Ash: A Secret History (126 page)

Could’ve been the tenth time,
she thought, somewhere between black humour and appalled resignation.
I’d better be able to handle this now I’ve got it.

A clatter of feet and weapons at the stair broke the silence. Still holding Carracci’s arm, Ash yelled across, “What is it?”

A harassed company guard entered the hall, behind him a dozen or so men in armour and Burgundian liveries. She saw in an automatic glance that their swords were in their sheaths; that the leader carried a white baton.

“Captain Ash,” their leader called across the hall. “My lord Olivier de la Marche has sent us. He wishes you to be suitably escorted to the Viscount-Mayor’s siege council. It is my honour to ask, will you come with us now?”

“You go,” Ash said instantly to Robert Anselm. “Assuming I’m right, and he’s here, I’ve got more important things to do – if you’re all set on staying here, I need to talk to the Duke.”

“To Charles?” Anselm lowered his voice. “They won’t let you in, girl.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t know yet? Fuck. I should have told you.” Anselm hitched up the belt that held his purse and bollock dagger, settling it under his beer-belly. His gaze on the Burgundian men, he said, “You know Duke Charles was wounded at Auxonne? Yeah? That was three months ago. They tell us he still hasn’t recovered enough to leave his bed.”

IV

One of the aides standing beside the Burgundian with the white rod called across impatiently, “Are you
deaf,
woman? The council’s
waiting!
”

Jolted, she turned her head: found herself among men-at-arms swearing, straightening their shoulders, beginning to move. She made the abrupt mental gear-change necessary to realise that violence is about to happen – especially now; especially after Carracci – and nodded at Geraint, watching as he and his provosts brought the lances to order.

“Son of a bitch!” Robert Anselm muttered, from his tone as disoriented as she was.

The leader of the Burgundian officers – Jussey? Jonvelle? – said something sharply condemnatory in French to his companion. He shrugged a very informal half-apology towards Ash. His expression, as far as Ash could decipher it in the dim, high-roofed hall, was embarrassed. His gaze went up and down her, head to foot.

“He’s got a point,” Ash said grimly.

The night-before-last’s sodden rain still blackened her brigandine’s blue velvet and buff straps. She glanced down at the high boots pointed to her doublet skirts, and the mud drying black and crusted on them. One moment of feeling naked without cuisses and greaves – without armour – then she realised, too, that the brass-headed studs on her brigandine were dull, and her sallet (where Rickard, blushing, picked it up) was glazed orange and brown with rust.

“Get me a sword,” Ash said abruptly.

“
And
the rest…” Robert Anselm gave her one assessing glance, already signalling to one of his squires. The boy came back across the hall with his hands full of straps, scabbard, and sword.

“Arm me.” Anselm, stripping off his demi-gown, stood with his arms outstretched, while his pages pointed and strapped leg armour and cuirass to his arming doublet. As if they weren’t there, he stared around at the men-at-arms, and finally fixed on the master gunner. He showed his teeth. “
Tony!
”

Angelotti, kneeling by a bucket, lifted his head and threw a quantity of wet-gold hair back, spraying his own squires with dirty water. His face was a little cleaner, still showing traces of having come in through mud, rain, and freezing slush. He looked first at Anselm, then at the Burgundians, scowled, and muttered something mellifluous and filthy.

“Yeah, yeah. I
know
you. You got clean stuff in your pack, wrapped up dry. Right?” Robert Anselm kicked at the Italian gunner’s kit with his sabatons, as his pages laced his arm-defences on to his obviously newly repaired arming doublet. “You’re about her size. That demi-gown. The one you always wear when you’re on the pull… You manage to bring that all the way back from North Africa?”

Ash covered her mouth with her hand, feeling a sudden grin under her palm. Angelotti knelt, unwrapped a pack of leather and waxed pelts, and stood up and turned, a garment across his arms.

A white silk damask demi-gown. Spotless. Furred at the high collar, skirts, and slit sleeves with the soft, multiple greys of wolf-fur.

“Can’t ’ave boss going out there looking shite,” Anselm said, giving the Burgundians a brawl-starting grin. “Now can we, Tony? Get the Lion a bad name.”

