by Mary Gentle
“Okay.” Ash grinned at them: all confidence. She ignored and hid the churning in her guts. “Now. This is where we get our asses in gear, guys. Where’s Master de la Marche? We’ll give it an hour – and then send an envoy out to tell King-Caliph Gelimer exactly what he expects to hear.”
Robert Anselm, on the heels of her remark, said, “Yeah? Who?”
III
“If we don’t send Fernando del Guiz back out to negotiate the surrender,” Ash said regretfully, to Olivier de la Marche, “Gelimer’s going to think that’s suspicious.”
The sun of Stephen’s day set in a wine-red blaze. Snow fell with the dusk, small flakes plunging into the black emptiness. Ash closed the shutters of the window in the ducal chambers. She momentarily leaned her forehead against the cold wood, listening inside herself.
‘…LITTLE SHADOW, SOON TO BECOME AS OTHER SHADOWS. A GHOST; A THING THAT NEVER WAS. NOT EVEN A DREAM…’
Their power sucked at her, like a current in a swift river. Her forehead grew warm and damp with the effort of resisting. A smile curled at her mouth as she straightened up. “You don’t give up, do you?”
‘FEEL OUR POWERS, GROWING—’
‘SOON, NOW. SOON.’
She ignored the fear, walking back across the bare chamber.
“Not if someone of sufficiently high rank goes instead,” Olivier de la Marche said, from beside the hearth. “It is my duty to go. I am of Burgundy, Captain-General.”
“True. But Gelimer will be quite capable of torturing a herald to double-check they’re telling the truth. I know that, personally.” Ash gave the Burgundian champion a level look. “There are people who know too much, now, about what we plan to do. You’re one of them: so am I. We don’t go. It would make sense to send Fernando.”
Except that he’ll want to speak to his sister the Duchess before he does this.
The thought was plainly in de la Marche’s mind as well as her own, and Anselm’s. Even here, none of them voiced it. Ash looked across the ducal chamber at the figure in padded headdress, veil, and brocade robes. Her mouth twitched.
“I don’t think Fernando had better talk to the Duchess.”
By the remaining unshuttered window, Dickon de Vere gazed down into the darkness that hid the roofs of Dijon with the same expression he had been wearing since he had said – in an appalled tone, to John de Vere – You want me to wear a what?
“Put the lamp out, or close the shutter!” Robert Anselm growled at the young Englishman; and when Dickon turned a look of disbelief on him, added, “You want to give them a nice bright light to aim at, boy – your Grace?”
Dickon de Vere looked around for servants, found that there were none, and awkwardly reached out to fasten the shutter closed. Anselm slapped him on his velvet shoulder, companionably, as he walked back to the fire.
“Look, boss.” Anselm glanced at Ash. “Gelimer knows you’ve got a grudge against your husband. String Fernando up. Send someone else out – with the body. Tell the King-Caliph you’ve settled a family matter. If Fernando’s dead, he can’t go shooting his mouth off about anything else. And whoever you send out can negotiate the surrender.”
“I don’t want him dead.”
It came out before she thought about it. Anselm gave her a very deadpan look. De la Marche, not noticing, only nodded, and said, “He is our Grace the Duchess’s brother; I am reluctant to put him to death without her word.”
I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.
“If we imprisoned him,” she began.
Anselm interrupted. “If you shove ‘Brother’ Fernando del Guiz in a dungeon, there’ll be talk. Likely as not, we’ll have an informer find their way down there, and hear him say he ain’t seen his sister recently. Shit hits the fan, then.” He stabbed his finger at Ash. “Never mind what the doc would say. Have him killed.”
The chill bit through the hearth’s meagre warmth. Ash stretched stiffening limbs, and moved to walk a little on the bare floorboards, their creak the only sound.
“No.”
“But, boss—”
“Bring me his priestly robes,” Ash said. “We’re not short of dead men. Are we, Roberto? Find a body about his size, and put the robes on it. Stick it in a cage. Hang it off the city walls – I want it to look like a man starving to death. Whoever we send out as herald can point out to Gelimer that I’ve settled matters with my ex-husband…” Her eyes narrowed. “You’d better mess the face up a bit. I wouldn’t put it past them to have some golem-device that can see a face four hundred yards away.”
