Ash: A Secret History (12 page)

“I don’t suppose we’ve actually fought the enemy?” Ash somewhat theatrically whacked her palm against her forehead. “No, no; silly me – we don’t need an enemy. No feudal army does. Christ preserve me from factious nobility!”

A lance of sunlight slanted in through the open tent-flap. Everything Ash could see through the gap was dripping, and jewel-bright. She watched the red brigandines and blue and yellow livery jackets of men coming out to coax fires back into life, and tap the beer barrels that stood taller than a man, and fall to playing with greasy cards on the upturned tops of drums. Rising voices echoed.

“
Right.
Robert, Geraint, get the lads out, tell the lance-leaders to split ’em into red and blue scarves, and give them a game of football outside the wagon-fort.”

“
Football?
Bloody English game!” Florian glared at her. “You realise I’ll have more injuries to deal with than from the skirmish?”

Ash nodded. “Come to think of it… Rickard!
Rickard!
Where is that boy?”

Her squire hurtled into the tent. He was fourteen, with glossy black hair and thick winged eyebrows; already conscious of how good-looking he was, and with a growing disinclination to keep it in his codpiece.

“You’ll have to run up to the provosts and warn them the noise down here isn’t a skirmish, it’s a game.”

“Yes, my lady!”

Robert Anselm scratched at his shaven head. “They won’t wait much longer, Ash. I’ve had lance-leaders up to the tent every hour on the hour, these past two days.”

“I know.
When
they’ve worked their energy off,” Ash continued, “get them all together. I’m going to talk to everybody, not just the lance-leaders. Go!”

“I hope you’ve got something convincing to tell them!”

“Trust me.”

Anselm went out behind Geraint. The tent emptied of all but Ash, her surgeon, priest and page.

“Rickard, on your way out, send Philibert in to dress me.” Ash watched her eldest page stomp out.

“Rickard’s getting too old,” she said absently to de Lacey. “I’ll have to pass him on as a squire, and find another ten-year-old page.” Her eyes gleamed. “That’s a problem you don’t have, Florian –
I
have to have body servants under the age of puberty, or all the whore-rumours start up again. ‘She’s not a real captain, she just shags the company officers and they let her prance around in armour.’ Hell-fire!” She laughed. “In any case, young Rickard’s far too good-looking for me to have around. Never fuck your employees!”

Florian de Lacey leaned back in the wooden chair, both palms flat on his thighs. He gave her a sardonic look. “The bold mercenary captain ogles the innocent young boy – except I don’t remember the last time you got laid, and Rickard’s been through half the Imperial camp whores and come to me because he caught crab-lice.”

“Yeah?” Ash shrugged. “Well… I can’t fuck anyone in the company because it’s favouritism. And anyone who isn’t a soldier goes, you’re a woman and you’re a
what?
”

Florian stood and walked to look out of the tent, cradling a wine cup. Not, after all, a particularly tall man; he had the left-over stoop of a boy who grew tall earlier than his contemporaries, and learned not to like standing out in a crowd. “And now you’re getting married.”

“Yippee!” Ash said. “It won’t change anything, except we’ll have revenues from land. Fernando del Guiz can stay in his castle, and I’ll stay in the army. He can find himself some bimbo in a stuffed headdress, and I’ll be entirely happy to look the other way. Marriage?
No
problem.”

Florian raised a sardonic eyebrow. “If that’s what you think, you haven’t been paying attention!”

“I know your marriage was difficult.”

“Oh.” He shrugged. “Esther preferred Joseph to me – women often prefer their babies to their husbands. At least it wasn’t a man she ignored me for…”

Ash gave up her attempt to unlace her bodice herself, and presented her back to Godfrey. As the priest’s solid fingers tugged at the cords, she said, “Before I go out there and talk to the guys – I’ve been paying attention to one thing, Florian. How come you keep vanishing lately? I turn round and you’re not there. What’s Fernando del Guiz to you?”

“Ah.” Florian wandered in an irritating manner around the kit-cluttered tent. He stopped. He looked coolly at Ash. “He’s my brother.”

“Your
what?
” Ash goggled.

At her back, Godfrey’s fingers were momentarily still on the bodice lacing. “
Brother?
”

“Half-brother, actually. We share a father.”

