Ash: A Secret History (5 page)

When she was ten, she nearly died, but not on the field of battle.

IV

First light came. Ash leaned out over the stone parapet of the bell tower. Too dark to see the ground, fifty feet of empty air below. A horse whinnied. A hundred others answered it, all down the battle-lines. A lark sang in the arch of the sky. The flat river valley began to emerge from darkness.

The air heated up fast. Ash wore a stolen shirt and nothing else. It was a man’s linen shirt and still smelled of him, and it came down past her knees. She had belted it with her sword-belt. The linen protected the nape of her neck, and her arms, and most of her legs. She rubbed her goose-fleshed skin. Soon the day would be burning hot.

Light crept from the east. Shadows fell to the west. Ash caught a pinprick of light two miles away.

One. Fifty. A thousand? The sun glinted back from helmets and breastplates, from poleaxes and warhammers and the bodkin points of clothyard arrows.

“They’re arrayed and moving! They’ve got the sun at their backs!” She hopped from one bare foot to the other. “
Why
won’t the Captain let us fight?”

“I don’t want to!” The black-haired boy, Richard, now her particular friend, whimpered beside her.

Ash looked at him in complete bewilderment. “Are you afraid?” She darted to the other side of the tower, leaning over and looking down at the company’s wagon-fort. Washerwomen and whores and cooks were fixing the chains that bound the carts together. Most of them carried twelve-foot pikes, razor-edged bills. She leaned out further. She couldn’t see Guillaume.

Day brightened quickly. Ash craned to look down the slope towards the river’s edge. A few horses galloping, their riders in bright colours. A flag: the company ensign. Then men of the company walking, weapons in hand.

“Ash, why are we so
slow?
” Richard quavered. “They’ll be here before we’re ready!”

Ash had started to be strong in the last half-year or so, in the way that terriers and mountain ponies are strong, but she still did not look older than eight. Malnutrition had a lot to do with it.

She put her arm around him. “There’s trouble. We can’t get through. Look.”

All down by the river showed red in the rising sun. Vast cornfields, so thick with poppies that she couldn’t see the grain. Corn and poppies together – the crops so thick and tangled that they slowed down the mercenaries walking with bills and swords and halberds. The armoured men on horseback drew ahead, into the scarlet distance, under the banner.

Richard bundled his arms around Ash, pale enough for his birthmark to stand out like a banner on his face. “Will they all die?”

“No. Not everybody. Not if some of the other lot come over to us when the fighting starts. The Captain buys them if he can. Oh.” Ash’s guts contracted. She reached down and put her hand between her legs and took her fingers out bloody.

“Sweet Green Christ!” Ash wiped her hand on her linen shirt, with a glance around the bell tower to see if anyone had overheard her swear. They were alone.

“Are you wounded?” Richard stepped back.

“
Oh.
No.” Far more bewildered than she sounded, Ash said, “I’m a woman. They told me, in the wagons, it could happen.”

Richard forgot the armed men moving. His smile was sweet. “It’s the first time, isn’t it? I’m so happy for you, Ashy! Will you have a baby?”

“Not right now…”

She made him laugh, his fear gone. That done, she turned back to the red river fields that stretched away from the tower. Dew burned off in bright mist. Not dawn, now, but full early morning.

“Oh,
look
…”

Half a mile away now, the enemy.

The Bride of the Sea’s men moving over a slope, small and glittering. Banners of red and blue and gold and yellow gleamed above the packed mass of their helmets. Too far away to see faces, even the inverted V that disclosed mouth and chin when, in the heat, they left off falling-buffs and bevors.
⁴

“Ashy, there are so
many
—!” Richard whined.

The Serene Bride of the Sea’s host drew up into three. The vaward or advance unit was big enough on its own. Behind it, offset to one side, was the mainward, with the Bride of the Sea’s banners and their commander’s own standard. Offset again, the rearward was only just in sight as a moving thicket of pikes and lances.

The first rows came on slowly. Billmen in padded linen jacks, their steel war-hats gleaming, bright hook-bladed bills over their shoulders. Ash knew billhooks had some agricultural use, but not what it might be. You could hook an armoured knight off his horse with one, and use it to crack his protective metal plates open. Men-at-arms in foot armour, with axes over their shoulders like peasants going out to cut wood… And archers. Far too many archers.

“Three battles.” Ash pointed Richard bodily, holding him by his narrow shoulders. The little boy trembled. “Look, Dickon. In the front battle. There’s billmen, then archers, then men-at-arms, then archers, then billmen, then more archers – all down the line.”

A hoarse voice, audible across the whole distance, shouted, “Nock! Loose!”

Ash scratched at her stained shirt. Everything laid itself out suddenly plain in her head. For the first time, what had been an implicit sense of a pattern found words.

