Ash: A Secret History (148 page)

Over the slight susurrus of the crowd, the noise of the single bell came clearly. Ash glanced up at the peaked roofs. She could not see the twin spires of the abbey.
They’ll be anointing him, giving him the last sacrament.

The back of her neck prickled with anticipation, waiting for the second and final peal to begin.
Dead before midday, the huntsman thinks. And it’s got to be past the fourth hour of the morning now…

“What about the Faris?” Robert Anselm rumbled.

“Oh. She’s sending an escort with the hunt,” Ash said wryly.

“An
escort?
” Anselm’s bullish, stubbled face looked bewildered. He shook his head dismissively. “That’s not what I meant. When he dies – is she Gundobad’s child? Can she do a miracle?”

“I don’t think even she knows.”

“And do you know, girl?”

The pale gelding butted Ash’s pauldron. She reached up absently and firmly stroked its muzzle. It lipped at her gauntlet.

“Roberto… I don’t know. She hears the Wild Machines. They speak to her. And if they speak to her—” She switched her gaze to Robert Anselm’s brown gaze, under pinched, frowning brows. “If they made me turn around and walk to them – then, whatever she’s capable of, they can make her do that, too.”

There were no last hedgerow flowers in this ravaged autumn, but she could smell evergreen branches, and pine-sap: half the men and women in the crowd were wearing home-made green garlands. Ash stands where she has stood so often before: among a group of her officers, familiar faces; horses being held by the company’s grooms; men-at-arms in Lion livery sorting themselves out and swapping kit between them.

Everything’s different now.

They watch her with more seriousness than they would give to the morning of battle.

“The Faris is frightened. I
may
have frightened her all the way back to Carthage – but I don’t know,” Ash said thoughtfully. “She’s heard the Wild Machines say
winter will not cover all the world, unless Burgundy falls.
But what she’s lived under is the Eternal Twilight – I don’t know if she really understands that they want everything black and freezing and
dead.
”

Her gaze went above the silent crowd and the ruined roofs, towards the sun, for reassurance.

“I’ve been forced by them. She hasn’t. She thinks it can’t happen to her. So I don’t know if she can bring herself to harm the Stone Golem. Even now that she knows it’s the only way the Wild Machines can get at her.”

Robert Anselm completed her thought: “It’s what she’s depended on, in the field, for ten years.”

“It’s her life.” Ash’s scarred face twisted in a grin. “And it isn’t mine. I’d blow the Golem sky-high – but I’m not there. So that doesn’t leave me much of an option.”

Her mind recovering itself, she found herself with a plan rapidly falling together under the stimulus of that demand. “Robert, Angeli, Florian. I said to the Faris, one Duke’s as good as another. But I can be wrong. If the Wild Machines only need
Charles
dead – then we’re about to find out what that means.”

Ash made an effort, ignored the silent crowd.

“Let’s hope the Visigoths have got all their attention on this hunt. Damn us riding
with
it – I’m going to lead a snatch-squad. Once we’re outside the area, we’re going to slip away from the hunt, come back to the Goth camp, and make an attempt to kill the Faris.”

“We’re dead,” Anselm said brutally. “If you took the whole company, you wouldn’t get through thousands of men!”

Ash, not at all contradicting him, said authoritatively, “Okay: we’ll
take
the whole company – all those with mounts, anyway. Roberto, the Faris can declare a truce, but there could be an armed mutiny going on out there before midday. The hunt could turn into a slaughter. If we want to kill the Faris – this is going to be the only chance to get outside the walls and try.”

Anselm shook his bull head. “Truce be buggered.
I’d
kill any Burgundian noble who stuck his head outside, if I was Goth commander. De la Marche thinks he can be in and out of here like a rat up a drain-pipe!”

“This whole hunt is mad,” Ash said, lowering her voice, under the noise of the single bell. “That’s
good.
The confusion will work for us. But I should start praying, if I were you…” A brief grin. “Roberto; I’ll take picked men; volunteers only.”

“Poor bastards!” Robert Anselm gave a glance at the Lion captains sorting their men out into units, in the square. “The ones you took to Carthage. They
believe
they’re ‘heroes’ now. They forget they got their asses kicked. And the ones that stayed here, they think they missed out, so they can’t wait to get stuck in. They’ll think you’ve got a plan.”

