by Mary Gentle
“Fucking hell!”
Still holding the armour, he demanded, “Are you all right, boss? Boss, are you all right?”
His adolescent voice squeaked; going high for the first time in weeks.
“Shit – I’m fine. Fine!” Ash held her arms out from her sides. Her hands shook. The little brush-haired page slit the points of her arming doublet. “Where’d it get me?”
Rickard laid the body-armour down in a clatter of steel, staring at it. “Right in the chest, boss.”
Florian blocked her view, reaching down to her arming doublet, and carefully pulling the sweaty, filthy garment open.
“Rickard, I’m fine; the rest of you, I’m okay. Now fuck off, will you? Florian, what’s the damage?”
Robert Anselm still hovered in the doorway. “Boss…”
“What part of ‘fuck off’ didn’t you understand?” Ash inquired acidly; and when the Englishman had vanished, yelped under her breath: “Shit, that hurts!”
Floria knotted her fists in Ash’s arming doublet again, yanked it wide open, got her hand in to the ribs on Ash’s left-hand side, and felt with remarkably gentle fingers under her breast. Ash had not been wearing a shirt under the arming doublet, and her flesh shrank from the bitingly cold air, from Floria’s chill flesh, and from the prodding fingers on her bruised skin.
“Easy!” Ash winced again; grinned shakily. “Hey. It’s not like they were aiming at me!”
“It’s not like that will matter,” Floria mimicked, sardonically. She peered at Ash’s side, face all but inside the open arming doublet. Her breath steamed in the cold air. Ash felt it shivery-warm against her skin, and momentarily stiffened.
“Haven’t you got something better to do than mess about in hospitals, Duchess?”
There were women with Florian who were not from the company, she realised as she said it. The Duchess’s maids and Jeanne Châlon sniffed, and looked much as if they agreed with Ash.
“No. I’ve got patients here. I’ve got patients up at St Stephen’s, and in the two other abbey hospices…” Florian grinned. “I’d left Blanche in charge here; you’re lucky to have me.”
“Oh, sure I— fuck! Don’t do that!”
“I’m checking your ribs.”
Peering down, Ash could see her open doublet, bare breast, and a raised, reddened area of skin perhaps the size of a dinner plate below her left breast. She shifted a little, feeling now the separate aches from hipbone, armpit, pectoral muscle, and – now she realised it – the base of her throat.
“That’s going to go all sorts of pretty colours,” she observed.
Floria straightened up, sat down on the medical chest that was doing duty for a bench (tables and chairs long since gone for firewood), and tapped her dirty finger thoughtfully against her teeth. “Your lung’s okay. You might have sprung a rib.”
“No wonder, boss!” Rickard straightened up, still bundled in jack, livery jacket, and fur-lined demi-gown; his hood barely pushed back from his face even inside the tower and close to the remaining hearth-fire. “Look at this.”
He held up Ash’s cuirass by the shoulders, fauld and tassets still attached. The plackart, unstrapped from the upper breastplate, caught the light in a glinting craze.
“Fuck me.” Ash reached out and slid her gloved fingers across the case-hardened steel. The curve of the plackart was shattered, like ice when a rock hits it. At her gesture, he turned the body-armour around. On the back of the breastplate, over the place where her left ribs would be, the softer iron bulged back.
Her fingers went without volition to her bare torso, touching the swelling skin.
“It bloody cracked it. My plackart! And the breastplate, too. Two layers of steel, and it fucking cracked it!”
The light from the winter-blue sky outside the window flashed from the steel. She slowly removed her gauntlets, and fumbled to pull the edges of her doublet together. Florian took her left hand, probing for stone splinters. Her breath hissed as she stared at the Milanese breastplate in Rickard’s hands. “The armourer can’t hammer that out. Sweet Green Christ up a Tree, that’s my luck for this siege! Holy Saint George!”
“Never mind the soldier saints,” Floria remarked under her breath, with asperity, “try Saint Jude! Tilde, I’ll need a witch hazel and St John’s wort poultice. Wash this hand in wine. It doesn’t need bandages.”
The maid-in-waiting curtseyed, to Floria’s obvious amusement.
Jeanne Châlon caught Ash’s eye and sniffed again, disapprovingly.
“Niece-Duchess,” she said pointedly, “remember you are called to the council, at Nones.”
