Ash: A Secret History (23 page)

“Four miles? Ten? Two?” She fisted her hand, punched her thigh. “I’m blind! He forbids me to put scouts out, he forbids me to hire local guides; he’s got this damn printed itinerary for pilgrims going to ports for the Holy Land, and
he
thinks that’s all we need! He’s a noble
knight,
no one’s going to bushwhack
him!
What if it hadn’t been Lamb’s men out there? What if it had been some bandit?”

She stopped as Godfrey smiled, and shook her head. “Yeah, okay, I grant you, the difference between Lamb and a bandit is a bit hard to spot! But hey, that’s Italian mercenaries for you.”

“A baseless slander. Probably.” Godfrey coughed, drank from his jug, and handed it up to her. “We’re making camp two hours after we get started?”

“My lord wants to change his clothes.”

“Again. You should have tipped him over the edge of a barge into the Rhine before we ever got to the cantons, never mind crossed the Alps.”

“That isn’t very Christian of you, Godfrey.”

“Matthew ten, thirty-four!”
⁶

“I don’t think that’s
quite
how Our Lord meant that one…” Ash lifted the pottery jug to her lips. The small beer stung her mouth. It was tepid, vaguely unpleasant, and (being wet) still extremely welcome for all that. “Godfrey, I can’t push it, not right now. This is no time to ask my people to start picking sides between me and him. It’d be chaotic. We’ve got to at least
function
until we get back from this idiot’s errand.”

The priest slowly nodded.

Ash said, “I’m going to ride up to the top of the next ridge while he’s busy. We’re wandering around in a mist in more ways than one. I’ll go take a look. Godfrey, go show your Christian charity to Asturio Lebrija and his mate. I don’t think my lord husband had them fed this morning.”

Godfrey’s palfrey plodded back down the column.

Jan-Jacob Clovet and Pieter Tyrrell caught Ash up as The Sod skittered unwillingly up the slope – two fair-haired, almost identical young Flemish men, with unshaven faces, and tallow candle droppings on the sleeves under their brigandines, and crossbows at their saddles. They smelled of stale wine and semen; she guessed they had both been rousted out of a whore’s cart before daybreak; probably, if she knew them, from the same woman.

“Boss,” Jan-Jacob said, “do something about that son of a bitch.”

“It’ll happen when the time’s right. You move without my word, and I’ll nail your balls to a plank.”

Normally, they would have grinned. Now Jan-Jacob persisted, “When?”

Pieter added, “They’re saying you’re not going to kill him. They’re saying you’re cock-struck. They’re saying what can you expect from a woman?”

And if I asked who ‘they’ are, I’ll get evasive answers or no answers at all. Ash sighed.

“Look, guys … have we ever broken a contract?”

“No!” They spoke simultaneously.

“Well, you can’t say that for every mercenary company. We get paid because we don’t change sides once we’ve signed a contract. The law is the only thing we have. I signed a contract with Fernando when I married him. There’s one reason why this isn’t easy.”

She urged The Sod on up towards the lightening skyline.

“I was kind of hoping that God would do it for me,” she said wistfully. “Hard-drinking reckless young noblemen fall off their horses and break their necks every day, why couldn’t he be one of them?”

“Crossbows work.” Pieter patted the leather case of his.

“No!”

“Does he fuck good?”

“Jan-Jacob, get your mind out of your codpiece for once – fucking
hell!
”

The breeze took the mist as they came up to the top of the ridge, rolling it forward, away out to sea. Mediterranean sun blazed back from ochre hills. A blurred blue sky shone, and – no more than two or three miles ahead – the light fractured off creeping waves. The coast. The sea.

A fleet covered the bay, and all the sea beyond.

No merchant ships.

Warships.

White sails and black pennants. Ash thought in a split second
that’s half a war fleet down there!,
and
Visigoth pennants!

The wind blew the taste of salt against her lips. She stared for a long, appalled, frozen second. The knife-sharp prows of black triremes cut the flat silver surface of the sea. More than ten in number, less than thirty. Among them, huge quinqueremes – fifty or sixty ships. And closer inshore, great shallow-draught troopships vanished from her sight behind the walls of Genoa, the wheels that drove them dripping rainbow sprays of sea-water. Dimly, across all the intervening distance, she heard the
thunk-thunk
of their progress.
⁷

And she registered black smoke rising from the tiled roofs of the walled port city, and saw moving men among the painted plaster walls and winding streets of Genoa.

