Ash: A Secret History

by Mary Gentle

  “You’re the one who’s keen on suicidal actions; getting the enemy to execute you. If I thought it necessary, I wouldn’t be handing myself over to Gelimer, I’d be walking off the top of this tower – four storeys straight down.” Ash gestured emphatically.

  “There’s something you’re planning. Isn’t there? Ash – sister – tell me what it is. I was their commander. I can help.”

  Everybody wants me to do this. Even her!

  “I will help you, if it leads to destroying the Wild Machines.” The Faris knelt up, her unlined face seeming young. Excitedly, she said, “The King-Caliph Gelimer will not command as I would. Rather: not as I would if I had the machina rei militaris—”

  “He’s got fifteen thousand troops out there, he doesn’t have to!”

  “But – you could put me on the field: not as a commander, as your battle double—”

  “I don’t need your help. We’ve already wrung you dry. You’re missing the point, Faris.”

  “The point?”

  Ash moved forward. She sat down on the edge of the war-chest. Well within range, if the woman now sitting at her feet should choose to strike at her with hands assisted by iron chains.

  Her eyes stung. She knuckled at them, smelling charcoal on her fingers. Water, hot and heavy, gathered on her lower lids, and ran over and down her cheeks.

  “The point is, who else can I tell that I’m afraid? Who else can I tell that I don’t want to get my friends killed? Even if by some remote chance we win, most of my friends are going to end up dead!”

  Her voice never shook, but the tears carried on, unstoppably. The other woman looked up, seeing, in the fire’s light, Ash’s face red and shining with water and snot.

  “But you know—”

  “I know, and I’m sick of it!” Ash put her face into her hands. In the wet, sweaty darkness, she whispered, “I – don’t – want – them – to – die. I can’t make it any fucking plainer! Either we go out there tomorrow, and they die, or we stay in here tomorrow, and we die. Christ, what don’t you understand!”

  Something touched her wrist. By reflex, she clenched her fist and knocked it away, hard. One knuckle struck iron. She swore, snatched her other hand from her face – vision dazzled by wetness – and made out the other woman holding up her cuffed wrists in a gesture of non-aggression.

  Distressed, the woman said, “I’m not your confessor!”

  “You understand this! You’ve done this – you know what—”

  The Faris reached out, pulling at Ash’s belt and demi-gown with her hands that were trapped close together. All in a second, Ash stopped resisting. She slid down the side of the wooden chest, hitting the stones hard, crammed in beside the Faris’s warm body.

  “I don’t—”

  Chains shifted, tangling in cloth. Ash felt the Faris attempting to put her arms around her shoulders – failing – and then her left hand was gripped tight between both of the Faris’s own hands.

  “I know. I know!” The Faris wrapped her arms around Ash’s arm; Ash felt the woman’s hard, hugging pressure.

  “—don’t want them killed!” Hiccoughing sobs stopped her speaking.

  Ash clamped her eyes shut, tears pushing out between the hot lids. The Faris murmured something, not in any language that she knew.

  Ash dipped her head, abruptly, and muffled the noise against the filth-stained wool of the Faris’s gown. She sobbed out loud, body clenched, crying against her sister’s shoulder until she wept herself dry.

  There were no remaining city clocks to chime the hour. Ash blinked awake in darkness, with sore, swollen eyes, and stared into the greying embers of the fire.

  Utterly relaxed against her, the Visigoth woman with her face, her hair, her body, slept on.

  Ash did not move. She said nothing. She sat, awake, alone.

  The page Jean entered the room.

  “Time, boss,” he said.

  On the third day after Christ’s Mass and the return of the Unconquered Sun, in the dark an hour before Terce:

  “Go in peace!” Father Richard Faversham proclaimed, “and the grace of God be upon us all this day!”

  He and Digorie Paston bowed to the altar. Both men wore mail, and helmets.

  The stones of the abbey, hard under Ash’s armoured knees, forced the metal back into the protective padding. She crossed herself and stood up, heart thumping, hardly feeling herself cold to the bone. Rickard got to his feet beside her: a young man in mail and the Lion Azure livery, his face pale. He said something to Robert Anselm; she heard Anselm chuckle.

