Ash: A Secret History (31 page)

She rode with fifty men, past bone-fires that burned the clock round now, out through the gates of Guizburg. They passed some of her own men coming in from expeditions to untouched forest, dragging loads of pine for torches. What she thought were silver pine-needles were, she saw as she rode close, pine-needles covered in frost. Frost. In July.

The wheel of the mill was silent, above where they splashed across the ford; and in the darkness she could just see cows straying, not knowing when to come in to be milked. An odd half-song came from copses, birds uncertain whether to sleep or to claim territory. Oppressiveness prickled her spine, under the pinked silk lining of her arming doublet, and made her sweat; all this before she saw a thousand torches down the shallow valley, and the silver eagle Visigoth standards, and heard drums.

Joscelyn van Mander demanded reassurance, his eyes on the spearmen and bowmen down the slope. “I never fought Visigoths, what’s it like?”

Ash leaned her upright lance back against her armoured shoulder. Its foxtail pennant hung in the still air. Godluc frisked, his tail bound up with a chaplet of oak-leaves and folly-bells. “Angelotti?”

Antonio Angelotti rode beside her, armoured, a Saint Barbara medal knotted around the cuff of his gauntlet. “When I was with the Lord-
Amir
Childeric, we put down a local rebellion. I had captaincy of the English hackbutters.
⁹
The Visigoths are raiders.
Karr wa farr
: repeated attack and retreat. Hit and run, cut your supply lines, deny you the fords, indifferent sieges for a year or three, then take the city by storm. I have not known them seek out the enemy army for a pitched battle. They’ve changed tactics.”

“Evidently.” There was a strong smell of unwatered beer from van Mander.

Ash checked back, twisting in the high, upright war saddle. Apart from the usual command officers, she had brought Euen Huw and his lance; Jan-Jacob Clovet and thirty bowmen; ten men picked from van Mander’s band, and her steward Henri Brant – torso swathed in bandages – to oversee on behalf of the non-combatants. A majority of her riders carried torches.

Angelotti said, “You should have let my bombards open up the Guizburg keep. It would be much harder to get us out of that, madonna.”

“Try not to think of it as
a
pile of rubble, but as
our
pile of rubble. I’d like it kept in one piece!”

Confident of the number and disposition of this part of the Visigoth forces at least, the company’s scouts being reliable, Ash rode on down the slope between neatly sectioned fields and wattle-fenced animal pens. The company standard and her personal banner rode in the mass of men, dark against the unnatural dark sky, among the jolting, flaring torches.

They topped a slight rise. Ash kept Godluc moving forward when he would have responded to the shift in her weight as she saw what lay a little distance off. It is one thing to be reliably informed that there is a division of an army, eight or nine thousand men plus baggage train, encamped just off the Innsbruck road. It is another to see a hundred thousand torches, bright bonfires, hear the whickering and stamping from the horse lines, and the shouting of guards; glimpse, in the lightless day, the vast wheel of tents, spidered with guy-ropes, thronging with armed men and circled with wagons, that is that army in the flesh.

Ash drew rein at the appointed rendezvous, a crossroads milestone, and thumbed her sallet’s visor up. All her party rode in full armour, by her orders; horses fully barded and caparisoned; coloured silk scarves twisted around helmets, plume-holders on sallets and armets frothing with white ostrich feathers. The mounted crossbowmen had their weapons out of their cases, and bolts close to hand.

“There,” she said, straining to see through the darkness.

A rider with a white lance pennant rode up from the Visigoth encampment. After a while she managed to distinguish European armour, the rounded curves of Milanese plate, and a straggle of black hair curling out from under the neck of his armet. “It’s Agnes!”

Robert Anselm growled, “Jammy sod. Trust Lamb to get hired.”

“In the middle of a fucking battle! He must have signed a contract while they were still having that skirmish.” In so far as her armour allowed it, Ash shook her head ruefully. “Don’t you just love Italian mercenaries?”

They met in the stink of smoking pine torches. Lamb carefully unpinned the visor of his armet, showing his tanned face. “Planning a quick getaway, are we?”

“Unless the whole Visigoth army down there comes after us, we’d make it back through the town gates.” Ash slotted her lance into its saddle holster to give her hands freedom. She spoke mainly for the benefit of her officers. “And unless your employer
really
wants to be sitting in front of one tiny Bavarian castle for the next twelve weeks, I don’t think she’ll be too interested in trying to prise us out of Guizburg.”