Ash whispered, “Troopships unloading, number unknown, fleet attacking, no allied vessels; my strength is two hundred men.”

‘
Withdraw, or surrender.
’

She still gaped at the coastline below the hills, the sound of the voice in her head almost ignored.

“The Lamb’s run right into them!” Aghast, Jan-Jacob pointed at the standard with the white Agnus Dei, a mile ahead. Ash made a quick mental count of his groups of running men.

Pieter had already spurred in a circle, his mare hardly under control. “I’ll sound the alarm!”

“
Wait.
” Ash held up one hand, palm outwards. “Now. Jan-Jacob, get the mounted archers formed up. Tell Anselm I want the knights up and armed, under him as captain! Pieter, tell Henri Brant that all wagons are to be abandoned, everybody on them is to be issued with weapons and told to ride. Ignore anything you hear from anyone with del Guiz livery – I’m going to talk to Fernando!”

She galloped down to the Lion Azure standard in the centre of the wagons. Among the milling men she spotted Rickard, yelled at the boy to bring Godfrey and the foreign ambassadors, and pelted on towards the green-and-gold-striped pavilion that was being put up in a confusion of struts and ropes and pegs. Fernando sat his horse, sun-bright, cheerfully talking to his companions.

“Fernando!”

“What?” He turned in his saddle. An arrogant shape took his mouth, a discontent foreign to what she was beginning to think was only a careless nature. I bring out the cruelty in him, she thought, and threw herself out of the saddle, quite deliberately on foot and catching his reins, so that she had to lift her head to look up at him.

“What is it?” He hitched at his falling hose, that now rucked down around his buttocks. “Can’t you see I’m waiting to dress?”

“I need your help.” Ash took a deep breath. “We’ve been tricked. All of us. The Visigoths. Their fleet. It
isn’t
sailing for Cairo, against the Turks. It’s
here.
”

“Here?” He looked down at her, bewildered.

“I counted at least twenty triremes – and sixty fucking big quinqueremes!
And
troopships.”

His face became open, innocent, bemused. “Visigoths?”

“Their fleet! Their guns! Their army! It’s a league up the road
that
way!”

Fernando gaped. “What are
Visigoths
doing
here?
”

“Burning Genoa.”

“
Burning
—”

“Genoa! It’s an invasion force. I have never seen so many ships in one place—” Ash wiped a crust of dust off her lips. “The Lamb’s run into them. There’s fighting going on.”

“Fighting?”

The man Matthias, in a south German dialect, said, “Yes, Ferdie,
fighting.
You remember. Training, tournaments, wars? That sort of thing?”

Fernando said, “War.”

The young German scowled, good-naturedly. “
If
you could be bothered.
I
train more than you do! You’re so Boar-damned
lazy
—”

Ash cut across their languid conversation. “My lord husband, you have to see this. Come on!”

She mounted up, spun The Sod, and spurred him unmercifully, being rewarded by a kick-out (for temper’s sake) and then a long, low, hard gallop up the slope, to arrive sweating and anxious, and peer down the long slope to Genoa.

She expected Fernando beside her in heartbeats: it seemed long minutes until he rode up, back- and breast-plates strapped on to his body almost anyhow, and the white silk of his shirt-sleeves puffing out between the plates on his arms.

“Well? Where—” His voice died.

The foot of the slope was black with running men.

Otto, Matthias, Joscelyn van Mander, Ned Aston and Robert Anselm all arrived beside her in a flurry of manes and wet dust kicked up. They fell silent in the misty morning. Ahead, the smoke from Genoa smirched the sky.

In an identical bewildered tone to Fernando del Guiz, Joscelyn van Mander said, “
Visigoths?
”

Robert Anselm said, “They were either coming for us or the Turk. Turned out to be us.”

“Listen.” Ash’s knuckles whitened on her reins. “A dozen mounted men riding on their own can move faster than this company. Lord husband, Fernando – ride back, tell the Emperor, he has to know about this
now!
Take de Quesada and Lebrija with you as hostages! You can do it in a few days if you ride post.”

