by Mary Gentle
“I had the idea after you talked to me in Carthage. You were right. I was still taking the King-Caliph’s arms and armour: why would he listen to me say we shouldn’t be fighting this war? So I thought of this. This is the only way I can give up the sword and still have men listen to me.”
She kept looking at him, long enough for her concentration to miss a beat, and for her foot to catch a fragment of broken brick. Recovering with a sword-fighter’s balance from the stumble, she said, half-stifled, “You entered the church for that?”
His mouth set, mulishly, making him look momentarily no more than a boy. “I don’t want to be ignored like a peasant or a woman! If I’m not knightly, then I have to be something they’ll respect. I’m still del Guiz. I’m still noble! I’ve just taken my vows to be a peregrinatus christi.”
Tears swelled the lower lids of her eyes. Ash looked into the wind and blinked, sharply. She was momentarily in Carthage’s palace, hearing a nazir say Let him through, it’s only the peregrinatus christi, and seeing Godfrey’s lined, bearded face in the mass of foreign soldiers.
I need him here, now, not as a voice in my head!
“You’ll never be a priest,” she said harshly. “You’re a fucking hypocrite.”
“No.”
The escort clattered under the gateway and into the courtyard in front of the company tower. A blaze of cold wind whipped in through the open gates, spooking the remaining horses. Anselm bellowed orders to the men, over the noise from the forge. Florian immediately found herself intercepted by a dozen courtiers.
“So you’re not a hypocrite.” Ash wiped wind-tears out of her eyes. “Yeah. Right.”
“I never bothered much about praying, it was priest’s work. I’m a knight.” The tall, golden-haired man stopped. He spoke under the noise the men made. “I was one. I’m a priest now. Maybe God made me see how fucking crazy this fighting is! All I know is, one day I was a traitor Frankish knight, with no patron, and nobody listening to me – and now I’m not killing anyone, and I might just get some of Gelimer’s nobles to listen when I say this war’s wrong. If you call that hypocrisy – fine.”
“Ah, shit.”
Something in her tone obviously puzzled him. He shot a glance at her.
“Nothing,” Ash snapped. She felt resentful; bad-tempered.
I might not have liked the separation, but at least it was settled. I might not have liked you being a weaselling, lying little shitbag – but at least I knew where I was with you.
I resent you making me think about this again. Feel again.
“Nothing,” Ash repeated, under her breath.
If he had had a glib answer, she would have walked away from him. Fernando del Guiz looked down at the flagstones in adolescent male embarrassment, kicking his boot-heel against the ground, under the hem of his robe.
Ash sighed. “Why did you have to come back doing something I can respect?”
A mass of people blocked the company tower’s steps. She heard Florian’s raw voice raised. One glance found her Anselm; without more prompting, he began to give brisk orders. Men in company livery began to shift Burgundian courtiers out of the arched doorway.
Without looking at Fernando, she said, “You’re wrong, you know. About war. And if there was a better way than going to war, we’re long past the point where it was an issue. But I suppose you’ve had the guts to put your balls on the line…”
He coughed, or laughed, she was not sure which. “This is the Arian priesthood, not Our Lady of the Bloody Crescent!”
One of the escorting Turkish soldiers glanced across at that; nudged his mate, and said something under his breath. Ash stifled her grin.
“The goddess Astarte’s very popular round here right now, so let’s keep the religious dissent to a minimum, shall we?”
Fernando’s smile was warm. “And you call me a hypocrite.”
“I’m not a hypocrite,” Ash said, turning to go into the tower as the crowd cleared. “I’m an equal-opportunities heretic – I think you’re all talking through your arses…”
“This from the woman who was marked by the Lion?” He made a movement, reaching up to brush her scarred cheek with his gloved hand. She had let him touch her skin before she realised she was not going to move.
“That was then,” she said. “This is now.”
She heard, ahead, a roar of male laughter; loped up the steps to the door and walked in, in the midst of her escort, into chaos in the lower hall.