“Actually, aunt, I think you’ll find that I called them.”
Jeanne Châlon flushed. “Of course, my lady.”
“‘Of course, my lady’,” Rickard muttered under his breath, in mincing mockery.
Floria caught his eye and scowled. “You need to get the rest of this metalware off her. Tilde, where’s that poultice?”
A man sat up, on a pallet closer to the hearth. Ash saw it was Euen Huw. Dirty beyond belief, and gaunt, with the fine cat-gut of Floria’s stitches poking up out of his shaven hair, the wiry Welshman still managed to grin woozily at her.
“Hey. Don’t you let her prod you around, boss. Heavy-handed, she is. Working for the rag-’eads, I swear it!”
“You lie down, Euen, or I’ll put some more stitches in that thick Welsh head of yours!”
He smiled at Florian. As he half-fell back on to his pallet, he murmured, “Got a cushy number, now, haven’t we? Comes of having a smart boss, see. Gets our surgeon crowned Duchess. Boss in charge of the army. Even the damn rag-heads give up when they hear that.”
I wish! Ash thought. She saw it mirrored on Florian’s face.
She held out her arms to Rickard and the pages, who stripped her of couters, vambraces, cannons. Shucking the arming doublet painfully down to her waist, she flinched as Florian prodded at her back.
The woman surgeon straightened up. “Whatever you hit when you landed, the armour saved you. Have you got a shirt I can tear up? I’m going to bind those ribs tight. You’ll be stiff; it’ll hurt; you’ll live.”
“Thanks for your sympathy…” Ash gritted her teeth at the touch of the poultice. “Rickard, you take my kit across to the armoury. Tell ’em boss needs a new breastplate and plackart. They can pull anything they need out of the army stores. But I need it done yesterday!”
“Yes, boss!”
The light here came from one set of opened shutters. Further into the hall, the shutters were closed. Fire-heated bricks, placed under blankets, took a very little of the freezing chill off the air. Men on pallets moved, uneasily; someone groaning continuously, another man muttering to himself. Some had purple-bruised, stitched flesh left uncovered; other men had bloodied bandages. Only a few men sat playing dice, or cleaning their kit, or arguing. Most huddled down.
Ash’s eyes narrowed against the dull light. “You’ve got twice the number of sick here since yesterday. We haven’t had an attack on the walls. Is it the bombardments?”
Florian looked up briefly. “Let’s see. I’ve got twenty-four men wounded here. Three men are going to die, because I can’t do anything about the shock and bleeding; one man from a stinking wound, the other from a poisoned wound. The broken shoulder-bones, ribs, and broken wrists should mend. I don’t know about the stove-in breastbone. Baldina took an arrow out of one of Loyecte’s men; I haven’t wanted to move him out of here. There are ten burn-cases, that’s Greek Fire. They’ll survive.”
She spoke without reference to the parchment notes stuffed in the corner of the medicine chest.
“There’s more than twenty-four men in here.”
“Twenty men down with campaign fever,” Florian stated. Her expression, studying Ash’s half-bare body, was clinical in the extreme. She ignored the hiss of breath as the poultice touched Ash’s skin.
“Dysentery,” she elucidated, whipping bandages with a sure hand. “Ash, I tell
them to bury bodies away from the wells. The ground’s rock-hard. I tell them to make sure there are slit-trenches dug, on the waste-ground back of the forge.2 They shit anywhere they please. I’ve got civilian cases of dysentery in the abbeys. More than there were yesterday. And that’s more than there was the day before. Once it gets a hold…”
“What about stores?”
“No fresh herbs. Even with the civilian abbeys, we’re low on Self-Heal, goldenrod, Lady’s Mantle, Solomon’s Seal. Baldina and the girls can give them camomile, to calm them down. Marjoram, on sprains. That’s it.” Her gaze flicked to Ash’s face. “I’m out of everything else. We bandage. We sew.” She smiled wryly. “My people are washing out wounds with Burgundy’s finest wines. Best use for them.”
Ash shrugged herself painfully back into her doublet. Rickard held out a brigandine, brought by one of the pages, and began to buckle her into it.
“I got to go. In case they think I am dead. Morale.”
Florian glanced at the pallets, her attention on a man with a chopping cut across the side of his jaw. “I hadn’t finished my rounds. I’ll see you at the palace. Dusk.”
