Ash: A Secret History (172 page)

Into silence, Ash said:

“That’s what you call cowardice? Not telling me?”

“That? No.” A glimmer in the light: more welling tears wet on Florian’s cheek. She took no notice of her own weeping. Her voice didn’t change. “First I wanted you. Then I knew I could love you. Real love; the sort that hurts. And I killed it.”

“What?”

“Oh, you can do that.” Florian’s eyes glittered, in the shifting light. “I couldn’t
know
that you didn’t want me. Esther said she didn’t want me. And then she did. So you might … but I watched you. Watched your life. You were going to
die.
Sooner or later. You were going to come back from a field on a hurdle, with your face chopped off, or your head blown in, and what was I going to do then?
Again?
”

The bishop’s long fingers wrapped around his Briar Cross, pale in the torchlight. Ash saw how the skin over his knuckles strained white.

“So I killed the love and made you into a friend, because I’m a coward, Ash. You were trouble. I don’t want to take on trouble. Not any more. I can’t take it. I’ve had enough.”

Dispassionately, Ash asked, “Can you kill love?”

“
You’re
asking
me
that?” Florian shook her head violently. Her voice exploded in the catacomb-darkness. “I didn’t just want a fuck! I knew I was capable of falling in love with you. I strangled it. Not just because you’re going to die young. Because you don’t let anyone
touch
you. Your body, maybe. Not
you.
You pretend. You’re untouchable. I couldn’t find the courage to let it grow; not when I knew that!”

Watching, Ash sees – past her own gauche embarrassment, and a sneaking wish not to have been told any of this – how much damage the woman has done to herself.

“Florian…”

And she sees that what looks back at her, from Florian’s whitened face, is not only shame and anger.

“So how come you keep telling me about it?” Ash demanded quietly. “How come you keep teasing me with it? And then telling me it’s okay, you don’t want me, you’ll back off again. And then you tell me again. How come you can’t leave me alone?”

“Because I can’t leave you alone,” Floria echoed.

Conscious of dust, damp, the glitter of candles on old mosaics, Ash would give anything to run out of this place – weighed down by history as it is – into daylight. Leave all of this, leave everything.

Am I that detached? Is that bad?

“Why do we hope?” Floria said. “I could never understand that.”

Careful to say and look nothing that could be construed as acceptance, Ash only shook her head.

“It wouldn’t have been any good,” she said. “If you’d told me three years ago, I would have kicked you out – probably screamed for a priest. Now, I think I’d give anything if I could want you. But half of that is guilt because I never gave Godfrey what he needed. And I still want Fernando more than either of you.”

She looked up, not aware until then that her head had drooped, and that her field of vision held only the floor mosaic of the Great Bull of Mithras, bleeding to death from a dozen mortal wounds.

“You know…” Sweat stood out on Florian’s skin, making her forehead shiny. With one swift movement, she wiped her palm across her face, smearing wet hair back. “You certainly know how to finish something off. Shit. Don’t you? That was…”

Brutal.

“That was
me,
” Ash said. “I’m
not
going to make thirty; I
don’t
want to fuck you; I love you as much as I can love anybody; I don’t want you hurt. But right now I need to know what you’re going to do, because I have to give the fucking orders around here, so will you please fucking
help
me?”

Florian lifted her hand and touched Ash’s cheek with her fingers. Brief, light; and the expression on her face just shy of that square-mouthed uninhibited bawl that children have when they burst out crying in pain. She shuddered.

“I don’t like not having answers!”

“Yeah, me neither.”

“At least you know how to run an army. I don’t know how to run a government.”

“I can’t help you there.”

Florian lowered her hand to her side.

“Don’t look for some dramatic decision.” Floria shivered. “I was brought up here. I know I
ought
to commit myself. I’m going to do everything I can – but you know what? I’m one of your fucking company too, remember! Don’t treat me like I’m not! The only people I care about is us. If there’s a safe way out of here for all of us,
I’ll take it.
I’m different now. I ought to stay. I know I don’t understand everything about the Wild Machines. That’s the best you’ll get.”

Ash reached for the ties of her cloak, slipped the knot, swung off the heavy wool, and swathed it around the older woman.