Long minutes, while the Burgundian officers waited meekly: two pages brushing her boots, Rickard pointing and buttoning the spotless demi-gown on over her filthy brigandine and calling to a mate of his for the loan of a polished archer’s sallet. He deftly twisted blue and yellow silk ribbon around the open-face helmet, and skewered a white plume into the holder.

The soft wolf-fur lining Angelotti’s collar stroked her scarred cheek.

“Sword!” Anselm beckoned his squire forward. Ash automatically raised her arms for the squire to kneel at her side.

Anselm reached across and took the weapon from the boy, with a deliberate, expansive physicality that always brought him far more clearly into her mind than anything else.

He stepped forward and knelt on the flagstones in front of her, an armoured man now but for his helmet and gauntlets. He began to buckle the sword-belt and weapon on around her waist, over the shining demi-gown.

She dropped her hand down, encountering a hand-and-a-half grip: blue velvet bound with gold wire. She touched the flutes of a writhen brass pommel and cross; the metal polished to a deep, glimmering brightness.

“This is your best sword, Robert.”

“I’ll wear my other one.” He snicked a buckle home, expertly threaded the tail of the belt through itself in a knot, and let the blue leather strap, studded with brass mullets, hang down over the pleated white damask skirts of her demi-gown. “You ain’t at Neuss now, girl.”

The memory of kneeling before the Holy Roman Emperor is sharp in her mind’s eye. Silver hair rippling to her knees; young, scarred, beautiful; a woman in full Milanese plate shining so brilliantly in the sun that it hurts the eye, leaves dazzles on the vision – and says, as clearly as a shout:
This is what I earned as a mercenary captain, I’m
good.

They’re going to look at me now and think:
she can’t even afford plate armour.
Well, shit, I’m down to a helmet and gauntlets: that’s
it.
Everything else – spare leg harness, borrowed cuirass – is lost, damaged beyond repair, or out there with the fucking Faris…

Is this going to be enough?

Ash reached out and took the borrowed sallet, prodding the padding for a better fit. She lifted her chin as Rickard tied the fastenings of a clean, dry livery jacket, and buckled the sallet’s strap.

“Looks like I’m going to the council. Angelotti, Anselm; with me. Geraint, I want a complete muster-roll of the whole company before I get back. Okay: let’s move it!”

A cluster of men sorted themselves out into a remarkably clean, if now unspectacularly dressed, Angelotti; a Thomas Rochester, equally rapidly cleaned up and wearing other people’s kit; and his lance of twelve as escort with Ash’s banner. Ash strode at their head, out of the shadow of the doorway, into the open air. The courtyard scurried with pigs and a few remaining hens, chased by screaming children; clanged with the noise of the armoury sheds that lined the inside of the tower’s perimeter wall.

A
crack!
made her whole body startle – the invisible impact of a rock, not far off. Animals and children simultaneously froze for a second. Pale sun struck her face: her chest suddenly constricted, her breath coming shallow.

“Hitting up at the north-west gate again,” Anselm rumbled, glancing automatically and uselessly at the sky, and reaching up to buckle on his sallet.

Beside him, Rickard flinched. Ash reached out to shake his shoulder companionably. Unexpectedly, she felt sweat cutting runnels in the dirt on her face.
What’s wrong with me now? This is just the usual shit for a siege.
She made herself start to walk down the stone steps, towards the men and horses in the courtyard.

There was a brief moment of the confusion that she has been used to for over a decade; armoured men mounting into the saddles of war-horses: trained, restless stallions. As the Burgundians mounted up, Rickard led forward a mouse-coloured dun stallion with black points and tail visible under the caparisons.

“Borrow Orgueil,”
⁹
Anselm said. “I don’t suppose you picked up any remounts on the way back from Carthage.”

The dun’s shining black eyes looked into Ash’s face, dark nostrils flaring. Anselm’s rough, sardonic tone demanded humour, or at least comradeship.

“Boss?”

“What?”

“Wrong time of the month for a stallion? We can find you a gelding.”

“No. ’S okay, Roberto…”

Momentarily – reaching up to put a firm hand against the beast’s soft muzzle; feel warm horse-breath on her bare, cold skin – she is stopped dead: incapacitated with loss.