  “Angeli!” She grabbed Angelotti’s arm as the company began to file out of the church. “Are we set?”

  “All set to go.” His face was barely visible as they came out of the great church door into the St Stephen’s abbey grounds. Then a lone torch caught his gilt curls, showed her his teeth in a wild, wide grin. “You are mad, madonna, but we have done it!”

  “Have you warned everybody off?”

  Robert Anselm, beside her, said, “I’ve had runners from all our lance-leaders; they’re in place on the ground and on the walls.”

  “We’re almost – fully deployed,” the centenier Lacombe grunted.

  “Then get fucking moving!”

  The faintest grey of dawn lightened the sky. Ash strode through the icy streets, head buzzing with information, talking to two and three people at a time; sending men here and there, conscious of her mind moving like an engine, smoothly, without feeling. A message of readiness came in from Olivier de la Marche as she reached the cleared desolation back of Dijon’s north-west gate.

  She passed her helmet to Rickard to carry. Walking bareheaded, the bitter cold numbed her face immediately, made her eyes run, and she blinked back tears. A word here, a touch on the shoulder there: she went through her men, and the Burgundian units, towards the foot of the wall.

  Torches threw golden swathes of light on the lower reaches of the wall, invisible outside. Men passed cannon-shot hastily from hand to hand up the steps to the battlements. She stepped back as a Burgundian gun-crew trundled an organ-gun across the frost-rimed cobbles, that they could barely see. Rags muffled its steel-shod wooden wheels, covered the metal of its eight barrels.

  At the foot of the steps they barely halted, tripping the organ-gun up so that they held the trolley, and carrying it bodily between them up to the battlements. A throng of gun-crew trod after them, and men hauling three timber frames – mangonels.

  Her numb skin cringed at every sound. Muffled footfalls, an oath; sweating grunts of effort as another light gun went up to the walls – will they hear us? Sound carries, it’s frosty, it’s too still!

  “Tell them to keep it down!” She sent a runner – Simon Tydder – off towards the walls; turned on her heel, and set off at a fast walk with her HQ staff, parallel to the wall between the White Tower and the Byward Tower, fifty yards back.

  They ran into a crowd, Burgundian archers and billmen. Ash craned her neck to look at the rooftops. A rapidly lightening sky was no longer grey – was a hazed white, with a deep red glow to the east.

  “How much fucking longer!” Her breath whitened the air. “This lot are late! How many more? Are we in place!”

  “We need it light enough to see what we’re doing,” Anselm grunted.

  “We don’t need it light enough for them to see what we’re doing!”

  Thomas Rochester snorted. The dark Englishman carried her personal banner again, a position of prestige for which he has handed his temporary infantry command back to Robert Anselm. He, or someone from the baggage train, has neatly darned a rip in his livery jacket. His sallet is polished until the rivets shine. Didn’t sleep last night, doing that. All of them: preparing.

  “Get your men in place!” she swore at the Burgundians. “Fuck it! I’m going up on the wall. Stay down here!” She pointed at Rochester’s Lion Affronté banner.

  Loping up the steps to the battlements, the burn-injury on her thigh hurt with the exertion.
She grunted. Once above roof-level, wind whipped out of the east and tore the breath out of her mouth. She slowed her pace, trying to move reasonably quietly in her armour. Stone treads glittered, crusted thickly white with frost, imprinted with the boot-marks of the men who had climbed up minutes before her.

  A line of light lay across the battlements.

  Brightness striped the merlons and brattices, and the tall curve of the Byward Tower. She turned east. Between one long low cloud and the horizon, the brilliant yellow of the winter sun stabbed out.

  We’re not a minute too soon.

  Men crouched behind the merlons. Gunners in jacks, their sallets and war-hats held at their feet so they should not catch the betraying sun; counting their shot in silence, their rammers leaning up against stonework. Other crews kept their cannon back from the crenellations, loading powder and ball and old cloth for wadding. Further along the parapet, men worked in rapid, silent teams, hauling back the arms of siege-engines with greased wooden winches.

  Beyond the Byward Tower, to her right, the battlements were completely deserted.

  “Okay…” Breath, warm, was cold against her lips a second after.