Florian looked into her face. “I can only do what I can do. I can’t be your lover. And – I can’t be your boss, either.”

Ash blinked, jolted. After a minute, she nodded acknowledgement. “Shit, you don’t give me any rope… Guess we’ll have to manage, won’t we?”

Ash put her hand out and gave Florian’s shoulder a little shove. The woman smiled, still wet-faced; mimed avoiding a blow. Ash squinted up at the invisible darkness of the night outside.

Bishop John of Cambrai cleared his throat. “Madame, the crown?”

The tall woman reached and took the horn circlet out of his grasp, dangling it carelessly in her long fingers.

“Sod waiting till dawn. And screw the witnesses,” Ash said, “Bishop John, you just tell them to keep their mouths shut, or show us whatever back way there is out of here. If you want me and Florian tonight, we’ll be in the tower with Roberto and Angeli and the guys.”

The message arrived four days later.

Black shadows leaped up on the flint-embedded walls of the garderobe,
²⁸
sank, then grew again as the candle-flame was all but extinguished by the draught from below. The wind rustled the hanging gowns either side of her. Ash, hitching the back of her demi-gown and shirt up around her with numbed fingers, swore.

Beyond the heavy curtain, Rickard’s voice asked, “Boss, you busy?”

“
Christus Viridianus!
”

The wax- and wine-stained demi-gown slid out of her frozen fingers, down her hips, on to the wooden plank. A chilling wind from the night below struck up Ash’s back. Her flesh felt red-hot by comparison. She yelled, “No, I’m not
busy.
Whatever gave you that idea? I’m just sitting here with my arse hanging out, taking a dump; why not invite the whole fucking Burgundian
council
in? Jesus Christ up a Tree, here I am
wasting time
– are you sure you can’t find something
else
for me to do while I’m in here?”

There was a noise which, had she bothered to decipher it, rather than attend to the necessities of her toilet, she might have deciphered as an adolescent male having alternately bass and soprano giggles.

“The doc— the Duchess— Florian wants you, boss.”

“Then you can tell her lady high-and-mightiness the Duchess she can come and wipe my—” Ash broke off, grabbing at the candlestick that her elbow had just knocked. A great black shadow jolted up the walls, and the wick flared and smoked. Hot wax spilled over the back of Ash’s hand.

“Bitch!” she muttered. “Got you, you little bastard!” and set the candle upright again. She peered at it. The heavy beeswax candle had melted past the next mark, before she spilled it: past Matins, an hour short of Lauds.
²⁹

“Rickard, do you know what fucking
time
it is?”

“The doc says a message came in. They want her up at the palace. She wants you, too.”

“I expect she bloody does,” Ash muttered under her breath. She reached out to the box of fresh linen scraps.

“It’s Messire de la Marche who has the message.”

“Son of a whore-fucking, cock-sucking, arse-buggering
bitch!
”

“You all right, boss?”

“I think I just lost my Lion livery badge. It fell off my demi-gown.” Ash, hauling her split hose up her legs, peered down below the hem of her shirt, through the hole in the plank, at a black and empty void. She stood up with the care that the knowledge of a two-hundred-foot drop below one brings. Two hundred feet of excrement-stained tower wall, invisible in the night outside, but nothing to want to bounce down on your way to the caltrop-strewn no-man’s-land at the foot of Dijon’s walls…

“Come and do these damn points up!” Ash said, and the swing of the curtain as the boy pushed it back made the candle-flame swing again; yellow light illuminating the boy still wearing his mail-shirt, for God’s sake, and an archer’s sallet with a rather sorry yellow plume in it.

“Going somewhere?” she enquired of the back of his head, where he bent over tying points with practised skill. The visible part of his neck grew red.

“I was just showing Margie some shooting techniques…”

In the dark?
and
I bet that’s not all you were showing her!
became the two foremost remarks in Ash’s mind. With Anselm or Angelotti – except for the extreme unlikelihood of Angelotti showing anything to anyone called Margie – she would have said just that.

Given his embarrassment, she murmured, “‘Margie’?”

“Margaret Schmidt. Margaret the crossbow-woman. The one that was a soeur, up at the convent.”

