by Mary Gentle
“They won’t have any friends,” Ash said dryly. “You watch Frederick and Louis leg it. And the Sultan come in – right, Colonel?”
Bajezet, translated, said, “It is not impossible, Woman Bey.”
John de Vere said, “But, madam, Lord Gelimer is not a stupid man. Yes, we might make a sally out in force, hoping to overrun his men and kill him – but where is he? In what part of the enemy camp? Or has he withdrawn – to a town nearby? He will expect just such an attempt.”
“He can expect what he likes: if two and a half thousand troops hit him, he’s dog-meat.” Ash shook her head vigorously, speaking over the rest of them, gasping with the tearing wind. “Listen to me. The Faris knows – troop dispositions – and guard rosters. She knew – she’d have to come over. Collected information. If we can do it – before things can be changed – we can get spies out – and back in again. We can find Gelimer’s household – without him knowing, and moving it again. My guess is, it’s to the north there. He needs an eye on his troops.”
“God’s teeth!” John de Vere said.
Surveying the enemy lines, beyond the walls, there was no sign of the King-Caliph’s standard among the other eagles. Any of the finer pavilions and turf-roofed buildings might house him – whichever is the warmer, Ash thought cynically, letting Florian and de Vere and de la Marche stare north at the encamped Visigoth legions.
“It would need to be very fast,” the Earl of Oxford said thoughtfully. “And if he is on that ground, you would find it difficult to get a great number of troops out of the north-east or north-west gates in time. Impossible. They would be on us before we could deploy out of the bottleneck.”
“I know how to do that,” Ash said.
She spoke with a confidence that made them ignore her chattering teeth, and the fact that she hugged herself, shivering violently in the bitter wind. The advancing sun dappled a pale gold over Dijon’s white walls. The frost on the battlements did not melt.
“I know how to get the troops out there,” Ash repeated. She looked at Florian. “It’s St Stephen’s day, it isn’t twenty-four hours since the Faris came over to us. Whatever we’re going to do, we’ve got to at least get intelligence collected quickly.” She snatched a breath of freezing air. “Some weaknesses Gelimer can’t alter. He can’t alter his weak units – but he can move them. He needs to think there’s no hurry, we’re surrendering. We need time to prepare for this. And we need him not to think he’s our target.”
Florian chuckled, a little hoarse and breathless. She held out her hands to the brazier. “He’s our target. Yes. We’re surrounded by fifteen thousand men – so we’re going to attack their leader. Perfect logic, boss!”
“It is. It’s why they want you. Cut off the head, and the body dies.” Ash halted. “Look, if we do this, that’s it: it hangs on this. Once we’re outside, if we lose, they come in and trash this city.”
The surgeon-Duchess said frankly, “So where are you planning on putting me? Down in some deep dungeon where they won’t find me? Because they will.”
“They can attack the city even while we attack them,” Olivier de la Marche cut in. “If the opportunity were seen, they would send a legion in while we fought on the outside. Then we have lost – her Grace being dead – everything.”
“I’ve got an answer for that, too,” Ash said. “Are we agreed on this?”
They looked at each other.
In the end it was Florian who spoke. Wrapped in wolf-pelts, her dirty, hung-over face peering out of the grey fur, she swallowed back bile, frowned, and said, “Not until I’ve heard every detail six times. I don’t buy a pig in a poke. And where does the Duchess feature in all this?”
“That,” Ash said, smiling and nodding at the Janissary commander, “is where Colonel Bajezet and his horses come in. And,” she turned to the Earl of Oxford, “your youngest brother, my lord. We need to speak with Dickon de Vere.”
She did not arrive back at the company’s tower until the second hour of the afternoon. She immediately called Ludmilla Rostovnaya and Katherine over.
“How many woman sergeants have we got in the company at present?”
Ludmilla frowned, glancing at her lance-mate. “Not sure, boss. About thirty, I think. Why?”
“I want you to get them together. Get all the spare polearms we’ve got – the Burgundians’ as well, Jonvelle’s expecting you. You’re going to put some people through basic training.”
The Rus woman still frowned. “Yes, boss. Who?”
“The civilians, here. They’re going to get basic instruction in how to defend the city walls.”