Olivier de la Marche nodded. “And Fernando del Guiz himself?”
Ash stopped pacing. Her head came up. “Put him with the prisoners. Put him in with Violante and Adelize and the Faris. The Faris could do with a confessor – he’s the only Arian priest we’ve got.”
Let him have his chance to speak to her.
Robert Anselm said nothing, only nodding curtly, but she intercepted a look which she refused to respond to. After a moment, he said, “Then who’re you going to send out there to have his nuts chopped off?”
Ash tapped her fingers against her armoured thigh. “Ideally, someone who’s of sufficient high rank, and who knows nothing about the military side of things here.”
Olivier de la Marche snapped his fingers. “I have him! The Viscount-Mayor. Follo.”
“Richard Follo?” Ash thought about it.
De la Marche, with a knight’s contempt for a man who does not fight for pleasure – or at least, for honour – shrugged. “Pucelle, isn’t it obvious? He’s a civilian. More to the point – he’s a believable coward. If he is told we’re surrendering, he’ll negotiate in good faith that we are.”
There speaks your nobleman.
“You mean, who’ll miss him?” Ash said, and, surprised, felt more than a slight regret for scapegoating the man.
“Do that fat bastard good to walk out there!” Robert Anselm commented, to laughter from de la Marche, and a scowl from Dickon de Vere.
On the one hand, Richard Follo’s a self-aggrandising, pompous troublemaker. On the other hand, he’s mayor; he’s a civilian, with a family still living; we shouldn’t lose any of our people, no matter how much of a pain they are…
Don’t be too anxious to save him just because you don’t like him.
“Of people of that rank,” Ash said, “I suppose he’s the least likely to be able to tell Gelimer anything useful. Olivier, will you have one of your heralds set up a meeting between Follo and – Sancho Lebrija, I expect it’ll be, on their side?”
De la Marche nodded, stood, and walked towards the door.
“Where…” Ash tapped her fingers restlessly, and resumed pacing, always pacing; ignoring the three men in the room. “Where? Where is Gelimer?”
“You got him,” Ash said.
She did not need the Welshman to say anything. Euen Huw wearing his smug expression told it all. The two Tydder brothers with him – Simon and Thomas in dirty Visigoth tunics, mail shirts underneath – looked equally pleased with themselves.
“You had their patrol rota down pat, boss. And who notices one more spearman? Living in real comfort, he is,” Euen Huw remarked. “Better than you, boss. Got all these slaves, hasn’t he? And stone men, and I don’t know what. And braziers, too. Hot enough to melt the skin off your face. First time I been warm since we got here.”
Ash pinched the bridge of her nose, and looked at him.
“We’d’ve had him if we could.” The Welshman’s frustration was clear. “Talk about high security. I reckon he has twelve men with him when he goes to do a shit! Took us long enough to get close enough to work out it was him.”
“Bow? Crossbow? Arquebus?”
“Nah. Can see why the guys we sent out couldn’t get to him. That unit he’s got round him are sharp. Daren’t touch a weapon anywhere near ’em.”
“Which is where?” Ash demanded.
“Here,” Euen Huw said, hastily feeling in his leather pouch.
Euen’s dirt-black hands spread a paper in front of her. The Tydders crowded at his shoulder. He ran his finger across the charcoal lines that mapped the city, and the rivers to east and west, and the open valley to the north. The lines of the Visigoth camps were sketched in, now blackly definite. Euen Huw tapped his finger on the paper.
“He’s there, boss. About a half mile north of the north-west gate. Up-stream of us, on this side of the river. There’s a bridge there, behind their lines. They haven’t thrown it down. I reckon he’s sitting there so he can be over it and away, if there’s trouble.”
“Yeah, he’s got roads going south or west, if he crosses the bridge…”
“Not that we’re going to let him.”
Ash let herself smile at the Welshman. “We’re going to have to move fucking fast to stop him. Well done, Euen; guys. Okay. I need more people to go out and keep an eye on him – be careful, his ’arifs have had enough time to re-do guard duties. I must know if King-Caliph Gelimer moves his household.”