Ash became aware that the top of her gown had loosened. She shook her shoulders in the cloth, feeling it slide away. Godfrey Maximillian’s fingers began to untie the fastenings of her underrobe.

“You’ve got a brother who’s noble?”

“We all know Florian’s an aristocrat.” Godfrey hesitated. “Don’t we?” He went around to the trestle table and poured a goblet of wine. “Here. I thought you knew, Ash. Florian, I always thought your family came from one of the Burgundies, not the Empire.”

“It does. Dijon, in Burgundy. When my mother in Dijon died, my father remarried, a noblewoman from Cologne.” The blond man slid a shoulder up in an insouciant gesture. “Fernando’s a good few years younger than me, but he is my half-brother.”

“Green Christ up a Tree!” Ash said. “By the Bull’s Horns!”

“Florian’s hardly the only man we’ve got in the company under a false name. Criminals, debtors and runaways, to a man.” Seeing that she would not take the wine, Godfrey gulped it himself. He made a face of disgust. “That sutler’s selling us rubbish again. Ash, I assume Florian stays away from his family because no aristocratic family would ever tolerate their son as a barber-surgeon – is that right, Florian?”

Florian grinned. He sat again, sprawling back on Ash’s wooden chair, and put his boots on her table. “Your face! It’s true. All of the del Guiz family, German and Burgundian, would have a fit if they knew I was a doctor. They’d prefer me dead in a ditch somewhere. And the rest of the medical profession don’t like my research methods.”

“One corpse too many gone missing in Padua,
¹⁵
I suppose.” Ash recovered some composure. “Blood! How long have I known you—”

“Five years?” Florian said.

“And
now
you tell me?”

“I thought you knew.” Florian stopped meeting her gaze. He scratched at the shin of his torn hose with a hand deeply dirt-ingrained. “I thought you knew everything I had to hide.”

Ash pushed her underrobe and kirtle off her shoulders and stepped out of the vast heap of crumpled silk and brocade, leaving it laying on the rushes. Her linen chemise was fine enough to show her skin as a pink glow under it, and disclose the round swell of her breasts, the darkness of her nipples.

Florian grinned at her, momentarily distracted. “That’s what I
call
a pair of tits. Good Lord, woman! Beats me how you ever get those under an arming doublet. One day you really must let me have a closer look…”

Ash stripped her chemise off over her head. She stood naked and confident, one fist on her hip, and grinned back at her surgeon. “Yeah, sure – your interest in women’s bodies is
purely
professional. That’s what all the camp girls tell me!”

Florian leered. “Trust me. I’m a doctor.”

Godfrey did not laugh. He looked out of the tent. “Here’s young Philibert. Florian, isn’t this ridiculous? You could – mediate with your brother. Isn’t this the ideal occasion for a family reunion?”

All humour gone, Florian said flatly, “No.”

“You could be reconciled to your family – bless them which persecute you; bless, and curse not.
¹⁶
And then you could
strongly
suggest to your brother that he doesn’t marry Ash.”

“No. I could not. I recognised who it must be out there by his livery. I haven’t met him face to face since he was a child, and I intend to keep it that way.”

An edge was apparent in the air, a tension in their voices. Ash glanced from one man to the other, entirely unconscious of being naked. “Don’t object to this marriage, guys. It can open up a whole new world for the company. We can be permanent. We’ll have land we can go back to, in the winter.
And
revenues.”

Florian’s gaze locked on the priest’s face. “Listen to her, Father Godfrey. She’s right.”

“But she mustn’t marry Fernando del Guiz!” The priest’s desperate voice went up an octave; he sounded like the young ordinand that Ash remembered meeting in the St Herlaine convent, eight years ago. “She must not!”

“Why not?”

“Yes, why not?” Ash echoed her surgeon. “Phili, come and sort me out shirt and doublet and hose. The green with the silver points will be suitably impressive. Godfrey, why not?”

“I’ve been waiting, but you don’t— Didn’t you recognise his name? Don’t you remember his face?” Godfrey was a big man, rather than being fat, and he had all the charisma of a large, powerful body, priest or not. Now there was helplessness in his gestures. He swung round on Florian, jabbing a finger at the willowy man sprawled in the chair. “Ash can’t marry your brother because she’s met him before!”

“I’m sure our ruthless mercenary leader has met many noble idiots.” Florian picked at his dirty nails. “Fernando won’t be the first, or the worst.”