“Perhaps.” Ambiguous.

“Tell your general that we’re understandably not keen about riding into her camp, but if she wants to ride up here, we’ll negotiate.”

“That’s the word I wanted to hear.” Lamb wheeled his lean, bony roan gelding, held up his lance, and dipped the white pennant to the dirt. Another group of riders moved out from the wagon-fort, perhaps forty strong. Too far away in the darkness to see detail, they could be any group of armed men.

“So how much extra did you get paid for riding up here on your own?”

“Enough. But I’m told you treat hostages well.” A flirtatious curve of the lips; Agnus Dei’s religious convictions not (by common rumour) extending as far as celibacy. Ash smiled back, thinking of Daniel de Quesada and Sancho Lebrija, now being compulsorily entertained in Guizburg until she should return unhurt.

“Nothing in the city states is holding out now except Milano,” Lamb added, ignoring Antonio Angelotti’s sudden obscenity; “and of the Swiss cantons, only Berne.”

“They fucked the
Swiss?
” Ash was stunned into momentary silence. “Their lines of supply go back clear across the Mediterranean; they can keep armies like this in the field, and still push on north? And hold down territory behind them?”

It was very inelegant fishing for information, or rather, a restating of information that her sources informed her was true. Ash’s attention fixed on the approaching riders.

Lamb proved close-mouthed. “Twenty years of preparation helps, I think, madonna Ash.”

“Twenty years. I find it hard to imagine. That’s as long as I’ve been alive.” The mention of her youth was entirely malicious, Lamb being in his early thirties. So young, so famous; better not to be over-confident as well, she concluded, and waited for the riders to come up the slope. A wind swept over the dark grass, rustling the pine forests in the distance. There was a sense in her, almost physical, like the sensation of successfully riding a mettlesome horse of which one is barely in control.

“Sweet Christ,” she murmured joyfully, almost to herself, “it’s Armageddon. Everything’s changing. Christendom being turned upside-down. Who’d be a peasant now?”

“Or a merchant. Or a lord.” Lamb drew in his reins. “This is the only trade to be in,
cara.
”

“You think so? Fighting’s all I can do.” A rare moment: she and the straggle-haired man apprehended each other very clearly. Ash said, “Stay in the fighting line until you’re thirty and you die, so I command. Stay in command until you’re old, forty or so, and you die. Hence—” A wave of her armoured hand back at Guizburg. “The game of princes.”

“Mmm?” Lamb turned both body and head, in his plate harness, so that he could look directly at her. “Oh yes,
cara.
I heard rumours that half your trouble was, you wanted an estate and title. As for myself—” He sighed, with some degree of content. “I have my money for the last two campaigns invested in the English wool trade.”

“Invested?” Ash stared at him.

“And I own a dye-works in Bruges now. Very comfortable.”

Ash became aware that her mouth was open. She shut it.

“So who needs land?” Agnus Dei concluded.

“Uh … yeah.” Ash switched her attention back to the Visigoths. “You’ve been with them, what, two weeks or more? Lamb, what’s the deal here?”

The Italian mercenary touched the lamb on his surcoat. “Ask yourself if you have a choice, madonna, and if not, what does my answer matter?”

“She’s
good.
” Ash watched the torchlit procession coming closer. Close enough to see the outriders, four robed and veiled men on mules, with what looked like open-frame octagonal barrels resting on their saddles in front of them. Something wrong about the size of the men’s heads and bodies. She identified them as dwarfs, a moment after she realised the red and gilded leather sides of the barrels were being struck with sticks; were, in fact, war-drums. The growing vibration made Godluc’s ears go back.

Ash said, in a rush, “She kicked our asses at Genoa. You believe all this stuff about a brazen head machine telling her what to do? Have you seen it?”

“No. Her men say the brazen head, that they call her ‘Stone Golem’, isn’t here with her. It’s in Carthage.”

“But the time you’d spend waiting for an answer – messages, riders on post-horses, pigeons – then she can’t be using it in the field. Not in real-time
combat.
”

“But her men say she does. They say she hears it
at the same time as it speaks in the Citadel,
in Carthage.” He paused. “I don’t know, madonna. They say she’s a woman, so she can only be this good if it’s voices.”

Lamb’s sly comment stung. Ash momentarily ignored him, caught up in an idea of what it might mean if one could be in constant real-time communication with one’s home city and commanders, thousands of miles away.