“Yes sir…” Smiling, Ash essayed a few steps, a little shaky, but mostly balanced.
Back on the first floor, she found the stench of cuckoo-pint starch and billowing steam filling the entire hall. Damp warmth hit her. Women with sore hands, kirtles caught up into their belts, banged around the tubs, through the wet; shouting orders and lewd comments. She found herself behind Blanche and Baldina at the foot of the stairs as Antonio Angelotti appeared, holding out a yellowed linen shirt and complaining in rapid-fire Milanese.
“Madonna,” he broke off to greet her. His expression changed, seeing her damaged left hand. “Jussey wants you at the mills.”
“Yeah, I was on my way there. You come with me—”
“Boss,” a female voice said.
Ash halted, as Blanche put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders, the dyed blond heads together. Baldina’s kirtle as she turned to face Ash was laced only loosely at the front.
Under it, the belly of a woman great with child showed as a sharp curve. Not visible before Auxonne. But she must have been carrying it from spring: at Neuss, say?
“You should be eating better,” Ash said automatically. “Ask Hildegarde: tell her I said so.”
Baldina put her hands on her belly in an immemorial gesture. Winter sunlight shot through the steam, illuminating her in a glaze of light; and Angelotti’s icon-face and yellow ringlets beside her made Ash think caustically, Haven’t I seen you guys in a church fresco somewhere?
“Have you got a father for it?” Ash added.
Baldina grinned wryly. “Now what do you think, boss?”
“Well, draw on company funds: an extra third-share.”
Not that that amounts to much, now.
The younger woman nodded. Her mother, a little awkwardly, said, “Put your hand on it, boss. For luck.”
“For—” Ash’s silver brows went up. She put her unbandaged hand palm-flat on Baldina’s belly, feeling the heat of the woman’s body though kirtle and shirt and gauntlet-glove.
In Ash’s memory, a woman-physician of the Carthaginians says The gate of the womb is spoiled; she will never carry to term. A pang, that might have been for anything – lost chances, perhaps – went through her, stinging her eyes.
“Here’s luck, then. When do you drop?”
“Near Our Lord’s mass. We’re naming it for Saint Godfrey, if it’s a boy.” Baldina turned her head as someone else yelled. “All right! Coming! Thanks, boss.”
Ash smiled, saw the escort gathering ahead of her at the door, and walked away from the stairs, on across the great hall, Angelotti falling into step beside her.
“Well, there’s one thing I’m sure of,” she said, in a rasping attempt at humour: “It isn’t yours!”
Angelotti gave a calm smile, at odds with his vulgar Italian: “Not until pretty bum-boys give birth.”
Almost at the door of the hall, with cold wind swirling the steam into towers of whiteness, he touched her arm. “Don’t think of us as friends, madonna. We’re not your friends. We’re men and women who obey you. Burgundy’s men, too. That is not what friends do.”
She gave him a startled look. The relief of that detached view sank in. She nodded absently.
He added, “Even if what I say is half true, it is not wholly false. Men who have given you the responsibility of leading them are not your friends; they expect more of you. ‘Lioness’.”
“So: is this a warning?” A little cynically, she said, “Gun captains go anywhere. The Visigoths would give you a job with their siege-machines – they wouldn’t send your gun-crews against these walls. You’re too expensive to kill off. Shall I expect to be told when you’re going, or shall I wake up in the next few days and find you and Jussey’s lads gone?”
His oval eyelids shut, briefly; allowing her one look at the smooth perfection of his face. He opened his eyes. “Nothing like so easy, madonna. Fever has a grip, famine is here. Sooner, rather than later, now, you’ll commit us to an attack – and we’ll do it.”
Four days later, in the company armoury, she looks down at herself. At a new breastplate and plackart buckled into her body-armour; only the brightness of the buff leather, and therefore the newness of the straps, giving away that this mirror-finish steel is not her original Milanese-made harness.
“Shit-hot job…” She brought her arms together, let her body follow the lines of someone moving a weapon in precise arcs. Nothing caught, or pulled.
“Not my job, boss.” Jean Bertran, something over six foot tall, forge-blackened like a pageant-devil, gave her a look equal parts diffidence and cynicism. “I roughed it out like Master Dickon taught me. Took it to the old Duke’s royal armourers for the rest. The lads here did the buckles.”