The day of the twenty-seventh of December passed. A dozen times in an hour, she missed the presence of John de Vere; his advice, his even temper, and his confidence.
The absence of Floria del Guiz worried at her like a missing tooth.
“Activity in the enemy camp. They’re shifting men,” Robert Anselm reported.
“Have they answered our herald yet?”
“Follo’s still out there talking.” Anselm said evenly, “The longer we leave it, the more weaknesses the King-Caliph can cover.”
“I know. But we knew this would take time to set up. We have to take them by surprise: get out there and punch through them to Gelimer. Anything less than that is useless.”
She covered the distance wall-to-wall inside Dijon twenty times in the day, hearing reports, giving orders, liaising with de la Marche and Jonvelle. When she did rest, for an hour after noon, she started up again, head swimming in noise.
‘FEEL IT GROW COLD, LITTLE SHADOW, FEEL HOW WE DRAW DOWN THE SUN.’
In the brief twilight towards the end of the twenty-seventh of December, the appointed Burgundian herald trudged back across the iron-hard mud between Dijon and the Visigoth camp.
Richard Follo came at last to Ash, where she and Olivier de la Marche waited in the palace presence chamber, surrounded by the silent merchants and tradesmen of Dijon. The veiled Duchess sat silent upon the great oak throne of the Valois princes.
He was escorted in through the refugees crowding the streets outside. There were few of them now – white around the eyes, gaunt with hunger, out at the further edge of desperation – who did not carry a bill or a pitchfork or, if nothing else, an iron-shod staff.
“Well?” de la Marche demanded, as if at his Duchess’s behest.
Richard Follo took a moment to arrange his vice-mayoral chain over his demi-gown, and catch his breath. “It is arranged, my lord. We will surrender, tomorrow, to the lord commander qa’id Lebrija. He will have all the lords and magnates of the city come out first, without weapons, on to the empty ground before the north-east gate. Then the fighting men, unarmed, in groups of twenty at a time, to be taken into Visigoth imprisonment.”
Ash heard de la Marche asking, “Does he guarantee our safety?” but she was no longer listening. She looked to Robert Anselm, Angelotti, Geraint ab Morgan, Ludmilla Rostovnaya; to the Burgundian centeniers. All of them had the look of those receiving expected, if unwelcome, news; there was even a slight appearance of relief.
“The surrender is set for the fourth hour of the morning, tomorrow,” Follo concluded, his eye-sockets dark with shadow and strain. “At ten of the clock. Do we agree to this, my lords? Is there no other way?”
Ash, face impassive, ignored the last bickering; could only think, Okay. This is it.
“Angeli,” she said. “Find Jussey. Now we know when we start.”
By Compline, it became too cold for snow. Ash, plodding over frost-sparkling flagstones and frozen mud, came back into the company tower’s courtyard, and found herself among men packed in tight for the pre-battle kit-check.
Wall-torches burned smokily in the freezing air. She beat her hands together, numb in their metal plates. For a moment, the crowds of tall, bulkily armoured men and women intimidated her. She took a cold breath, pushed into the yard, and began to greet them.
Knots and clumps of men stood here, a buzz of conversation going up into the night air. Lance-leaders checked the troops they were responsible for raising – Ash spoke to foot-knights, archers, sergeants, men-at-arms and squires, knowing at least their first names; and stood aside for the sergeants, forming up larger groups of men towards the back of the courtyard – all the billmen together, all the archers and hackbutters together. Shouts and bawled orders echoed off the vast expanse of stonework of the tower.
She walked among them, banner and escort meaning that a way always cleared in front of her, and talked to the billmen and the missile troops.
What am I missing? she thought suddenly. And then: horses!
There is no sound of hooves on the cobblestones. No ringing steel, from the caparisoned war-horses; no pack-horses, even; no mules. All gone into the company kitchens, now; from where a thin thread of scent trails – last rations before the morning.
“Henri Brant saved a couple of barrels of the wine,” she announced, voice cracking at the coldness of the air in her throat. “You’ll all get some at dawn.”
