by Mary Gentle
Anselm leaned down from the saddle to accost one. The man pushed past him, stared up at the Lion Affronté, made a mark on his scroll, and called up to Ash: “After the Sieur de la Marche! Remember that, demoiselle!”
“Bloody cheek.” Robert Anselm let Orgueil drop back a stride, to ride beside her. “What now? We can’t get through this.”
Torch-fire flickered, growing stronger as the wet light failed. Down in the street, it was already dark; only the sky above the tilting rooftops held some pale brightness. Approaching the edge of the crowd at the road junction, Ash saw black-robed torchbearers – holding people back.
She squinted into the dusk. “We need to see Florian. More than these damn Burgundians do!”
Between the lines of fire, chaplains and equerries, in black cloth, cleared a way from the direction of the ducal palace, holding the centre of the road clear. Tears streamed down the faces of people close by. Ash glanced the other way down the street – to the cathedral? she thought, trying dimly to call back memories of the summer, and riding there with John de Vere, and Godfrey.
Nothing but a mass of packed heads, hats pulled off to show respect; a crowd everywhere so thick that she abandoned any idea of riding through it to the palace now, or sending a messenger on foot.
“It’s the funeral!” she realised. “This is Charles’s funeral, now. They’re burying the Duke.”
Anselm appeared singularly unimpressed. “So – what next?”
“Where have they given us precedence?” She tapped her gauntlet on the pommel of the saddle. “After de la Marche – he was Charles’s champion. After the noblemen; before the rest of the men-at-arms. Does that sound good to you, Robert?”
“Oh yeah. Sounds like they might not do what the Faris did to her Frankish mercenaries – stick ‘em out in front, get ’em chewed up. If we’re still signed up with Burgundy.”
Antonio Angelotti shifted his chestnut mount back, flicking his head as water dripped down from the gabled roofs above him. The torchlight made chiaroscuro of his icon-face under the sallet’s silver brilliance.
“Our surgeon will be at the funeral if she’s Duchess now, madonna.”
“Oh, you worked that one out, too?” Ash smiled, shakily. “Enough messing about, right? They want to bury Charles – fine. I’m sure he’d rather they were keeping Dijon out of Visigoth hands. They want to crown Florian, for fuck’s sake? Also fine – but they’d better bloody get on with it. We have to plan now. Plan what we can do.”
“If there is to be a coronation, following this…” Angelotti shrugged.
“We need,” Ash said, “to know who’s really in charge, now. Because we’ve got decisions to take. This siege only needs the lightest shove, and it’s all over. And … whatever else happens, Florian has to stay alive.”
The last light faded, down in the narrow streets. Clergy and citizens, court servants and doctors and secretaries and sergeants-at-arms came past; and Charles’s sovereign-bailiffs and maîtres de requêtes and procureurs-générals, their liveries and black garments illuminated by torchlight. The remaining noblemen – those few who are not with the army in the north, or rotting outside Auxonne – walked in long black robes, bearing a pall of gold. It became dark, and the pitch-torches made the street pungent. Too many torches surrounded it: Ash could not look into the flames and see the coffin when it passed. Dazzled, she recognised one of the abbots walking in its wake, and two of Charles’s bastard brothers; and then glimpsed, at the back of their personal attendants, red-and-blue livery – de la Marche, he and all his noble companions riding horses in black cloth caparisons.
Ash spurred the gelding and rode, determinedly, in de la Marche’s wake, as the funeral procession moved through the streets of Dijon; followed the black-draped, lead coffin into the cathedral.8 She took up a place standing by a pillar, not far behind the Burgundian nobility. Every few minutes, as unobtrusively as possible, de la Marche’s military aides approached and whispered to him: messages, she guessed, from the wall. Petro, stationed by the door, filtered news from her own runners: the north-west, at least, still unassaulted.
She sweated through chants and anthems. The coffin stood with embalmed heart, and embalmed entrails, each in their own lead caskets, on top of it; on a bier draped to the ground in black velvet, with four great candles at the corners.