“Tell ’em fucking brilliant—”
“Boss!” a voice bawled. “Boss! Come quick!”
She winced, turning; catching her bruised flesh painfully. Willem Verhaecht’s 2IC, Adriaen Campin, stumbled across the ice-rutted paving stones and into the forge.
“Boss, you’d better come!”
“Is it an assault?” Ash was already staring around wildly. “Rickard, my sword! Where are they coming this time?”
The big Fleming shook his head, red-faced under his war-hat. “The north-east gate, boss. I don’t know what it is! Maybe not an attack. Someone’s coming in!”
“In?” Ash stared.
“In!”
“Fucking hell!”
Rickard thumped back from the recesses of the armoury, the sword and belt slung over his shoulder, her livery jacket in his hands. In a frantic few seconds, Ash found herself attempting simultaneously to answer questions from the lance-leaders crowding in after Campin; and answer Robert Anselm – and Duchess Florian – as they came in on the men-at-arms’ heels.
“Son of a bitch!” she bellowed.
Silence fell in the armoury, apart from the subdued hiss of the coals in the forge.
“Double the wall guard,” she ordered rapidly. “This could be a diversion. Roberto, you and twenty men, with me, to the north-east gate. Florian—”
The surgeon shoved her herb-sack at Baldina. “I’m with you.”
“No, you’re damn well not! The goddamn Visigoths would like nothing better than a shot at the Burgundian Duchess. I’ll get you an escort back to the palace.”
“What part of ‘fuck off’ didn’t you understand?” Floria del Guiz murmured, her eyes bright. She grinned at Ash. “There is such a thing as morale. As you keep telling me. If I’m Duchess, then I’m not afraid to walk the city wall here!”
“But you’re not the normal type of Duchess – oh shit, there isn’t time!”
Rickard held her livery surcoat up high, by its shoulders. Ash fisted her gauntlets, ducked under, and dived up, attempting to shove her fists and remaining arm-defences through the wide sleeves. Two moments’ breathless t
ugging and panic got it down over her head. Rickard slung the sword-belt around her waist, buckled and tugged; and she settled the hilt of the single-handed blade to where she wanted it, grabbed her cloak from him, pulled her hood up, and strode out of the room.
Too cold again to ride without danger to the horses. The hurried half-run to the north-eastern side of Dijon took them perhaps half an hour. In that time, they saw no one but soldiers up on the walls, and Burgundian men-at-arms on street patrol. Not a dog barked, not a cow lowed; the bright, eggshell-blue sky shone, birdless, no doves in the dovecotes now. The winter wind brought tears into her eyes, snatched the breath out of her throat.
Panting from the climb up to the top of the gatehouse, she joined Olivier de la Marche and twenty or more Burgundian nobles on the wall. The big Burgundian was shading his eyes with his gauntlet, peering north-east.
“Well?” Ash demanded.
Willem Verhaecht ran from the battlements to her side. He pointed. “There, boss.”
A squabble broke out behind her – de la Marche noting Floria’s presence; the surgeon-Duchess refusing to listen to his explosive, protective complaints – but Ash ignored it.
“What the fuck is that?” she asked.
Rickard elbowed his way through the Lion men-at-arms to her side. He carried her second-best sallet under his arm. She took it, thoughtfully; standing bareheaded in the icy wind, a woman with scars, and feathery silver hair now grown long enough to cover the lobes of her ears.
Ash glanced at her nearest captain of archers, and covertly back at Floria. “How far’s crossbow range from here?”
Ludmilla Rostovnaya smiled with a face still taut from healing burns. “About four hundred yards, boss.”
“How far away are their lines from this wall?”
“About four hundred and one yards!”
“Fine. Anything comes a yard closer to us, I want it skewered. Instantly. And watch those bloody siege-engines.”
“Yes, boss!”
The Visigoth tents shone white under a winter-clear sky. Spirals of smoke rose straight up from their turf-roofed huts, surrounding this quarter of the city. A neighing came from their horse lines. She strained her gaze to see siege machinery; could see none within range. A scurry of people ran, five hundred yards away, ranks parting; and something else moved, between the tents, northeast along the road that ran by the river. Horses? Pennants? Armed or unarmed men?