“A Stone Golem…” she said slowly. “Lamb, hearing Our Lord’s saints is one thing; hearing a
machine
—”

“It’s probably just the rumour-mill,” Lamb snapped. “Half of what they
say
they have in North Africa, they
don’t
have; just manuscripts and some great-grandfather’s memories. This woman is new, and a commander of armies. There will of course be ridiculous stories. There always are.”

Something about his rapid speech made her glance at Agnus: the Lamb was undoubtedly on edge. She caught the gaze of Robert Anselm, Geraint ab Morgan, Angelotti; all her officers in readiness for this, which might be a negotiation, and might be an ambush, and must in any case be endured long enough to find out. She looked down for Godfrey Maximillian’s palfrey. The priest was staring at the approaching torches.

“Pray for us,” she ordered.

The bearded man gripped his cross, his lips moving.

More torches bloomed, lower, carried by men on foot. Ash heard a superstitious oath from Robert Anselm. The torch-carriers were clay and brass figures of men, golems bearing streaming pitch-torches whose light flowed over their featureless red and ochre skins.

“Nice,” she admitted. “If I were her, and had something that disconcerting, I’d use it too.”

The Visigoth horses came on, between two lines of golems. Little high-stepping horses, with desert blood in them, and gilded leather tack that lay across their necks and their rumps; each bit and ring and stirrup flashing in the torchlight. They brought a smell of spicy horse dung, perceptibly different from that of the thick-necked European war-horses. Godluc stirred. Ash gripped his rein. Some of those are mares, she thought; and I’ve never been convinced Godluc realises he’s been cut. The darting shadows bothered Godfrey’s palfrey; she indicated a bowman should get down and hold the bridle, so that Godfrey could continue uninterrupted prayer.

Behind the Visigoth riders came the standard-bearer, with a black flag and an eagle on a pole. His horse was armoured, and Ash smiled to herself at that, having carried the standard in a number of battles and come to understand what her voices meant by the term
fire magnet.
An armoured poet rode beside him, singing something too colloquial for her to understand, but she remembered the custom from Tunis:
cantadors,
for morale.

“What a racket. I wonder if they’re trying to impress us?” Ash sat in the tall saddle, her legs almost straight in the stirrups, centre of gravity at hips or just below: a different feeling to walking in armour. She shifted imperceptibly, keeping Godluc still. The Visigoth horses jangled as they came to a halt. Lances and shields, swords and light crossbows… She studied men wearing mail hauberks over padded armour, with white surcoats and open-face helmets. They leaned from their saddles towards each other, talking openly, some of them pointing at the European mercenary knights.

“No,” Ash said cheerfully, picking one and letting her voice carry, “we don’t, as it happens. Besides, you don’t get goats in these mountains. Male or female.”

A spurt of laughter, cursing, and alarm followed her speech. Geraint ab Morgan slapped his armoured thigh. A better-armed Visigoth rider under the black pennant-and-eagle standard spoke to men either side, then urged a chestnut mare forward.

Not to be outdone, Ash signalled. Euen Huw blew three clear notes on the trumpet he unwillingly carried. Ash rode forward in a clatter of horse barding, six officers with her – Anselm, Geraint, and Joscelyn van Mander in gleaming Milanese full plate; Angelotti in a Milanese breastplate and fluted, intricate Gothic leg harness; Godfrey (still praying, eyes shut) in his best monastic robe, and Floria del Guiz in someone’s borrowed brigandine and archer’s sallet, looking nothing like a woman, and, sadly, nothing much like a soldier either, Ash had to admit.

“I’m Ash,” she said into the silence after the trumpet. “Agnus Dei tells me you’re interested in a contract with us.”

Ash could not make out the Visigoth leader’s face under her helmet in the moving shadows.

The woman wore steel helmet and greaves, banded sabatons visible in her stirrups. Torchlight flowed richly over her crimson velvet-covered body armour: a coat-of-plates with a hundred big flower-shaped rivet-heads gleaming gold. Mail was visible under it, at her thigh. A standing plate collar must be a gorget of some sort, Ash surmised; and she noted a trilobed gilded sword-hilt, sword and dagger scabbards with gold chapes, sword-belt with heavy gold decoration; and the blue-black and white chequer of a cloak lined with vair.
¹⁰
Ash had the price of each totted up in seconds and was impressed despite herself. She could not help the spasm of pure pleasure she felt at seeing another woman commanding armed troops; especially one foreign enough not to be a competitor.