The chants lasted past Vespers, past Compline. She sweated through the requiem mass, that began at midnight in the nave that was hung with black cloth. Fourteen hundred candles burned, their beeswax sweetness stifling in the enclosed air – at the sides of the nave, men were using bollock-dagger hilts to punch holes in the glass of the ogee windows, and let out the unbearable heat.
Twice, she slept kneeling. Once, Anselm’s tactful hand on her pauldron shook her awake, and she nodded at him, and swallowed with a stale mouth, helped when Angelotti covertly passed her a costrel of wine. The second time, as another mass began, she felt herself slide off into unconsciousness, without any ability to stop herself.
She woke, leaning against Angelotti, still strapped into metal plates, with every muscle and bone in her body hurting.
“Green Christ!” she muttered under her breath.
That was drowned by the swelling anthem from the choir that had woken her, sound shredding the last remnants of sleep and the candle-hot air. Robed men moved in ritual patterns. Beside her, Anselm got to his feet in respect, and reached down and hauled her upright. Numbness in her knees and legs gave way to searing pain.
The lead coffin of the Grand Duke of the West passed down the nave: Charles called the Bold, Philip’s son, John’s grandson; heir of Burgundy and Aries; being conveyed down into the crypt by four green-robed bishops and twenty-two abbots.
A pale light shone at the windows that was not candlelight. Dawn: pale, clear, and the bells for Prime ringing out of double spires across the city, as the choir in the great cathedral fell into final silence.
Ash covertly flexed her bad knee, shifted her leg, thought Green Christ, never sleep in armour in church! and glanced behind to see where her page with her helmet was.
“Madonna!” Angelotti pointed down the nave. She turned her head, staring.
Beside her, Anselm frowned, looking around uncertainly.
In the dimness of dawn and the few unextinguished candles, a tall, slender woman came down between the high, soaring multiple pillars of the cathedral. Throngs of officials and courtiers trod at her heels. She was not young – not far from her thirtieth year, perhaps – but still beautiful in the way that court women are. The black brocade and velvet of her robes brightened the green of her eyes, the gold of her hair. Looking at the fair-skinned face under the finest of linen veils – a little freckled across the cheekbones, but clean – Ash thought Doesn’t that woman there look like my husband Fernando? before she hitched air halfway through a breath, stared, heard Anselm swear, and realised That’s Floria!
Her feet were moving her before she properly realised it. Neither awake nor alert yet, Ash stepped out in front of the procession. I planned this last night. What the fuck did I think I was going to say?
“Florian! Never mind all this.” Ash gestured, cannon and couter scraping as she waved her arm to take in all the cathedral, the court. “I’m calling an officer meeting. Now. We can’t wait any longer!”
Green eyes and stark fair brows stared out at her from under a padded headdress and translucent veil. A momentary, unexpected embarrassment made her stop speaking. So difficult, looking at this woman, to picture the long-legged, dirty-faced surgeon who gets drunk with the baggage-train women, and who squints through a hangover to sew up wounds with threaded gut and reasonably steady hand.
In a voice equally awkward, Floria del Guiz muttered, “Yes. You’re right…” and stared around at the grief-stricken crowds, as if at a loss.
Behind her, a green-robed abbot murmured, “Your Grace, not here!”
The noise of footsteps made the nave loud and murmurous. Automatically, in the pr
esence of so many clergy, and still not recovered from sleeplessness or exertion, Ash touched her breastplate over her heart.
“So.” She stared at Florian. “Are you Duchess? Is it anything more than being the nobles’ puppet? We need to talk about keeping you alive!”
Florian, in woman’s clothing, stared back, saying nothing.
Quiet in Ash’s mind as snowfall, Godfrey Maximillian’s voice whispered, perfectly clearly:
– Child?
IV
Ash caught at Robert Anselm’s shoulder. Morning, the eighteenth of November – she is still, at some deep level, in shock. Ignoring Florian’s rapid words to the nobles around her, she is conscious only of a memory of influence, pressure, force.
“Godfrey!”
Some official leaned over Florian’s shoulder, whispering urgently.
“Perimeter defence!” Ash was briefly aware of Petro and his archers surrounding her, facing outwards, not drawing weapons in a holy place, but ready. She put her hands over her face and whispered into her cold, steel gauntlets:
“Godfrey – is that really you?”