“Green Christ, boss, they can’t fight! They don’t know how! It’ll be a massacre.”
“I don’t think I asked for an opinion,” Ash said. After a stern moment, she added, “There’s a difference between dying defenceless, if we’re overrun, and dying trying to take someone else with you. These people know that. I want you and the other women to teach them which end of a bill to hold, and how far away they should stand so they don’t impale each other. That’s all. You’ve got today.”
“Yes, boss.” The Rus woman, turning away, stopped and said, “Boss – why the women?”
“Because you’re going to be training the men and women of Dijon. You may not have noticed, soldier, but they don’t like soldiers. They think we’re drunken, licentious, aggressive louts.” Ash grinned at Ludmilla’s expression of angelic innocence. “So. The women civilians will learn if they see women who can already do it. The men will learn because they won’t have women outdoing them. Satisfied?”
“Yes, boss.” Ludmilla Rostovnaya went off, grinning.
Ash’s amusement faded, watching her go. Civilians do not turn into militia overnight; even militia don’t function until they’ve had a couple of fights. They’re going to get slaughtered.
Brutally honest, she thought, Better them than men and women who can fight. I need them.
“Boss?” Thomas Rochester slid in through the main door, the guards slamming it shut instantly behind the dark Englishman. A scurry of thin snow came in with him, and stayed, white and unmelted, on the flagstones. He said, “You’d better come, boss. The Turkish Janissaries are leaving the city.”
“Good!” Ash said.
II
The cold was no less bitter up on the battlements of Dijon’s north-east gate.
“Keep your fucking fingers crossed,” Robert Anselm growled, standing beside her. He had the ends of his cloak wrapped around his arms, and the whole lot bundled across his body; his hood pulled down almost to his nose. Only his stubbled chin was visible.
The pale afternoon sun put her shadow across the ramparts. Ash shaded her eyes with her hand, gazing north at the rider and red crescent banner moving out into the no-man’s-land between the city and the Visigoth lines. A second rider – on a borrowed Turkish mare – carried a yellow silk banner with the Blue Boar of the Oxfords on it.
“Well, if nothing else, this ought to convince them we’re really going to surrender.”
Anselm chuckled explosively at that. “Fucking right. Our last allies up the Swannee.”
From behind her, down in the square behind the north-east gate, Ash heard the chink of tack and the creak of saddles; many hooves ringing as they shifted on iron-hard cobblestones. She looked down. The ochre gowns and pointed helmets of Bajezet’s Janissaries dizzied her with their uniformity. The few Englishmen – de Vere’s household troops, his brothers, and Viscount Beaumont – stood out by virtue of their murrey and white livery.
Apprehension paralysed her. She said, “I can’t believe we’re doing this. I’m going to shit myself. Roberto, go tell them to quit.”
“Bugger off, girl. This was your idea!” Robert Anselm threw his head up, shifting his hood back to see her, and she saw his pinched white face and red nose. He grinned at her. “Don’t lose your bottle now. You said ‘a bold stroke’.”
With guards at the entrance to the battlements, and no one within fifty yards who could
possibly hear them, Ash still spoke in a whisper.
“This isn’t something to joke about. We’re risking Florian. We’re risking everything.”
Equally softly, and with the appearance of calm rationality, Anselm said, “If it wasn’t risky, the Visigoths would see it coming, wouldn’t they? Thought that was your point.”
“Fuck you,” Ash said. “Shit. Oh, shit.”
The sunlight cast his hood’s shadow over his face, but she saw that there were beads of sweat on his forehead. She strode across and leaned on the crenellations, staring out at the riders.
A Visigoth eagle, shatteringly bright in the frosty air, left the enemy lines. Ash was not aware that she was holding her breath until she let it out, with a choking sound. No more than twenty men, Visigoth foot soldiers and horsemen, were leaving the camp; and they rode into the empty ground at the walk.
“Told you they wouldn’t fire on the Turks.”
“Yet,” Anselm said.
“Christ up a Tree, will you shut up!”
Anselm said companionably, “Helps to have someone to yell at,” and then leaned out over the merlon beside her, straining to see the riders meet. “That’s it. Take it easy. Don’t fuck up now.”
