Ash: A Secret History (164 page)

Florian grinned, suddenly, and signalled to the servers. “I’m not keeping boss from her food. Bad things happen when you keep boss from her food…”

As the servers came to table, the Duchess of Burgundy reached out with long-fingered hands, helping herself and Ash from the dishes. Ash flicked a glance at the pander’s and butler’s expressions.
Ah, shit! She’s got them. I’ve
done that one
…

What she saw was not disdain for such non-noble acts, but a kind of pride in their Duchess’s blunt military manners.

Ash reached for a plate the right weight and colour to be gold. Unused to the noble luxury of a chair, she caught her armoured elbows on the chair-arms. She scooped up the wheat and honey gruel in a metal spoon – an oddly different taste to eating from a horn spoon – and shot a gaze down the table.

Anselm and Angelotti ignored her, seizing on the last of the food and eating with the fast, single-minded determination of soldiers; the gunner’s fair head close to Anselm’s shaven pate as they simultaneously leaned back to call for more wine. Next to Angelotti, the rheumy-eyed chamberlain-counsellor Philippe Ternant ignored the meat on his plate in favour of a rapid, whispered conversation with Olivier de la Marche, his eyes on Ash. Beyond the ducal champion, Ash saw the same middle-aged man in episcopal green who had been present at dawn.

Unable to speak with her mouth full, she raised her eyebrows at Florian.

“Bishop John of Cambrai,” Floria murmured, mouth equally full. She swallowed. “One of the late Duke’s bastard half-brothers. He’s a man after my own heart; there’s never enough women in the world for him!
¹⁸
He’s another reason I need you here. We’ve got business with him later. Whatever you’ve decided. Ash,
what does the company say?
”

Ash studied the bishop: round-faced, with black velvet eyes, and soft, matt-black hair growing around his tonsure, and only the Valois nose to mark him as an indisputable child of Philip the Good. She shook her head at Florian, pointing at her mirror-polished gorget and her neck.

“Better in a minute.”

“In your own damn time… What state is the infirmary in?” Florian demanded. “How’s Rostovnaya? And Vitteleschi? And Szechy?”

Anything to put off the moment.
Ash stopped chewing, swallowed; sent her mind back to the infirmary in the company tower. “Blanche and Baldina are running it, with Father Faversham. Looks okay.”

“What would you know!”

“About Ludmilla – spoke to Blanche – she says the burns aren’t healing.”

“They won’t if the stupid woman keeps trying to stand her duty up on the walls!”

“Your Grace,” de la Marche interrupted.

Ash did not look at the surgeon-turned-Duchess, she kept her gaze on the men lining the long table. Abandoning ceremony, they ceased eating; the officers looking towards Olivier de la Marche.

He rumbled, “Your Grace, with your permission – Demoiselle-Captain Ash, what have you decided?”

The spoon rattled as Ash set it down on the gold plate. She kept her gaze momentarily on the rich, warm glow of the metal. Then she lifted her head to see them all silent, all staring.

Sudden sweat made her arming doublet sodden, in the time that it took her to stand up.

“They voted.” Her voice sounded both thin and hoarse in her own ears.

An unbroken silence.

“It all comes down to what keeps Florian alive longer. You’ll die to keep Florian alive. So will we. Different reasons. But we’ll both do whatever it takes.”

A cold nausea pierced her. She leaned her fists on the table, to keep herself from dizzily sitting straight back down.

“If that also means me as your ‘Pucelle’, to boost morale – well: whatever it takes.”

Their eyes are on her: men of Burgundy, in their blue-and-red livery with the bold St Andrew’s crosses. Men she knows – Jussey, Lacombe – and men she knows only by sight, or not at all. She is conscious of her cleaned-up armour, her bright livery – and of her short-cropped hair, and the scars on her cheeks.

No. She watched the faces of men in their mid- and late-twenties, a few of them older.
It doesn’t
matter
what I look like – they’re seeing what they want to see.

She switched her gaze back to de la Marche.

“I’ll take the position of commander-in-chief. You’ll be my second-in-command. I’m in.”

Voices broke out. She heard it as a confused babble.

