundians, but for his livery. She could read nothing of what she could see of his expression. Angelotti glanced up continually as he rode, letting his scrawny mount put her hooves where she might – calculating the ability of enemy gunners? The sky began to turn white, wet, clear; with a tinge of yellow on the south-west horizon. Perhaps two hours of light left now, before autumn’s early sunset.
Florian. The Faris. Godfrey. John Price. Shit: why don’t I know what’s happening with anybody!
Inquiries have brought her no information, either, about a white-haired hackbutter of middle age, in borrowed Lion Azure livery. If Guillaume Arnisout came into Dijon in yesterday’s mad rush, he’s keeping quiet about it.
What did I expect? Loyalty? He knew me when I was a child-whore. That isn’t enough to bring anybody over to this side of these walls!
“Will we get in to see the doc?” Anselm pondered.
“Oh, yeah. You watch me.”
The wreckage of homes and shops behind the gate is deserted – ‘work-teams of citizens and Burgundian military have cleared paths through the burned and battered buildings, pulling them down completely where necessary. Making a maze of deserted ruins. There is no wall left standing higher than a man’s height.
“I want some of the lads down here. Make this lot into barricades. If the rag-heads take the north-west gate, we might hold them if we’ve got something to anchor a line-fight on.”
“Right.” Anselm nodded.
She rode at a walk, not risking laming the gelding. If they get us, they get us. The slam and shatter of rock two hundred yards off made her flinch. Another dark object flashed through the air: high, close. She tensed, expecting a crash. No noise came.
Giovanni Petro’s sharp face creased. “Fucking hell, boss!”
“Yeah. I know.”
The escort straggled out in front and behind, automatically spacing themselves. She nodded to herself. A cold wind blew in her face. Rain still ran off the wreckage of masonry and oak beams. Shifting her weight to bring the pale gelding around the corner of a half-house, she saw four of the archers clustered around something – no, two things, she corrected herself – on the earth. Petro straightened up as she rode forward, hauling the mastiffs back by their studded collars.
“Must have been that trebuchet strike, boss,” the Italian grunted brusquely. “No missile. A man’s body; come down in two places. The head’s over here.”
Ash said steadily, “One of ours.”
Or else you wouldn’t be giving it a second look.
“I think it’s John Price, boss.”
Signalling Anselm and Angelotti to stay on their horses. Ash swung herself out of the war saddle and down. She side-stepped around the men picking up a severed torso and legs from shattered cobbles.
As she passed the two crossbowmen, Guilhelm and Michael, their grip slipped. A mass of reddish-blue intestines plopped out of the body’s cavity, into puddles. Fluid leaked away into the water.
Without looking at her, Guilhelm mumbled, “We ain’t found his arms yet, boss. Might have come down someplace else.”
“It’s all right. Father Faversham will still give him Christian burial.”
Beyond them, a woman in a hacked-off kittle and hose knelt in the mud, her steel war-hat tilted back, crying. Her face shone red and blubbered with weeping. As she looked up at Ash’s approaching clatter, Ash recognised Margaret Schmidt.
Margaret Schmidt held a severed head between her hands. It was recognisable. John Price.
“Look on the bright side,” Ash said, more for Giovanni Petro’s ears than those of the gunner. “At least he was dead before they shot him over the walls.”
Petro gave a snort. “There’s that. Okay, Schmidt – put the head in the blanket with the rest of him.”
The young woman lifted her head. Her eyes filled again with tears. “No!”
“You fucking little cunt, don’t you talk to me like—!”
<
br /> “Okay.” Ash signalled Petro, jerking her head. He moved reluctantly back to the work-detail shifting Price’s body. She was aware of her mounted officers watching. She saw how the woman’s fingers were pressing into the flesh of the severed head. Dried blood patched her skin and kirtle-front.
Not dead that long before they shot him over, then.
She called back to Anselm, “Need to check if he’s been tortured.” Could he have told them anything worth hearing? Then, more gently, turning back to Margaret Schmidt: “Put him down.”
The woman’s gaze went flat and cold. Anger, or fear, sharpened her features. “This is somebody’s head, for Christ’s sake!”
“I know what it is.”