Plainly, he was talking to the Turkish and English envoys. Ash shaded her eyes again. The frost lay white and heavy on the ground. Two hundred yards beyond the gate, the red crescent banner halted, and the Blue Boar; and one Visigoth rider came forward from beneath the eagle. The armed figures on horseback blurred in her vision.
“Don’t you wish you were a fly on that horse?” she murmured. “I know what Bajezet’s Voynik is saying. ‘Burgundy is about to fall. My master the Sultan has no confidence in the Duchess. It is time that we returned to our own land.’”
Robert Anselm nodded slowly. “I don’t reckon Gelimer wants a war with the Turk. Not this winter.”
The shouting on the distant ground went on. A horse neighed once, in the square behind and below them. Ash shivered in the wind. She wiped her nose on her cloak; skin abraded by the wet wool.
The Visigoth rider approached the banners more closely, until Ash could not tell one man from another, only the coloured silks clear against the sky. The Visigoth troop of foot soldiers waited stolidly under their eagle.
“Know what my lord Oxford’s saying, too,” Robert Anselm said. He spoke without looking at Ash, all his attention on the meeting going on. “‘I’m an exiled English Earl, Burgundy’s none of my business. I’m going to find Lancastrian support with the Turk.’”
“It isn’t unreasonable.”
“Let’s hope my lord Gelimer thinks so, too.”
Ash put her left hand down, resting it on the grip of her sword. “Whatever he thinks, what’s happening is that five hundred reasonably fresh troops are abandoning this city. Leaving Burgundy to twist in the wind.”
Anselm peered at the riders. “They haven’t killed them yet.”
“Like you said, Gelimer doesn’t want Mehmet’s armies arriving over the border right now.” Her hand tightened on the leather-bound wooden grip. “The best way to keep the Turks from challenging him is to flatten Dijon. He thinks he’s going to do that anyway, but he’d sooner do it without flattening some of the Sultan’s men in the process. I don’t suppose he’ll mind if the great English soldier-Earl leaves the vicinity with Bajezet…”
“Please God,” Anselm said devoutly.
“I can’t believe I’m doing something this risky. I must be out of my mind.”
“All right. You are. Now shut up about it,” Robert Anselm said.
Ash abruptly turned her back on the meeting going on in no-man’s-land, and walked across to the other crenellations. She looked down into the square. No pigs rootled in the now-frozen mud, no dogs barked; there was no flutter of white wings from dovecotes.
Five hundred mounted Turkish archers sat their horses, in neat formation.
Close to the gate, almost under the battlements, Viscount Beaumont stood with the Earl of Oxford’s brothers, by their war-horses. His laugh came up clearly through the chill air. Ash was conscious of an unreasoning urge to go down into the square and hit him. John de Vere’s forty-seven men-at-arms stood a short distance off, with pack-ponies; the little remaining household kit packed on them. The Oxford brothers, as well as Beaumont, were in full plate. The two middle brothers, George and Tom, appeared to be having some debate over a broken fauld-strap on the youngest brother, Dickon’s, armour.
Ash looked down at the third brother, a young man in polished steel plate, sword and dagger belted over his livery jacket. The winter sun gleamed on silver metal, on scarlet and yellow and white heraldry; and on the fair corn-coloured hair that fell to his shoulders. He carried his helmet under his arm, and was gazing down at the heads of Tom and George, where they bent over, examining the lower lame of his fauld: the skirt of his cuirass.
“Put the fucking helmet on,” Ash whispered.
She could not be heard, sixty feet above the cobbled square. Dickon de Vere cuffed his brothers to one side, took a few long testing strides up and down the treacherous ground, banged a gauntlet against the offending laminated plate, plainly protesting that it was only an irritation, not a problem. Viscount Beaumont said something. The Earl of Oxford’s youngest brother laughed ruefully, glancing up at the gate, and Ash was looking into Floria del Guiz’s face.
Robert Anselm, quieter than a mouse’s footfall, said, “She passed as a man, in a mercenary company, for five years. No one’s going to spot her, girl.”