  A long way to her right, past the Prince’s Tower, thin clumps of men began again on the wall.

  Outside, past the bone-scattered ground, the Visigoth encampment lay vast and swollen between the two rivers. Heart in her mouth, she saw that smoke already threaded up from cooking fires. Behind the mantlets and trenches, pennants, banners, and eagles rose; like a forest of dry sticks in the rising sun.

  Anyone moving?

  For a second, she sees it not as tents and the men of the XIV Utica, VI Leptis Parva, III Caralis; but as a great structure sprawling there in the growing dawn: a pyramid whose foundation is use-and-forget slaves, then the troops with their nazirs and ’arifs and qa’ids, then the lord-amirs of the Visigoth Empire, and finally – pinnacle, peak of all – King-Caliph Gelimer. And for that same second she is utterly aware of the support of that structure: the engineers that bring supplies up frozen rivers, the slave-estates in Egypt and Iberia that raise the food, the merchant-princes whose fleets out-run the Turkish navy to sell to a hundred cities around the Mediterranean, and deep into Africa, and out to the Baltic Sea.

  And what are we? Barely fifteen hundred people. Standing in front of eight or nine thousand civilians.

  She looked away. The western river lay flat and white, frozen hard as rock. Strong enough? Please God. She could not see the surviving bridge, hidden by the myriad tents and turf huts of the Visigoth camp. As for the King-Caliph’s household quarters, there was nothing to mark any engineered building out from another except location.

  He was sleeping there two hours ago. And if he’s not there now – well. We’re fucked.

  A glint of brass caught her eye as the sunlight moved down. Golems, overwatching the gate. With Greek Fire throwers.

  The only thing we might have in our favour is that they’re not deployed. Maybe not even armed up – shit, I wish I could see that far!

  And they can’t fire into mêlée.

  What would have been a smile turned sour. She looked east, into glare: nothing but tents; tents and more tents; men by the hundred, by the thousand – beginning to stir, now.

  “Come on, Jussey—”

  Cold had got into her bones. She moved stiffly, half-running. The stone stairs were slippery with rime. She blinked, moving down into shadow again. Her muscles felt loose, and her bladder urgent; both these things she put out of her mind.

  Can I do this?

  No: but nobody can do this!

  Ah, the hell with it—

  At the foot of the wall, she grabbed Anselm’s arm in the dimness. “Time to do it. Is everyone in position?”

  “There’s a delay with some of the Burgundian billmen.”

  “Oh, tough shit! We got to move!”

  “Apart from them, it’s a go.”

  “Okay, where’s Angeli—” She glimpsed Angelotti in the gloom. “Okay, get your guys out: do it. And don’t let me down!”

  The Italian gunner went off at the run.

  “That’s it,” she said. She looked up at Anselm, not able to see his face. “Either everybody does what we’ve trained for – or we’re fucked. We can’t change this in mid-stream!”

  He grunted. “Like letting an avalanche go. We just got to go with it!”

  If I get hit, let it be a clean kill; I don’t want to be maimed.

  “If I go down, you take over; if you go,” she said, “Tom will take it; de la Marche will have to pick it up if we’re all fucked!”

  The command group trod on her heels as she strode back across the rough ground to the barricades. A lantern gave little light on the frozen mud-ruts. She slipped, swore; heard something before she saw it, and realised that she had come to one end of the company line. John Burren, Willem Verhaecht, and Adriaen Campin were conferring urgently.

  “We’re in position here, boss.” Willem Verhaecht spat, and spared a glance for the mass of men in Lion Azure livery, clutching their bills and poleaxes, grinning back at him. “Ready to go. I’d do anything to move, in this cold!”

  Some forty men stood behind. Bills jutted above their heads. Men strapped into whatever armour they possessed, much of it taken now from the dead. She heard a lot of low-voiced last-minute joking, settling of debts and forgiveness, and prayer.

  “We’re ready, boss,” John Burren said, nodding towards the unit in front.