Alert to nuance, Ash said, “I’d planned to leave Angelotti in charge here, the gunners need keeping under control. I think the foot needs an officer, too – maybe you
should
stay in Dijon, not volunteer to come with me now.”

She expected a protest, along the lines of
let Geraint Morgan do it!
Anselm only glanced at the city gates, and nodded acknowledgement.

“I’ll put a watch up on the walls,” he grunted. “Soon as I see you attack the camp, we’ll shoot from here, add to the confusion. Sod the truce. Anything else, girl?”

His gaze slid away from hers.

“No. Sort out all the mounts you can for the men who’re coming with me on this.”

Ash stood in the weak sun, watching him walk away; a broad-shouldered man in English plate, his scabbard tapping against his leg armour as he walked.

“Robert’s turning down a fight?” Floria said incredulously, at her elbow.

“I need someone smart to stay in the city.”

The surgeon looked at her with a brief, cynical expression. She did not say
his nerve’s gone,
but Ash read it on her face.

“He’ll be okay,” Ash said gently. “We all get like that.
My
nerve isn’t brilliant right now. Maybe it’s something about sieges. Give him a day or two.”

“We may not
have
a day.” Floria bit her lip. “I’ve seen you talk to Godfrey. I’ve seen you turned around by the Machines – we all have. I know it as well as the rest of this sorry lot: we may only have an hour, now. We don’t
know
how long until it happens.”

A familiar coldness insulated Ash. “I’ll do this without Robert. He knows what I’m planning here could be a one-way trip. I need people with me who know that – and still come.”

On the far side of the square, the town clock struck ten. Its chimes battered the silence. Ash saw people unwrapping bread from dirty kerchiefs, sitting and eating on heaps of fallen bricks and furniture; all of it done in a contained, reverent practicality.

Floria closed her fingers around Ash’s hand in its chill metal gauntlet. She said, as if the effort were suddenly too great, “Don’t do this. Please. You don’t need to. Leave your sister alive. There’ll be another Duke in an hour or two. You’re going to get yourself killed for no reason.”

Ash turned her hand so that she could clasp the woman’s hand, carefully, between metal and linen. “Hey. I spend my life risking getting killed for no reason! It’s my job.”

“And I get sick of stitching you back together!” Floria scowled. She looked, despite the dirt lining her face, very young: a youth wrapped in doublet and demi-gown, candle-wax drippings white down the front of her cloak. She smelled of herbs, and old blood. “I know you need to do this. And you’re scared. I know it. You’re not talking with Godfrey, either.”

“No.” The thought of speaking, or listening, brought a dryness to Ash’s mouth. In that part of herself that she has shared for a decade, there is a growing tension; an oppression, like the pressure before a storm. The silent presence of the Wild Machines.

“At least see the Duke chosen, before you try military suicide!” Floria’s voice was gruff, with a raw dark humour. “There’ll be as much confusion in their camp after that as before. Maybe more. They might even be more off-guard. Come on, you’re telling me you don’t want to see de la Marche become Duke?”

Responding to the humour, to the woman’s plain attempt to control her own emotion, Ash said lightly, “I thought no one knew who gets chosen?”

Floria squeezed her hand hard and released it. Thickly, she said, “Technically, no.
Technically,
anyone with Burgundian ducal blood’s eligible. Hell, with the way the noble families intermarry, that’s about every arms-bearing family between here and Ghent!”

Ash flicked a glance towards Adriaen Campin, where he did a last kit-check for Verhaecht’s other Flemish men. “Hey, maybe we’ve got the next Duke of Burgundy riding with the company!”

That made Floria wipe her eyes, and grin cynically. “And maybe Olivier de la Marche isn’t the experienced noble military candidate. Come on. Who do you think they’re going to pick?”

“You mean when they open up the deer and look at the entrails, or whatever it is they do here, it’s going to say ‘Sieur de la Marche’ in illuminated capitals all over it?”

“That’s about the size of it, I guess.”

“Makes life easier.” Ash shook her head. “Why go to the bother of hunting the fucking thing! Christus. I’ll never understand Burgundians – present company excepted, of course.”

When she looked at Floria, it was to see the young woman smiling at her, eyes warm, wiping her nose with a dirty rag.