Godfrey stepped out of the page Philibert’s way. Ash hauled a shirt over her head, sat on the wooden chest, and pulled on her doublet and hose together – two mismatched shades of green wool; still tied together at the waist with twelve pairs of cords tipped with silver aiglettes. She held her arms out, and the small boy eased her sleeves over them, tying them into the doublet’s arm-holes at the shoulders with more pairs of points.

“Go watch the football, Phili; come and tell me when they’re finishing.” She ruffled his hair. As he left, and she began lacing up the front of her best puff-sleeved doublet, she said, “Come on, Godfrey, what is it? Yeah, I know I know the face from somewhere. Where do you know him from?”

Godfrey Maximillian turned away, avoiding her eyes. “He … won the big tournament, in Cologne, last summer. You remember, child? He unhorsed fifteen; didn’t fight in the foot combat. The Emperor presented him with a bay stallion. I – recognised the livery and name.”

Ash took his shoulder and turned him to face her again. She said flatly, “Yeah.
And
the rest. What’s so special, Godfrey? Where did
I
meet Fernando?”

“Seven years ago.” Godfrey took a breath. “In Genoa.”

Her belly jolted. She forgot the waiting company. So
that’s
what all the adrenalin-powered cheerfulness has been about, these past two days. I’m like that when I’m hiding something from myself. I just don’t always know that’s what I’m doing.

And it’s probably why I’ve been running the company like a half-arsed excuse for a captain; letting myself be taken off to Cologne—

The memory, chewed dry, comes back to her as it always does, in the same fragments. Sea-water slopping against the stone steps of a dock. Lantern light on wet cobbles. Male shoulders against the light. Running back to camp afterwards – the camp of her old company, under the Griffin-in-Gold banner – choking, far too ashamed to show rage openly.

“Oh. Yeah. So?” Ash’s voice sounded, even to herself, too hurried to be casual. She looked away from Godfrey, out of the tent. “Was
that
del Guiz? That was a long time ago.”

“I made it my business afterwards to find out his name.”

“Did you?” The back of her throat tightened with malice. “That’s the kind of thing you like to do, isn’t it, Godfrey? Even then.”

In her peripheral vision, Florian de Lacey – now Florian del Guiz, a potential brother-in-law; how strange – stood up. He put his flopping, dirty blond hair out of his eyes, in the so-familiar gesture. “What is it, girl?”

“Didn’t I ever tell you? It was before you joined us. I thought I might have got drunk some night and told you.” A questioning glance, at which Florian shook his head.

Ash got up from the chest and walked to the tent’s entrance. The wet canvas was beginning to dry now, under the afternoon sun. She reached out to test the growing tautness of a guy-rope. A cow moaned, over in the quartermaster Henri Brant’s stock pens. The wind brought wet scents of dung. The tents and other shelters – A-frame structures made of canvas pegged down over halberd shafts – were unusually empty. She cocked an ear for the sound of voices shouting at football, and heard nothing.

“Well,” she said. “Well.”

She turned back to face the two men. Godfrey’s fingers kneaded obsessively at the cord around the waist of his brown robe. You could still see, in his weather-hardened features, the pallid, plump young man that he had been then. Her rage, hanging fire, snapped.

“And you can take that sheep-face off! I’ve never seen
you
so happy. You loved me being punished. You could comfort me! You never like me quite so much when I’m not falling apart, do you? Bloody virgin!”

“
Ash!
”

Ebbing, the anger leaves her dry, free of the conviction that the world is full of faces hiding harm, viciousness, persecution.

“Jesus, Godfrey, I’m sorry!”

The priest’s face lost a little of its distress.

Florian said, “What did my brother do?”

Ash felt the dry rushes beneath her bare feet as she walked back across the tent. The shadows of clouds move across the canvas; the world bright, then dim, then bright again. She sat on the wooden chest and pulled her boots on, without looking up at the surgeon. “Wine.”

“Here.” A dirty hand entered her field of vision: Florian holding a goblet.

Ash took it, and watched the red and silver ripples on the surface of the liquid.

“You can’t hear it without laughing. No one could. That’s the problem.” She lifted her head as Florian squatted down on his haunches in front of her; she and the man now level, face to face. “You know, you don’t look anything like him. I’d never have taken you on the company books if you had.”