  In the gloom, Jan-Jacob Clovet and Pieter Tyrrell struggled with a six-foot oak door, stripped out of some building. Tyrrell’s half-hand skidded on the frozen wood. A short, podgy figure in sallet and cut-off kirtle stepped in behind him, taking the weight on her shoulder. Hearing a female voice swear, Ash recognised Margaret Schmidt. Two more crossbowmen grabbed the door. Past them, she saw the other crossbow troops carrying doors, long planks, pavises, and torn-out shutters from ogee windows.

  “We’re here, boss!” Katherine Hammell’s voice said, at her side. Only the jutting staves above her troops’ heads showed them to be a mass of archers.

  Down the line, past them, Ash sees in this growing cold light, Geraint ab Morgan’s armed provosts; a dozen women from the baggage train, their skirts kilted up, and razor-sharp ash spears in their hands; Thomas Morgan holding the great Lion Azure battle standard. And faces behind them, under helmets, faces that she knows, has known for years in some cases: the line snaking on across the rubble, a little over three hundred strong.

  I do not want to lead these men into this.

  “Move ’em up,” she said curtly, to Anselm. “I’d better kick some Burgundian ass—”

  The silence shattered.

  A sudden sequence of cracks and booms from the eastern side of the city made her skin her lips back from her teeth in a wild grin. A long chill shiver went through her body. Through the ground under her feet, she felt the boom of guns; she heard the deceptive soft thwack! of rock-hurling siege-engines.

  “There goes Jussey! Better late than fucking never!”

  Eternal, now, this hasty shuffling of men into position; and one drops his bill with a clear clang! against a broken wall, and a dozen others cheer. Shoved into position by sergeants, spitting on their shaking hands, giving a last tug at fastened points and war-hat buckles – how long is this taking? Ash thinks, over the shattering noise of Jussey’s bombardment. How much longer have we got?

  Captain Jonvelle loped out from behind the long lines of Burgundian troops.

  “They’ve mobilised most of a legion!” He turned to confirm with a runner. “Pulled it out of the trenches – they think we’re staging a break-out to the east bridge – deploying over there—”

  “Got the fuckers! Okay, now wait. Let ’em commit themselves.”

  Counting in her head, she lets an agonising eight minutes pass.

  Ash gave a quick nod, walked out towards the wall, and turned, standing between the two advance crossbow units, to face the units behind.
Amorphous clumps of men: each a hundred strong. Unit pennons going up, now, in the dim light, but so few – barely a dozen. Gun-crews on the walls, engineers in the saps: even with everyone who can walk down here, we don’t amount to more than thirteen hundred men. Shit…

  She drew breath, shouting, her voice carrying over the distant Burgundian guns.

  “Here’s what we do. We attack now! They don’t expect us. They’re expecting us to surrender! We won’t be surrendering.”

  A rumble of voices, those few yards in front of her. Apprehension, excitement, blood-lust, fear: all of it present. Some of them are looking at the way cleared to the north-west gate: that choke-point – outside of which, where the sun may already be reaching the frost-white edges of ruts and stones, is a killing-ground.

  She cocked her head, short bright hair flying, eyes alight; and deliberately surveyed them.

  “You shit-faced bastards, you don’t need me to tell you what to do! Kill Gelimer!”

  It echoes off the walls as they scream it back at her.

  In full armour and livery, Rochester with the Lion Affronté at her shoulder, she bellows an old familiar shout, to Lions and Burgundian men-at-arms alike:

  “Do we want to win!”

  “Yes!”

  “Can’t hear you! I said do we want to win”

  “YES!”

  “Kill Gelimer!”

  “KILL GELIMER!”

  Everything lost, now, in the surge of adrenalin.

  “Boss!” Rickard, beside her, held up her sallet. She stopped for as long as it took him to buckle on her bevor and helmet. The sound of sakers, serpentine, and organ-guns from the east is already growing less regular, less loud. She shoved her visor up; taking as well a short, four-foot pole-hammer, carrying it loosely from her left hand.

  A solid boom! banged out from the city wall behind her.

  “Yeah! Go, Ludmilla!”

  A rapid firecracker-sequence of bangs, the reverberation of a mangonel cup thudding up hard against its bar – and every swivel gun, hackbut, cannon and organ-gun on the walls around the north-west gate opens up. Ash winced, for the nearness of the fire, even muffled by her helmet lining.