– Ash, little one…
This is nothing like the previous strength of his voice in her mind. This is as quiet as wind through bare branches, as soft as snow falling on to other snow. Momentarily, a scent comes to her – resinous pine needles; the raw, rich, dungy smell of boar. She sees no vision in her mind.
What’s happened to you!
With that same internal sense that she is performing some action, she listens. As she has always listened, when she has called the voice of the Lion, the Stone Golem, the machina rei militaris.
– Ash.
“Godfrey?” She hesitated; asked again. “Godfrey?”
– Weak beyond measuring, and a little broken, child, but, yes. Me.
“Green Christ, Godfrey, I thought I’d lost you!”
– You heard silence, not absence.
“That’s… I couldn’t tell!” She shook her head, aware that men surrounded her, her own and others; and that Florian was giving loud, clear instructions. She did not know what the woman said.
– Now, you hear me… And you fear, too, that you will hear the voices of God’s Fallen.
“I don’t think the Wild Machines are anything to do with God!”
– Everything that comes, comes to us by God’s grace.
So weak – as if he’s far from her, farther than can be measured in distance. The tiles under her slick-soled boots are granular with dawn light. She glimpsed them sparkle, between her steel-armoured fingers.
There is a hand under each arm; there are men walking; there is someone – Florian – ahead of her, leading the way. To where?
Outside, the new, cold, damp air pricks at her covered face.
“Can you hear the Wild Machines?” Ash demanded. “I heard them after the hart was hunted, and then— Are they there? Godfrey, are they!”
– I have been hurt, and recovering. There was an immanence: a great storm began to break, then nothing. Then confusion. And now there is you, child. I heard you calling to me.
“Yes, I … called.”
Godfrey’s voice, that is the machina rei militaris, says:
– I heard you weeping.
She woke herself with soundless weeping, two nights before; voiceless enough that it disturbed neither Rickard nor any of the pages. Woke, and put it out of her mind. Sometimes, on campaign, it happens.
She stumbled, hands dropping from her face; had a momentary glimpse of freezing early morning outside of the cathedral, de la Marche’s armed ducal household escort, the great boxy carriage of the Duchess; and then she is lost, again, in interior listening.
“Are they still there?” she insisted. “The Wild Machines, Godfrey! Are they still there?”
– I hear nothing now. But nor did I hear their passing, child. I have not heard them die.
Silence, but not absence.
“We’d know, would we, if they were gone? Or – damaged?”
Suddenly intense, Ash uncovered her face, breathing cold air, eyes watering at the approaching bright white walls of the ducal palace. Anselm and Angelotti still had a hand under each mailed armpit. She staggered as she walked. Pages followed with the horses. Now the sky has cleared, it is becoming very cold.
“No. How could I know? Why would I? Shit, that would be too easy…”
– All I hear is their silence.
The dispersing funeral crowds in the Dijon streets passed unnoticed. So did the muttering of her men superstitiously watching their commander talk to her voice – but not, she reflects, the voice they are used to thinking of; ‘Saint’ Godfrey, good grief! She ignored everything, ignored Anselm and Angelotti half-carrying her into the palace between them, forcing every part of her strength into the weak contact.
“They did try to do their miracle. I felt it, when the Duke died. They tried to trigger the Faris. It wasn’t even aimed at me, and I felt it!” A bare awareness of steps intruded itself: she stumbled up them. “And I heard their … anger … after the hunt ended. If they’re not damaged, not destroyed – shit, for all I know, they can do that again any time the Duchess dies!”
– Duchess?
No mistaking the very human bewilderment in her shared soul; Godfrey to the life.
– Margaret of York is Duchess, now?
“Oh, her? Hell, no. She’s even missed her husband’s funeral!”
Ash sounded sardonic, even to herself. The edge of a stool banged into the back of her greaves. She sat, automatically. “I was hoping she’d turn up. With about ten thousand armed men, for choice, and raise the siege! No, Widow Margaret’s still somewhere in the north. Florian’s the Duchess.”
– Florian!