“Boss!” Henri Brant gave her a smile that showed the gap between his missing front teeth. He slapped the shoulder of a man shouting into the crowded hall: Richard Faversham, in green robes, his beard untrimmed, his face flushed.
Momentarily forgetting the others with her, Ash stared at the tower’s first-floor hall. A fierce fire burned in the hearth, surrounded by off-duty Lion Azure mercenaries in various states of dishevelment ladling some liquid out of a cauldron. The beams were draped and hung with long strands of ivy. Baldina banged a tabor; blind and lame Carracci sat with her, fingering out notes on a recorder in duet with Antonio Angelotti. There were no trestle tables covered in yellowing linen, but men sat with their wooden bowls and cups where tables would have been ranked against either wall. She smelled cooking.
“Merry Mass of Christ!” Henri Brant exclaimed, his warm breath hitting her in the face. Whatever they were drinking – not having the swine to feed now, it was probably fermented turnip-peelings – it had a kick to it.
“God bless you!” Richard Faversham leaned down and gave her the kiss of peace. “Christ be with you!”
“And with you,” Ash growled. She ignored Floria’s chuckle. After a second, surveying the hall and her men, she grinned at Henri Brant. “I take it you’re doing two servings, so the lads on duty can come back here?”
“Either that, or find my balls boiling in the pot!” The steward pushed his coif back on his sheepswool-curly white hair, sweating from the heat of close-packed bodies if not from the fire. “We couldn’t hoard much. Master Anselm thought, as I did, better to eat now and starve the sooner, rather than let the Christ-Mass pass without celebration. So did Master Faversham!”
Ash studied the large black-bearded Englishman for a moment.
“Well done!” She clasped both men’s hands warmly. “God knows we need something to keep our minds off this shit-hole we’re in!”
Unguarded, she looked around and met the gaze of Fernando del Guiz inside his concealing hood. He was watching the soldiers and their sparse revelry with a strange expression. Not contempt, she guessed. Compassion? No. Not Fernando.
“We’re holding council. The Burgundians will be along any minute. I’ll come down for mass. Henri, can you send Roberto to me? And Angeli. I’ll be up in the solar.”
The tower’s top floor had been dressed in her absence. Green ivy hung stark over the round arches, bright against the sand-and-ochre colours of the walls. A hoarded single Green candle burned, scenting the room. Rickard turned from supervising the pages as she entered: obviously proud of the evergreen, the hearth-fire, the food in preparation – and stopped, his face freezing, recognising Fernando del Guiz under the hood.
“The Duchess will have this hall to speak with her brother,” Ash said formally. “Rickard, we’re expecting de la Marche, can you clear that with the guys on the door, and get these kids out of here?”
“Boss.” Rickard looked twice at the robes under the cloak, then stalked past Fernando del Guiz, glared brows dipping, hand resting down on his sword-hilt. She noted, as he walked out with the pages, that the boy was as tall as the German ex-knight now. Not a boy. A squire, a young man; all this in the last half-year.
“Good grief!” Floria shook her head, saying nothing more. She moved closer to the hearth, let her cloak fall open, and extended her hands to the blaze. Ash saw she was wearing a fur-lined demi-gown over male doublet and hose again.
Fernando del Guiz reached up and put his hood back. He looked quizzically at the surgeon-Duch
ess. “Sister. You make a strange Duchess.”
“Oh, you think so?” Her gaze warmed. “And you don’t make a strange priest?”
Ash blurted, “Why the hell pick you to come in here? Because priests are sacrosanct? De la Marche would love a traitor to hang up on the walls – cheer everybody up, that would!”
Fernando still spoke to Floria. “I had no choice. I came up with the Abbot Muthari, from Carthage. The King-Caliph dragged me into court as soon as he heard who the Duchess of Burgundy was. They interrogated me – not that there’s much I could tell him, is there, Floria?”
“No.” Floria turned to watch the fire. “I remember seeing you once, when I was about ten. The only time I ever stayed on my father’s German estates. You would have been born that year.”
“Mother used to have Tante Jeanne to stay – is she still alive? – and they’d talk about you in whispers.”