A cheer went up from those near enough to hear.
Coming to the entrance to the armoury, Ash raised her voice. “Jean.”
“Nearly done, boss!” Jean Bertran grinned in the red forge-light. Behind him, a last frantic burst of activity bounced hammer-noise off the shadowy walls, hung with tools. Two apprentices sat turning out arrow-heads at production-line velocity.
Deafened by the hammering, she stood with the welcome warmth on her face for a moment. At an anvil, one of the armourers beat out a dented breastplate, bright flakes spraying from the glowing metal. His bare arm with its prominent muscles flexed, shining with sweat and dirt, bringing the hammer down with accurate skill and power. She has a brief anticipation of that muscular arm and shoulder flexing, lifting, banging down weapons on some Visigoth soldier’s face. Maybe, in a few hours’ time.
At the tower door, she dismissed her escort of archers to the comparative warmth of the company tower’s guardroom, and padded clumsily down the stone steps to the ground floor.
A stench of shit made her blink, take off her gauntlets, and wipe at her eyes. Blanche came forward through the taper-lit gloom. A pack of children flanked her skirts. Ash, making a rough head-count, thought Most of the baggage-train kids, and nodded at them.
“I’ve got them bandaging,” Blanche wheezed thinly. Like the men outside, her face was hollow under the cheekbones, and the sockets of her eyes dark. “Every man who can walk is out of here, even if it means with a strapped-up wrist or shoulder. I can’t do anything for the others. The well’s freezing; I don’t even have water for them.”
The line of straw-beds extended off into the gloom. More than twenty-four now? Ash tried to count the dysentery cases, at least. Thirty, thirty-one?
“Szechy died,” the woman added.
Ash followed her gaze. Over by the wall, another dark, wiry man was wrapping the little Hungarian in something – ragged sacking, she saw, as an improvised winding-sheet.
“Out to the muster, when you’ve finished there,” she said. “You’ll get your chance tomorrow.”
The man knotted cloth, rested the body down, and stood. Tears marked what was visible of his face between long hair and moustache. He said something – only kill fucking Visigoths! was comprehensible among his words – and staggered off towards the steps.
“Keep them as comfortable as you can. We need the water for those who’re fighting, though.” Ash watched the supine bodies of the fever cases. “If a
ny of them suddenly ‘recover’, send them outside.”
Blanche, half smiling, shook her head. “I wish these were malingerers.”
Coming back up to the entrance hall, she found it crowded: Euen Huw, Rochester, Campin, Verhaecht, Mowlett, and a dozen others.
“See Anselm and Angeli; they’ll sort it!” She shoved her way past the familiar faces, up the narrow stone stairwell, to the top floor. One of the guards there pushed aside the leather curtain. The brush-haired page came to take her cloak, her hood, her huke, and her sword.
“Armour off, boss?” he demanded.
“Yeah. Rickard will do it. I’ll want arming up again before Lauds.” She hesitated, looking down at the boy – about ten, she supposed. “What’s your name again?”
“Jean.”
“Okay, Jean. You wake me about half a candle-mark before Lauds. Bring the other pages, and food, and lights.”
He gazed up at her over the bundle of damp, mud-stained wool, sheepskin, and weapons in his arms. “Yes, boss!”
She closed her eyes briefly, as he left, hearing his footsteps on the stone stairs, and some half-audible comment by the guards. For a second she sees, clearly, how his face will look cut across with the hand’s-breadth blade of a bill.
“Boss.” Rickard came away from the upper floor’s hearth, where the fire lay banked down to red embers, with a pitiful amount of rescued beams and timber stacked beside it to dry out.
He cut the waxed points holding her pauldrons, and she shut her eyes again, this time for weariness; feeling his hands unbuckle and lift off the weight of thin steel plates, as if he lifted boulders off her flesh. As he removed cuisses and greaves and sabatons, she stretched her legs; and with the removal of her cuirass and arm-defences, she reached out as if to crack every muscle in her body, before slumping back into a flat-footed stance.
“That’ll need a clean,” she said, as Rickard began to hang it up on the body-form. “Do it downstairs.”