Having been tall for a woman, Floria was – Ash thought – no more than a boy’s height in her armour. She moved easily, the armour fitting well. High riding-boots, pointed to her doublet, disguised the fact that Richard de Vere’s greaves would not fit her: two men’s calf-muscles are rarely alike, and there is no room for error in the close fit of the plate.
Floria’s gaze passed quickly back to Tom de Vere. She said something, obviously a joke: the men laughed. Ash could not tell whether the woman had seen her or not.
“I don’t believe we’re doing this.”
“You want, I’ll shut you in a garderobe till it’s all over,” Anselm offered, exasperatedly.
“That might be best.” Ash rubbed at her face. The straps of her gauntlets rubbed her skin, tender in the bitter cold air. She sighed, deliberately turned her back, and walked across to the outside edge of the wall again. The Turkish flag, English banner, and Visigoth eagle still occupied the middle of the open ground.
“People see what they expect to see,” she said steadily. “I’d be happier if her London-English was better.”
“Look,” Robert Anselm said. “Like you said to me, Dijon’s going to fall now. It’s going to happen. We attack them, they come in and flatten us; doesn’t matter. Either way, we’re fucked. And we’re talking days, maybe hours.”
“I told you that.”
“Like I need telling,” Anselm said, with a deep and caustic sarcasm. “Girl, if she stays here, she’s dead. This way, she’s out there in the middle of five hundred shit-hot troops that nobody wants to fuck with. For a whole multitude of reasons. You looking for ‘safe’? There ain’t no ‘safe’. Having Gelimer think she’s here when she isn’t, that’s as safe as it gets.”
“Roberto, you’re so fucking reassuring it ain’t true.”
In all the fuss of dressing her, swapping them; in all the high security, Ash thought, I never got to say goodbye. Fucking son of a bitch.
“How far did you tell them to go?” Anselm asked.
“De Vere will use his own judgement. If it’s safe to camp a day’s ride away, he will. The Visigoths won’t be too surprised if they see the Sultan’s troops hanging around to see how the siege turns out, so they can report home. If it looks dodgy, he’ll keep them moving gradually east, for the border.”
“And if it’s really dodgy?”
Ash grinned at Anselm. “We won’t be around to worry about it. If I was Oxford, in that case, I’d ride like s
hit off a shovel for the border, and hope I could get as far as the Turkish garrisons there.” Her grin faded. “There’ll still be a Duchess.”
Out in the empty ground, the Visigoth rider wheeled away and galloped back towards the trenches. The Turkish interpreter and John de Vere moved – but were only walking their horses in the cold, Ash saw. The banners unrolled on the air, streaming and dropping as the wind dropped. White breath snorted from the horses’ nostrils.
“Here he comes again.”
She stood shoulder by shoulder with Robert Anselm, in the bitter cold of St Stephen’s feast day, on the battlements of Dijon. One crow winged across the empty ground, calling, and dropped to pick and tear at something – red and mud-coloured – that flopped on the frost-bitten earth.
The Voynik interpreter and the Earl of Oxford rode back, picking their way between the bodies of the fallen, to the north gate. Trained, the horses did not shy; although Oxford’s mount nickered at the stink.
Ash’s hands knotted into fists.
It seemed seconds, not minutes, before the gates of Dijon opened, and the Turkish riders began to file out into the open. Cold shivers ran down her back, from neck to kidney, under her arming doublet; and she shuddered, once, before she made herself be calm. Tom and Viscount Beaumont rode out to join the Earl of Oxford, the youngest brother following with George de Vere and the household troops.
The crash echoed through gatehouse and gate alike, but Ash hardly registered the slam of the portcullis being lowered.
Under a clear sky, in the winter sunshine and cold, in borrowed armour, Floria del Guiz rode among the Janissaries of Sultan Mehmet II, away from Dijon.
She carried her helmet under her arm, as they all did; riding visibly bareheaded between Visigoth legions. Nothing at all female about her exposed face.
Ash strained to follow her, to watch her, one among many; and lost sight of her before they vanished among the Visigoth troops, on the path to the intact eastern bridge. A bridge over ice, now.
“Dear God,” Ash said. “Dear God.”
She turned, striding to the steps, and clattered down into the square below. Besides the Burgundian guards, a dozen or more of her own lance-leaders clustered there together, talking in low tones.