His face creased under his rumpled hair. Ash thought she saw something relaxed, despite the circumstances, in his humour. As if he were comfortable with himself.
He added, “I thought you’d run off with a man. I didn’t know you’d run off to be a man!”
“I ‘ran off’ to be a doctor!” Floria snapped.
“And now you’re Burgundy’s Duchess.” He looked at Ash. “Then it came out that you were made captain of the Burgundian armies here, and I was doubly useful.”
Ash snapped, “That must have made a pleasant change.”
“Except that I could tell him even less about you – ‘she’s a soldier; I married her; she doesn’t trust me’. I could tell him how good a soldier you are. And I’m not, you see. But by now, they know that.”
His wry expression confused her. Ash looked away. She had an impulse to provide him with food, with drink. An impulse to touch the faint blond stubble on his cheek.
Deliberately brutal, she said, “No. You’re not. The rag-heads still letting you keep Guizburg?”
“Priests have no lands. I’ve lost most of what I had. I’m still useful, by virtue of being Floria’s brother. While I’m useful, I can talk – this is a hopeless war, for both sides—”
“Christ up a Tree, I need a drink!” Ash turned and began to pace the floorboards, beating her hands together for circulation. “And where the hell is de la Marche? Let’s get this ‘envoy’ crap over with!”
There were no pages to serve out rations: all the baggage-train brats down in the hall below, by the sound of it – shrieks and yells echoed up the spiral stairwell, not subdued by the ragged hangings blocking the doorway. Cold wind found its way between the window shutters.
Tension kept Ash pacing. Florian squatted by the fire with her cloak held out open around her, to trap the heat: a campaigner’s trick she obviously remembered from half a dozen winters with the company. Fernando del Guiz folded his arms and stood watching both women, smiling wryly.
Ash strode to the stairwell and yelled, “Rickard!”
A longer space of time elapsed than she was used to before he called up, panting, “Yes, boss?”
“Where the fuck’s de la Marche and Oxford and the civilians?”
“Don’t know, boss. No messenger!”
“What are you doing?”
Rickard’s flushed face appeared in the dim light of the well, a dozen steps below. “We’re going to do the mumming, boss. I’m in it! Are you coming down?”
“There’s no word from Oxford?”
“Captain Anselm sent another man up to the palace just now.”
“Hell. What are they doing?” Ash glanced back over her shoulder. “It’s a damn sight warmer down there than up here, isn’t it? And there’s food. Okay: we’ll wait for my lords of England and Burgundy downstairs! And get me a drink before you start pratting around.”
“Yes, boss!”
A great burst of sound came as she stepped off the bottom stair and into the main hall: nothing to do with her or, as she first thought, the presence of Fernando del Guiz, but a carol being bellowed by two hundred lusty male throats:
“The Boar’s Head in hand bear I,
With garlands gay and rosemary,
I pray you all sing merrily,
Qui estis in convivio.
Caput apri defero,
Reddens laudes domino.”
Floria took a place beside Ash against the wall, in the small stir of men-at-arms and archers acknowledging their commander’s presence. Ash signalled them back to their singing. Floria murmured under her breath, “We could do with a boar’s head…”
“I don’t think we’ve even got the rosemary to cook with it!” Ash felt a wooden bowl and horn spoon shoved into her hand, yelled thanks to one of the pages, and realised that she had settled back against the stone wall shoulder-to-shoulder with Fernando del Guiz.
She had to look up to meet his eyes.
The shrill sound of Carracci’s recorder rose above the voices of men and women. She heard Angelotti playing descant. It was not possible to speak over the volume of sound.
I’d forgotten he’s so tall. And so young.
There being no tables on which to set the trenchers, the woman doing the cooking and the other baggage women were rushing about the hall, from group to group, ladling out pottage. Ash held out her bowl, caught for a second in the rush of conviviality; and spooned the hot broth into her mouth. The carol thundered to a close.
“The mummers!” someone yelled. “Bring on the mummers!”
A roof-shaking cheer.