Full Milanese armour does not easily allow squatting. Ash went down on one knee beside the woman.
“Don’t make an issue out of this. Don’t make Petro have to hand you over to the provosts. Do it now.”
“No—” Margaret Schmidt looked down into features beaten purple and bloody, but still recognisable as the Englishman John Price. She sounded on the verge of throwing up. “No, you don’t understand. I’m holding somebody’s head. I saw it come over us… I thought it was a rock…”
The last time Ash looked at John Price’s face with any attention, a half-moon whitened it on the bluff above the Auxonne road. Weathered, drink-reddened, and full of a cheerful confidence. Nothing like this butcher’s shop reject in the woman’s hands.
Forcing a sardonic humour into her tone, Ash said, “If you don’t like this, you’ll like Geraint ab Morgan’s disciplinary measures a lot less.”
Tears ran over the rims of the young woman’s eyes; seeped down into the dirt on her face. “What are we doing here? It’s mad! All of you, walking around up there on the walls, just waiting for them to come again so you can fight – and now they’ve got us trapped in here—!” She met Ash’s gaze. “You want to fight. I’ve seen it. You actually want to. I’m— this is somebody’s head, this is a person!”
Ash slowly got to her feet. Behind her, Petro and the other archers had unwrapped somebody’s bedroll; held it between four of them, now, with a burden dragging it down. The bottom of it was already stained and dripping.
“He was not interrogated,” Angelotti called. “Only killed, madonna. Spear wound to the belly.”
“Ride on!” she called. “Get over in cover!”
Angelotti spurred his horse. Anselm leaned from the saddle, said something to Guilhelm, who took the bay’s reins and stood waiting as the rest of Petro’s squad moved off. Ash turned back to Margaret Schmidt.
Why am I wasting time with her? One half-assed-gunner?
Ah, but she’s still one of us…
Ash spoke over the noise of orders and horses’ hooves. “This isn’t the first time you’ve seen a man die.”
Margaret Schmidt looked up with an expression Ash could not place. An utter contempt, she realised. An expression I’ve grown used to not seeing – at least: not directed at me.
“I worked in a whorehouse!” the woman said bitterly. “Sometimes I’d step over someone with his throat cut, just to get into the house. That’s thieving, or somebody’s grudge; they didn’t volunteer for it! To kill someone they don’t even know!”
Ash felt her shoulders and back tense, steel-hard, under her steel armour, expecting the strike of another missile in these wrecked streets.
Keeping her voice from going thin with an effort, she said, “I’ll take you off the company’s books. But first you’re going to pick up John Price’s head and take it to your sergeant. Then you can do what you want.”
“I’m leaving now!”
“No. You’re not. First you have to do as I say.”
Carefully, Margaret Schmidt put the severed head down on the wet earth in front of her. She kept a proprietary hand on the matted hair. “When I first saw you in Basle, I thought you were a man. You are a man. None of this matters to you, does it? You don’t know what it’s like in this city if you’re not a soldier – you don’t know what the women are afraid of – you don’t think about anything except your company; if I wasn’t in the company you wouldn’t waste ten minutes on me, or what I do, or don’t do! That’s all that matters to you! Orders!”
Ash rubbed at her face. Half her attention on the sky, she said quietly, “You’re right. I don’t care what you do. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve seen you up on the walls, fighting in Lion livery, and you’re new to this – you’d already be with Messire Morgan, so fast your feet wouldn’t touch the ground. But as it is, you do what I say. Because if you don’t, there’s a chance someone else might not.”
“And I thought Mother Astrid was a bitch and a tyrant!”
It was melodramatic, no less genuine for being so; and Ash might have smiled, in another situation. “It’s easy to call someone else a tyrant. It isn’t so easy to keep armed men in order.”
The blonde woman’s breath came raggedly into her throat. “You and your damn soldiers! We’re trapped in this city! There are families here. There are women who can’t defend themselves. There are men who’ve spent their life keeping shop: they can’t fight either! There are priests!”
Ash blinked.
Margaret Schmidt coughed, wiped her mouth with her hand, and then stared at it, appalled, as the head of John Price rolled over on to its side on the broken cobbles.