“There are two conditions!” Her voice cracked. She coughed, glanced around the room, fixed her eyes on Olivier de la Marche, and started again. “Two conditions. First: I’ll take this on until you get somebody better – when Anthony de la Roche comes down from Flanders, this job’s his. You want a Burgundian with leadership and charisma: that’s him. Second: I’m here in Dijon only until we can carry the fight to the enemy: kill my sister the Faris, because she’s a channel for the Wild Machines’ power, or attack the Wild Machines themselves.”

For a moment, she is dizzy with it: the desire to leave this battered, claustrophobic city. Even the memory of the horrific forced march from Marseilles is distanced, now, beside the chance of getting
out.

“And if we can get your Duchess – our Florian – away safely at
any
point, we’re leaving this town to the rag-heads. On that basis,” she said, “and with the vote of the Lion Azure – I’m here.”

The babble of voices resolved itself to two things: a cheer, and the explosive profanity of one of the abbots. Men all around the table stood up – one abbot’s green vestments swirling as he stalked towards the door – but the men in breastplate and hose crowded around her, grinning, speaking, shouting.

De la Marche strode up to her. Ash scrambled back from the high table. The Burgundian knight reached out, grasping her hand; and she managed to keep herself from wincing aloud.

“Welcome, Demoiselle-Captain!”

“Pleasure,” Ash muttered weakly. Her knuckles ground together. As he released her hand, she hid her fingers behind her back, massaging painful flesh.

“‘Captain-General’!” two knights corrected, almost simultaneously; one curly-haired and unknown to her, the other a thick-set man, Captain Lacombe, away from duty on the north-west wall.

Captain-General of Burgundy.
Shit.

Instead of leaving her, the fear intensified; nausea turning to cramps in her bowels. She kept her face as expressionless as she could.

Further down the table, Angelotti winked at her. It failed to steady her.

Well, it’s done now. I’ve said it.

Formal chivalric introductions passed in a blur of names. She stood, surrounded by men mostly a head taller than herself, talking at the tops of their voices. Looking back, she saw the remaining abbot and the bishop monopolising Florian.

The curly-haired knight’s gaze, followed hers. He might have been twenty-five, old enough to have killed and ordered killed any number of men in battle, but what was on his face as he watched Floria was a shining awe. Sounding contrite, he said suddenly, “Two of you blessed by God – I’m glad you’re our commander, Demoiselle-Captain Ash. You’re a warrior. Her Grace is so far above us—”

Ash lifted an eyebrow, and shot him a glance at about shoulder-height. “And I’m not?”

“I— well, I—” He blushed, furiously. “That’s not what I—”

As if he were one of her own lance-leaders, Ash said, “I think the phrase you’re looking for is ‘oh shit!’, soldier…”

Lacombe snorted, and grinned at his younger companion. “Didn’t I tell you what she was like? This is the Sieur de Romont, Captain Ash. Don’t mind him, he’s a dork in here, but he fucks those legionaries every time they come across the walls.”

“Oh, I’m sure he does,” Ash said dryly. Meeting Captain Romont’s pleased and blushing gaze, she thought suddenly of Florian in the camp outside Dijon’s walls:
call it charisma if you like…

The first smile tugged at her mouth.

I’d like to see de la Marche copy my command-style.

And then, her eyes on Lacombe and Romont and the others:
If I get this wrong – if I’m not up to this job
–
all of you will be lying dead in the streets. And soon.

She turned, walking to the table and putting her hands on the back of her chair; and as if there had been an order given, the
centeniers
of the Burgundian forces returned to their seats, and waited for her to speak. She waited until Florian sat down.

“I’m not a one-man show.” Ash leaned on the chair-back, looking at each of the faces around the table in turn. “I never have been. I have good officers. I expect them to speak their minds. In fact—” she looked across at Anselm and Angelotti “—most of the time I can’t shut the bastards up!”

It was not the laugh that warmed her, but the unmistakable body-language of men settling down to listen. Their expressions held cynicism, hope, judgement:
This is standard commander bullshit, we’ve heard it all before,
mixed with
We’re in deep shit here, are you good enough to get us out?

Burgundy may be different. But soldiers are soldiers.

Thank Christ I’ll have de la Marche.