Beside her, Fernando del Guiz, his hood still raised, studied the contents of his bowl and tentatively began to eat. What could be seen of him was anonymous, priestly; he drew no glances from armed men. Ash kept her eyes on the men shoving a space clear in the centre of the hall.
There was no Christmas kissing-bush hanging from the rafters: someone had strung up a pair of old hose – being at least green in colour, she supposed – and John Burren and Adriaen Campin were drunkenly pretending to kiss each other underneath it. She attended analytically to the cheers and cat-calls – a little shrill, not all the men joining in. She glanced towards the guards on the great door. No runners; no messages yet.
What is keeping them?
Fernando del Guiz chewed at some unrelenting piece of gristle, and swallowed. On the other side of Ash, Floria had stopped eating to talk enthusiastically to Baldina. The men-at-arms around them were watching the centre of the hall.
There was a certain amount of relief on the young man’s face as he turned his head to gaze down at her. He nodded, as if to himself. “Can we speak privately?”
“If I take you into a corner somewhere, everyone will be watching. Let’s talk here.”
To her own surprise, there was no malice in her tone.
Fernando took another spoonful of the pottage, frowned, put back the spoon, tapped the shoulder of the man in front, and handed the bowl forward. When he looked back at Ash, his face in the hood’s shadow was drawn, wry, and uncertain. “I came to make a peace with you.”
She stared at him for a long moment. “I didn’t even bother to find out if you were alive or dead. After Carthage. I suppose it was easier to think I had other matters to worry about.”
He studied her face. “Maybe.”
About to question that, Ash was interrupted by a loud and ringing cheer. The mummers’ procession wound around the centre of the hall, between men and women packed back to the walls. A rhythmic clapping bounced off the walls, together with inebriated yells.
“What’s this?” Fernando shouted.
Two large men-at-arms in mail hauberks, in front of him, turned around and shushed Fernando.
“It’s the mumming,” Ash said, only loud enough for him to hear.
The head of the procession walked into the central clear space. It was Adriaen Campin, she realised; the big Fleming wrapped in a horse-blanket and wearing a bridle over his head. Rags of cloth, for ribbons, fluttered at his knees and ankles. Campin, his blanket sliding down, put his fists on his hips and bawled:
“I am the hobby horse, with St George I ride,
It’s fucking cold out, so we’ve come inside!
Give us room to act our play,
Then by God’s Grace we’ll go away!”
Ash put her hands over her face as the men-at-arms cheered and the hobby horse began to dance. Beside her, she heard Floria whimper. On her other side, Fernando del Guiz quaked; she felt his arm, pressed against her in the crowd, shaking with amusement.
“Not used to seeing this one at Christ’s Mass,” he said. “We always did it at Epiphany Feast, at Guizburg … do I take it you think this city won’t hold out until Twelfth Night?”
“That what you’re going to tell Gelimer?”
He grinned boyishly. “Gelimer will hate this. The King-Caliph hopes you’re all cutting your own throats, not making merry.”
Ash looked away from Campin’s high-kicking horse-dance. She thought one or two of the men around her caught the King-Caliph’s name. She shook her head warningly at Fernando. The warmth of the hall brought the smell of his body to her: male sweat, and the own particular smell that was just his.
Obscene, brutal and blackly humorous comments drifted her way. Ash caught the eye of those of her men who obviously did recognise the fair-haired priest as the German knight who had briefly been their feudal lord. The comment moved to where she would not hear it.
Why am I sparing his feelings?
“You’re going to have to tell me,” she said, surrendering to the impulse. “Fernando, how did you get to be a priest!”
For answer, he extended his arm, pulling his sleeve up a little. A comparatively new scar was still red and swollen across his right wrist, although to a professional eye mostly healed.
“Hauling Abbot Muthari out of the palace when it collapsed,” he explained.
“I’d have left him!”
“I was looking for a patron,” Fernando remarked sourly. “I’d just spoken up for you, remember? In the palace? I knew Gelimer was going to dump me faster than a dog can shit. I would have hauled anyone with jewellery or fine clothes out of the wreckage – it happened to be Muthari.”