He stared down from his horse at the approaching banners. Behind him, the lance-leaders and men of the Lion Azure were a mass of steel helmets and dusty flags and the heads of polearms wavering in the heat. Fernando said, “Why not you,
Captain!
”

Poised above the dusty ruts, smelling of horse, wet with sweat, Ash felt a sensation as of putting her hand to a familiar sword grip: a sensation of control, not felt since they left Cologne a fortnight ago.

“You’re a knight,” she said, “not a peasant, not a mercenary. He’ll listen to
you.
”

Anselm managed a servile, “She’s right, my lord.” Roberto didn’t meet Ash’s eye, but she read what he was thinking with the clarity of long knowledge of the man.
Don’t let this boy get any ideas about death-or-glory charges against that lot!

“There are sixty quinqueremes…” Van Mander sounded stunned. “Thirty thousand men.”

Fernando gazed down at Ash. Then, as if no one had spoken, as if it were his own decision, he shouted at her, “
I’ll
take my Imperial cousin the news! You fight these bastards for me. I
order
it.”

Got him! she thought, exultant, and stared down Joscelyn van Mander, who had very plainly heard his order.

They wheeled their horses by unspoken consent, trotting back down the slope. Early humid heat brought a cream sweat to the horses’ flanks. The sea-mist from the Mediterranean coast thinned still more. A harsh sunlight stung her eyes.

She beckoned Godfrey Maximillian as he strode up, the two Visigoth men stumbling beside him. “Get them on horses. Chain their wrists. Go!”

Ash slapped her gloved hand against The Sod’s satin neck. She couldn’t stop grinning. The gelding whickered and mouthed at her, immense teeth clicking on the metal greaves covering her shins. “All right, you sod, so you like people – why the fuck can’t you put up with other horses? One of these days you’ll be stew. Stand
still.
”

A hard object thunked between her shoulders, chinking the metal plates inside the brigandine. Ash swore. The already-spent arrow fell to the earth.

She brought the gelding around with her knees.

A line of light horses and riders in black livery were skylined at the top of the slope ahead. Mounted archers.

“Stop!” she yelled at Henri Brant, seeing the steward bawling at the drovers and men-at-arms to haul the big-wheeled vehicles around into wagon-fort formation. “You can forget that. That’s a fucking army down there! Take what you can carry on packhorses. We’ll leave the rest.”

She spurred forward to where Anselm drew up a long line of mounted knights at the bottom of the slope, Jan-Jacob and Pieter out to either wing with mounted archers.

She kneed The Sod ferociously, wished that she was riding Godluc –
fucking Fernando, “Don’t bring war-horses, we’re riding in peace”!
– and her bastard sword was in her right hand, she didn’t remember drawing it; and her unprotected hands wore nothing but leather riding gloves: her stomach clenched with the sheer terror of their vulnerability to chopping-edged weapons. She spared one glance to see the dozen young German knights riding hell for leather back down the road, lost in plumes of dust; then she galloped across the battle-line and out to the flank, and stared towards the sea…

Dark banners with clusters of men under them scrambled across the rocky slopes towards her. The sun winked off their weapons. A couple of thousand spear, at least.

She galloped back to the Lion Azure standard, finding Rickard also there, with her personal banner. Coming up with Robert Anselm, she called, “There’s trees, two miles back! Henri, everyone on wagons is to cut their horses’ traces, load up what they can, and ride. When you get to the bend about a mile back, leave the road and ride for the hills. We’ll cover your backs.”

Ash whirled The Sod on the spot, on his hind hooves, and rode out in front of the line. She faced them: about a hundred men in armour on horseback, another hundred out to the wings, with bows. “I always said you bastards would do anything for wine, women and song – and that’s your wine, headed for the woods back there! In a minute, we’re going to follow it. First, we’re going to give this lot of southern bastards enough of a hard time that they won’t
dare
come after us. We’ve done it before, and now we’ll do it again!”

Rough voices bawled, “Ash!”

“Archers up on the ridge, there – move it! Remember, we don’t go back until the standard goes back. And then we go back steady! And if they’re stupid enough to follow us into the forests, they deserve everything they get. Okay, here they come!”

Euen Huw bawled, “Nock! Loose!”