Six months ago, she owned destrier, palfrey and riding horse. All gone, now. Iron-grey Godluc, wide-chested, bossy and protective. Lady’s flaxen chestnut sweetness and greed. The Sod’s dirty-water-grey colouring and foul temperament. For one second her heart hurts, thinking of the golden foal that Lady might have had, and The Sod’s viciousness (nipping at her leg when least expected; nuzzling at her chest equally unexpectedly), all lost in the rout from Basle. And Godluc –
I swear,
she thought, eyes stinging, mouth twisting with black humour;
I swear he thought of me as a horse; some misbehaving mare!
– skewered and dead at Auxonne.

Easier to grieve for horses than men?
she wonders, remembering the dead buried on rocky, inhospitable Malta.

“We’ll get you another war-horse,” Anselm said, appearing at a loss when she did not speak. “Shouldn’t have to lay out more than a couple of pounds. There’s been enough dead knights won’t need ’em any more.”

“Jeez, Roberto, you’re an ever-present trouble in time of help…”

The Englishman snorted. She cast an eye around at the armoured knights on their war-horses, the bright richness of rounded steel plate. Her own blue-and-gold liveries on the mounted archers shone out brilliant in the grey morning; men with open-faced steel helmets and mailed sleeves mounting up – she guessed – on some of the riding horses the garrison still maintained. Jutting bow-staves and her striped banner-pole pierced the air. A careful eye could have picked out rusted cuisses and poleyns, and boot-leather blackened and cracked by wet and cold.

“…Let’s go.”

They rode in the wake of the Burgundian officers, out into a crowded street where cold air moved against her face. Her escort formed up around her. Dust blew, filling the air; and old ashes skirled across the cobbles, spooking two of the geldings. Groups of people standing talking on the corner moved back out of the way of the armed men. She laid the rein over to avoid a man hauling a hand-cart of rubble away from a collapsed shop. In the space of a hundred yards, she picked half a dozen constables out of the crowds.

Another heavy
crack!
and boom of something landing and exploding into fragments echoed through the morning air over Dijon. Orgueil fluffed a plume of breath into the chill air, and she felt him shift discontentedly under her. Another succession of sharp impacts sounded, to the north. The Burgundians rode on, with an unconsciously hunched posture – men used to shrinking, however pointlessly, away from what the sky might deliver to them.

“Shit, that’s close!”

“Couple of streets. Sometimes they play silly buggers like this all day.” Robert Anselm shrugged. “Limestone. Reckon they’re quarrying rocks all the way down the Auxonne road by now. It’s just harassment.” Riding up to her side, he jerked his thumb at a church further on down the street. Ash saw it was a blackened shell. “When they’re
serious,
they use Greek Fire.”

“Shit.”

“Too fucking right!”

“I’ve been up on the walls. They must have upwards of three hundred petriers
¹⁰
out there,” Angelotti called, his voice thinning. Careful on the flagstones, he brought his brown gelding over closer on her other side. “Perhaps twenty-five trebuchets that I can see, madonna. They shelter their mangonels and ballistae with hides; difficult to count them. Perhaps another hundred engines – but truly bad weather will make at least their catapults unusable. But … they have golems.”

Wryly, Ash said, “I thought they might.”

Angelotti said, “But do we fight here, madonna?”

Our options are narrowing all the time
—

The Burgundian officers, picking up the pace, struck off diagonally down a narrower street; riding from the cover of one house to the next. Here there were fewer broken roofs and burned-out houses. Under the iron hooves of the horses, rubble strewing the cobbles made footing uncertain.

Deliberately not answering his question, Ash asked, “If you were their
magister ingeniator
¹¹
Angeli, what would you be doing right now?”

“I would look to undermine the north wall, or break one of those two gates.” The Italian’s oval-lidded eyes narrowed, looking past her to study Anselm’s reaction. “To weaken morale first, I would have had men up on the bluff, to draw me a map of what could be seen in the city; then I would concentrate my barrage on public targets. Markets, where people congregate. Churches. Guild halls. The ducal palace.”

“Got it in one!” Anselm snorted.

The churning in her stomach, and the tightness in her chest, both increased. A man desperately nailing boards across his remaining windows paused as she passed, pulling off his hat, and then ducked into his doorway as another spray of rocks cracked and whined across the rooftops.