His eyes shone, and his face was still visibly pink in the candlelight. Ash signalled him to buckle the sword-belt around her waist, as she held the candle up to give him the light.
So she’s still in the company? I wonder if Florian knows?

“Can you write up the reports now, before morning council?”

“I’ve done most of it, boss.”

“Bet you’re sorry the monks taught you to read and write!” she observed absently, giving him the candle to hold, and settling the belt, purse and sword more comfortably about her waist and hips. “Okay, do the reports, bring them to me at the Tour Philippe le Bon. It’ll be quicker.”

She hesitated for a moment, hearing an unidentifiable noise, and realised that it was rain, beginning to beat on the walls below her. The ammoniac stench of the stone room grew stronger. That did not so much offend her as pass her by entirely. A gust of rain-laden wind spurted up, chilling the stone walls, and shifting the heavy garments hanging around her.

“Oh, great. Next time it’s a wet arse, as well.” Ash sighed. “Rickard, get one of the pages; I need my pattens,
³⁰
and a heavy cloak. I take it Florian’s in the infirmary? Right. So tell whoever’s on guard to get their asses in gear, I need six guys to go as escort to the palace with us.” She hesitated, hearing a scrabble and whine from the room beyond the curtain. “And get the mastiff-handler – I’ll take Brifault and Bonniau with me.”

“You’re expecting to be attacked in the streets?” Rickard, shielding the candle’s flame with his hand, looked wide-eyed for a second.

“No. The girls just haven’t had their walk yet.” Ash grinned at him. “Get scribbling, boy. And, just think – if Father Faversham’s right, after a life like this, you’ll hardly spend any time in Purgatory at all!”

“
Thanks,
boss…”

She all but trod on his heels, stepping out of the garderobe, so as not to lose the light of the candle. The main fireplace shed some light, still, into the company tower’s upper storey, by which she saw the curled blanket-strewn forms of pages asleep around the meagre warmth. Rickard took the candle to his pallet, to work with, kicking one of the pages as he went; and she stretched, in the dim light, feeling the bones of her shoulders crack and shift.

Viridianus! When did I last sleep through a night? Just one night without fucking Greek Fire missiles and army paperwork, that’s all I want…

Blanket-wrapped forms unrolled: two pages coming to dress her for the pitch-black, rain-blasted ride through the muddy streets to the ducal palace, the mastiffs Brifault and Bonniau padding silently up, sure-footed, to her side.

Ash found Florian down on the second floor, in the aisle that ran around the hall in the thickness of the walls, seeing to a patient in smoky taper light. The man sat with his hose slung around his neck, naked from the waist down. A smell of old urine hung about the stonework and flesh.

“So, de la Marche wants you?” Ash peered over the surgeon’s shoulder.

“I’m just finishing up.” Florian’s long, dirty fingers pulled at a gash that started above the man-at-arms’s knee. He gasped. Blood, black in the light, and a glint of something shiny in the depths – bone?

“Hold him,” Florian said, over the man’s shoulder to a second mercenary, kneeling there. The second man wrapped his arms tightly around the injured man, pinning his arms down. Ash sat down on her heels as Florian washed out the gaping hole again with wine.

“De la Marche—” the surgeon peered into the wound; swilled it out again. “—will have to wait. I’ll be done soon.”

The man-at-arms’s face shone in the light of tapers, beads of sweat swelling up out of his skin. He swore continuously, muttering
Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!
on ale-heated breath, and then grinned, finally, at the surgeon.

“Thanks, doc.”

“Oh – any time!” Florian stood up and wiped her hands down her doublet. Glancing down at Baldina and two junior deacons, she added, “Leave the wound uncovered. Make sure nothing gets into it.
Don’t
suture it. I don’t give a shit about Galen’s ‘laudable pus’.
³¹
The uncovered wounds I saw in Alexandria didn’t stink and go rotten like Frankish wounds. I’ll bandage it in four days’ time. Okay? Okay: let’s go.”

The leaded glass window of the Tour Philippe le Bon was proof against the rain, but freezing draughts found their way in around the frame and chilled Ash’s face as she peered through her reflection, out into blackness.

“Can’t see a fucking thing,” she reported. “No, wait – they’ve got Greek Fire lights all along the east bank of the Ouche. Activity. That’s odd.”