“You don’t understand a damn thing.” Floria’s voice shook. “For the first time in my life, I wish I knew how to hack someone up with your bloody meat-cleavers. I want to ride with you, Ash. I don’t want to see you ride off on this suicidal, stupid idea and not
be
there—”

“I’d sooner throw a mouse into a mill-wheel. You’d stand about as much chance.”

“And what chance do
you
stand!”

That this morning – the clouds thinning in the north, no more flurries of snow; the sun harsh and white in the south; the air full of the scent of broken evergreen – that this may be the last morning she sees: it is not new to her. But it is never old; never something which one becomes used to. Ash took a deep breath, into lungs that seemed dry and cold and constricted with fear.

“If we do take out the Faris, all hell will break loose. Then I’ll get the guys out in the confusion. Listen, you’re right, this is suicidally stupid, but it won’t be the first thing to succeed simply because it is. No one out there is expecting anyone to actually
do
this.”

She reached out quickly as Floria turned on her heel to stalk off, and grabbed her arm.

“No. This is the hard bit. You don’t go off and cry in a corner. You get to stand here with me and look like we
know
it’s going to work.”

“Christ, you’re a hard bitch!”

“You can talk, surgeon. You feed my guys up with opium and hemlock,
²
and chop their arms and legs off without a second thought.”

“Hardly that.”

“But you do it. You sew them up – knowing they’re coming back to this.”

After a silence, Floria muttered, “And you lead them, knowing they wouldn’t do this for anyone else.”

A flurry of activity among the Burgundian nobles made Ash turn her head. She saw lords and their escorts mounting up, on what nags and palfreys three months’ siege had left in the city; a clarion rang out; and a hunting horn over that shrillness. All across the square, people began getting to their feet.

In the part of her soul that listens, ancient voices mutter, just below the threshold of hearing.

Ash said briskly. “All right – but stay with the hunt, Florian, where it’s safe. I’ll break off immediately the full cry sounds. I can’t wait until the hunt’s over to attack. We can’t wait for anything, now.”

II

Riding out through the zigzag siege trenches that extended due north of the city, Ash’s neck prickled. Silent Visigoth detachments stood and watched them pass.

She swivelled in her war saddle. Black and massed as ants, a Visigoth spear-company fell in behind the cavalcade.

“Lousy bloody hunt,
this
is,” Euen Huw complained.

Ash has an immediate tactile memory: six months ago, riding from Cologne at the Holy Roman Emperor’s own lackadaisical pace towards the siege at Neuss, and stopping for a day’s hunting. Frederick III had had the regulation trestle tables spread with white linen set up in the forest, for his noblemen to have their dawn breakfast at. Ash crammed her mouth full with white bread while lymerers returned from their various quests and unfolded, from the hems of their doublets, fumays, which they spread on the cloth, each debating the merits of his own particular beast.

The hot June sun and German forests faded in her memory.

“They don’t find a hart soon, see,” the Welsh captain added, “and there won’t be a hunt at all. We’ll have scared off the game for leagues around!”

His gaze was febrile. Ash, without appearing to watch, took in Euen Huw, Thomas Rochester and Willem Verhaecht; the armoured escort that rode with her and her banner; and her fifty men riding behind.

It has been a scramble to raise even fifty battle-trained horses.

Is this enough men? Can we break into their camp, with this?

“Watch for my signal,” she said briefly. “Break off by lances as soon as we’re in tree-cover.”

And hope we can go without an alarm going up.

The wind outside Dijon’s walls blew chill from the two rivers. Sun winked from Visigoth helmets – the amazing, still-new, still-welcome sun. Ash wore her demi-gown over her harness, the thick wool belted at the waist so that her arms would be unencumbered. The pale sun shone back also from the armour of her men, and from the rich, dirty reds and blues of the Burgundian liveries a few yards ahead.

Thin, across the cold air, the noise of clapper against bell struck, singly.

“I can hear the abbey bell, boss,” Thomas Rochester said. “Charlie’s still with us.”

“Not for long. Our surgeon had a word with his – he’s in a coma; has been since Matins—” Seeing de la Marche stopping, on the verge of the trees, Ash reined in, checking the pale bay with a curse. Silent people on foot crowded the horses: peasants, townsmen, huntsmen. An anxious whining rose from the hounds.