A bluish film covered the eyes.
Ash – with a memory of Price’s capable hand steering her down into the moonlit underbrush, pointing out the Visigoth fires – felt her breath suddenly catch. Robert was right: this is when it’s too hard.
A crow flopped down, all in ruffled black feathers, landed three yards away, and began to hop sideways towards the severed head.
Margaret Schmidt lifted her head and wailed, as unselfconscious as a small child. She might not be more than fifteen or sixteen, Ash suddenly realised.
“I want to get out of here! I wish I’d never come! I wish I’d never left the soeurs.” Tears streamed down Margaret’s face. “I don’t understand! Why couldn’t we leave before? Now we’ll never get out! We’ll die here!”
Ash’s throat tightened. She could not speak. For a second, fear shifted in her gut; and her eyes stung. A quick look showed her her banner far towards the undamaged houses; even Guilhelm, holding her horse, was out of earshot.
“We won’t die.” I hope.
Tears cutting the dirt on her face, Margaret Schmidt reached out towards the severed head. She pulled her red, wet fingers back; shuddering. “You! It’s your fault he’s dead!”
Ash swatted at the crow. It bounced back, in a flutter, and landed on the churned-up cobbles; stalking from side to side, one black eye watching her.
“In the end, it is,” she said, and saw the woman gape at her. “Pick the head up and bring it. Everybody’s scared. Everybody in Dijon. We’re just safer in here – your shopkeepers and farmers and priests, too.”
“For how long!”
Ten minutes? Ten days? Ten months?
Ash said carefully, “We have food enough for weeks.”
As the woman hung her head, Ash thought quite suddenly, She’s right. I’d say this to her – or to Rickard, if he was frightened. But I wouldn’t say it to either of them if they couldn’t use a sword or crossbow. I wouldn’t bother. What does that make me?
“No one wants to fight.” Ash attempted to see the kneeling woman’s face. “It’s just better to be attacking someone with a close-combat weapon than it is being blown off the wall by cannon.” And as Margaret Schmidt’s head came up, Ash added, “Okay: not much better.”
The woman coughed, making a sound that could have been both a laugh and a sob. She got up off her knees, and picked up John Price’s severed head, scooping it up in her ragged knee-length kittle.
“This is better than fucking men for money.” Margaret Schmidt looked up from what she held in her skirts, and kicked a piece of broken brick at the crow. It hopped a few paces away. “But not much b
etter. I’m sorry, lady. Captain Ash. Do you think I should leave your company?”
Dismay went through her. Here’s another one who thinks I have the answers!
But then, why shouldn’t she think that? I go to some lengths to sound as though I do. All the time.
“I’ll … talk to Petro. If he says you’re up to standard, you can stay.”
Ash watched the woman hold her bunched skirt squeamishly, and turn her head to look at the lance and its sergeant.
What should I tell you? You’re safer with us than as a civilian, if the Goths overrun Dijon? You could just be killed, not raped and killed? Yeah, that’s a much better option.
Why aren’t you with Florian? What damn idiot ever convinced you that you wanted to be a mercenary soldier?
“Give that to Petro,” Ash said. “He’s not angry with you. He’s angry because John Price was a mate of his.”
By the time they got within three streets of the ducal palace, evening dimmed the sky. They could not move for people. The gables of the houses – still dripping – were hung with great swathes of black velvet. The insignia of the Golden Fleece7 hung from every building. Anselm and Angelotti, in mutual and unspoken habit, rode ahead of her banner; pushing a way through the people as a man breasts the waves of the sea.
A drenched tail-end of cloth, easily eight ells long, trailed across her and dripped water down her harness as she rode under it. Velvet that might – she thought – have been warm, worn against the cold. Shit, what a waste! What do they think we’re going to do this winter?
If the Goths come over the walls today or tomorrow, there isn’t a ‘this winter’ as far as these people are concerned.
The pressure of bodies pushed Petro, Schmidt, and the rest of the escort against the bay’s flanks: she quietened it, moving on. Her gaze, went over the mass of hats and shoulders as she passed through the people jammed between buildings here. Ahead, a flurry of men in black – dozens of them! – read from lists and shoved people bodily this way and that.