Somewhere close, there is a familiar, exasperated snort.
“Godfrey, have you heard the Faris since the hunt – is she sick? Is she sane?”
– She lives, and is as she was before. The ghost of an old amusement; as if Godfrey Maximillian is forgetting what it is like to laugh. – She will not speak to the machina rei militaris.
“Does she try to speak to the Wild Machines?”
– No. All the great Devils are silent… I have been shocked, deaf, dumb… How long?
Ash, aware now that she sits in a high tapestried chamber, that there are Burgundians speaking at high volume, that the woman who looks like Florian appears to be overriding them, said, “Forty-eight hours? Maybe an hour or two less?”
– I do not know what their silence may mean.
The voice in her head did not fade; it suddenly became silent, as if weakness drained it away. She still had a sense of him, something priestly; Saint Godfrey, infusing the sacral parts of her mind.
If I could make them hear me – the Wild Machines… Shit: not yet: I have to think!
She blinked her streaming eyes, and realised that she was looking out of the windows of the Tour Philippe le Bon, Burgundy’s quarrelling courtiers and military men filling the room with noise behind her.
Morning in the same building, if not the same room, in which she last saw Charles of Burgundy. This lower chamber has the same great carved limestone hearth at the end, fire burning fiercely against the early bitter cold. The same blond floorboards, and white-plastered walls covered with tapestries. But an oak throne stands upon a dais in the place where his bed is, in the room above.
A sudden pang went through her, that had not been there all the night they were burying him with masses and prayer. Shit: another one dead.
Fuck Carthage!
Anger brought her to herself; brought some respite from the cold silence in her head. It isn’t good business to get involved. Heat from the blazing hearth intruded, made her conscious of her silk doublet and woollen hose that have been rain-saturated and dried again on her in sleep, of armour whose bright surface is glazed thick with rust, of the immense ache and cramps of her body.
“You all right?” Robert Anselm said, standing over her.
“Same old same old. I’ll live. Where’s Florian?” She reached up, caught his armoured forearm, and pulled herself to her feet. The room tilted. “Shit.”
“Food.” Anselm strode off back into the chamber.
The clear, brilliant cold light stung her gritty eyes. She is looking out from the window of the Tour Philippe le Bon. Up past the towers that her company occupies, dawn shows her iron-walled wagons axle-deep in mud, wheeled into place in the Visigoth camp to protect Greek Fire throwers covering the approach to the north-west gate.
“Eat that.”
Anselm’s hand shoved a torn crust of bread into her hand. The smell of it brought saliva into her mouth, and a great rumble from her gut. She ripped the crust with her teeth, and said as she chewed, “Thanks.”
“You ain’t got the fucking sense.” A grin. “Fuck me, what a bunch of wankers. ’Scuse me while I sort this out.”
He left her side, moving back into the crush of courtiers. A raw female voice snapped Ash’s head around:
“A petit conseil9 first! Messire de la Marche. Messire Ternant. Bishop John. Captain Ash. The rest later! Everyone else out!”
Florian: her exact tone when yelling at some deacon late in bringing her linen bandages and gut. Straightening up, the tall woman in black robes stalked away from the long table, across the room. Men stood back from her; bowed as she passed.
One man’s voice snapped, “I protest!”
Ash recognised the Viscount-Mayor, Richard Follo; thought, But he has a point, there should be some merchant representative, and then, How much of a ‘Duchess’ can Florian be!
One of de la Marche’s aides, and two of his captains, began moving people towards the chamber door, in the way that armoured men can move an unarmed crowd without ever having to draw sword. A whole slew of officers, sergeants-at-arms, servants, household retainers, equerries, surgeons, secretaries, ex-tutors, minor captains and financial administrators were rapidly ushered out.
“Ash—” Floria del Guiz suddenly glanced across the emptying floor and shook her head at three Burgundian equerries who were attempting – with no success – to escort a suddenly monoglot Robert Anselm and Antonio Angelotti out of the chamber. At her signal, the equerries in ducal livery bowed, and backed out of the room. None of them looked at Olivier de la Marche or Philippe Ternant first, for confirmation of the order.