“So I expect you to talk to me, to keep me up to date with what’s happening, and to relay what I say to you to your men. I don’t want us blindsided by trouble because some dipstick thought he didn’t have to tell me about a problem, or he thought his guys didn’t need to know what the command people are saying. I don’t have to tell you we’re hanging by a thread here. So we need to get it together, and we need to do it fast.”

There were perhaps two, out of the twenty, who still automatically looked at Olivier de la Marche after she had finished speaking. She mentally noted faces, if not yet names.
Two out of twenty is
fucking
good
…

“Okay.
Now.
”

Ash left the chair and paced, primarily to let them get a clear view of her newly polished, expensive Milanese harness, but also to look out of the tower window, at the ant-like movements of the Visigoths beyond their trenches.

“What we need to know is – why the fuck have they given us three days to talk about this?”

VI

“Madonna?” Angelotti’s oval-lidded glance took in everybody gathered at the table.

Ash briefly explained, “My
magister ingeniator,
” and gestured him to speak.

“The new golem-built entrenchments are a fathom deep, at least; and the same wide. In some places the lines are three-deep. Any attack would have to throw down fascines and pavises and boards, to cross the ditches. There will always be time now for the Visigoths to sound the alarm and deploy to meet us.”

Ash saw heads nodding among the Burgundian
centeniers.

Angelotti added, “I’ve spoken with the Burgundian engineers. Those dugouts go clear over to the Ouche, in the east; and they continue all the way down the broken ground over on the east bank.” He shrugged, eloquently. “We can’t break out in any direction, madonna! This was worth their three days.
If-
—”

About to interrupt, Ash found herself interrupted:

“Is a ditch that important, for God’s sake?” Florian leaned forward, as she has done in tents from northern France to southern Italy, arguing with Ash’s command staff.

“It stops us sallying out.” Robert Anselm hit the table with his fist. “But it’s crazy! Why are they worried about that? They can
take
this city. Right now! You look out there! They’ll lose a lot of men – but they’ll do it.”

Imperceptibly, Olivier de la Marche nodded.

“A ditch
is
important.” Ash waited until Florian’s attention came back to her. “Trenches. Trenches are defence – not attack. Florian, they’ve got the Wild Machines behind them, urging them on. What we need to know is, why have they spent forty-eight hours digging, not attacking?”

Now Florian nodded, too, green eyes intent; and Ash prodded the oak table-top with her finger for emphasis.

“
Why
dig? Why
not
attack? I can make a guess why – and if I’m right, we’re going to have a little time.”

Lacombe’s flushed face took on a look of hope. Ash surveyed the other Burgundian officers. “The Faris has stopped the assaults on the walls. She’s sticking to bombardment. She’s dug entrenchments round the
whole fucking city—
”

“Do you not hear her orders?” de la Marche interrupted. “Does she not speak with this Stone Golem that you, too, hear?”

“G— Saint Godfrey told me she doesn’t speak to it now. If he’s right, she hasn’t used the
machina rei militaris
since I went into her camp and spoke to her, before we came into the city. That means she isn’t listening to Carthage… And I’m willing to bet I
am
right: that last attack she put in on the northwest gate, before the Duke died, she must have done that without the Stone Golem.”

“They so nearly took the gate!” the elderly Chamberlain-Counsellor Ternant protested. “Was that the act of a mad woman?”

“It wasn’t smart.” With the bull-necked Lacombe and the other
centeniers
already interrupting, Ash raised her voice over theirs and pursued the point. “She made a feint on the wall where we were, and when it looked like we were pushing it back, she put Greek Fire down on her own people. Oh, I know
why
she thought sending van Mander’s company would work – she thought it would freak out my guys who’d fought beside him before. They’re hard bastards; it’ll take more than that. And then she thought that dumping Greek Fire on us and van Mander when his assault was failing would clear the wall, and let her attack with her Visigoth troops and win. But it was a bad mistake. She killed her own mercenaries. There isn’t a Frankish soldier in Dijon who’ll go over to the Visigoths now.”

Memory flashed her back to the wall. Not, as she might have expected, to Ludmilla Rostovnaya rolling, body on fire, but to the face of Bartolomey St John as she shoved fourteen inches of steel dagger into his eye socket and blood soaked the velvet cover of his brigandine.
I was there when he ordered that one
from the armourer. And now Dickon Stour’s dead too.