She stuttered into speech, almost too fast and excited to be understood. “Their archers are safe
because
of their men with hand-weapons! They can shoot into us, loose an arrow every six heartbeats, and we can’t do anything about it! Because if we
do
try to get up close, their billmen or foot knights will kill us. Then their archers will draw their falchions and get stuck in too, or move out to the flanks and carry on shooting us up. That’s why they’ve put them like that. What can we
do?
”

‘
If you are outnumbered, you cannot meet them in separate units. Form a wedge. A wedge-shaped formation with the point towards the enemy, then your flank archers can shoot without hitting your men in front. When their foot troops attack, they must face your weapons on each of your flanks. Send in your heavy armoured men to break their flank
.’

Ash found the hard words no more difficult to decipher than discussions she had overheard, lying in the grass, back of the Captain’s command tent. She puzzled it out, and said, “How
can
we? We don’t have enough men!”

“Ashy,” Richard whimpered.

She protested, “What have we got? The Great Duke’s men – about half as many! And the city militia. They just about know enough not to hold a sword by the sharp end. Two more companies. And us.”

“Ash!” the boy protested loudly. “Ashy!”

‘
Then do not array your men too close together. They are a mass for the enemy to shoot into. The enemy are out of range. You must move, fast, and close-assault them.
’

She dug with her bare toe in the dust between the tower’s flagstones, not looking at the approaching banners. “There’s too many of them!”

“Ashy, stop it. Stop it! Who are you talking to?”

‘
Then you must surrender and sue for peace.
’

“Don’t tell me! I can’t do anything! I can’t!”

Richard shrieked, “Tell you what?
Who’s
telling?”

Nothing happened for long seconds. Then the mass of the company moved forward, running, the Great Duke’s troops with them, crashing into the first enemy battle-line, flags dipping, the red of poppies a red mist now; thunder, iron beating on iron, screams, hoarse voices shouting orders, a pipe shrilling through the dirt rising up a bare few hundred yards away.

“You said – I heard you!” Ash stared at Richard’s white and wine-coloured face. “You
said
– I heard someone saying – Who
was
that?”

The Great Duke’s line of men broke up into knots. No flying wedge now, just knots of men-at-arms gathered around their standards and banners. In the dust and red sun, the main battle of the Most Serene Bride of the Sea’s army began to walk forward. Sheaves of arrows thickened the air.

“But
someone
said—”

The stone parapet smacked her in the face.

Blood smashed across her upper lip. She put one hand to her nose. Pain made her scream. Her fingers spread and shook.

The noise filled her mouth, filled her chest, shook the sky crashing down. Ash touched the sides of her head. A thin, high whine filled her ears. Richard’s face streamed tears and his mouth was an open square. She could just hear him bawling.

The corner of the parapet wall fell soundlessly away. Open air gaped in front of her. Dust hung hazy. She got to her hands and knees. A violent whirring whicked past her head, loud enough for her, half-deaf, to hear.

The boy stood with his hands loose at his sides. He stared over Ash’s head, out from the broken bell tower. She saw his particoloured legs tremble. The front of his cod-flap wetted with urine. With a ripe, wet sound, he shat in his hose. Ash looked up at Richard without condemnation. There are times when losing control of your bowels is the only realistic response to a situation.

“That’s
mortars!
Get
down!
” She hoped she was shouting. She got Richard by the wrist and pulled him towards the steps.

The sharp edge of the stone barked her knees. Her sun-blasted vision saw nothing but darkness. She fell down inside the bell tower, cracking her head against the wall of the stairwell. Richard’s foot kicked her in the mouth. She bled and yelled and tumbled down to ground-level and ran.

She heard no more gunfire, but when she looked back from the wagon-fort, her chest raw inside and burning, the monastery tower was gone, only rubble and dust blackening the sky.

Forty-five minutes later the baggage train were declared prisoners.

Ash ran away, out of their sight, down to the river.

Searching.

Bodies lay so thick on the ground that the air swam with the smell. She clamped her linen sleeve over her mouth and nose. She tried not to step on the faces of the dead men and boys.

Scavengers came by to strip the bodies. She hid in the wet, red corn. Their peasant voices were rapid, inflected music.

She felt the skin across her cheeks and nose crisping in the high summer heat. The sun burned at her calves below the linen shirt, turning her fair skin pink. Her toes burned. She stood and put her wide-brimmed straw hat back on. The whole world smelled of shit and spoiling meat. She kept spitting without being able to get the taste of vomit out of her mouth. Heat made the air waver.

One of the dying men wept “Bartolomeo! Bartolomeo!” and then pleaded with the surgeon’s cart, long-handled, dragged on two wheels by a man who grunted and shook his head.

No Richard. No one. The crops were burned black for a mile or more. Ravens dragged bits of two armoured horse carcasses apart. If there had been anything else – bombards, bodies, salvageable armour – it had been cleared up or looted.

Ash ran, breathless, back to the company cooking fires. She saw Richard sitting with the washerwomen. He looked up, saw her, and ran away.

Her steps slowed.

Abruptly, Ash turned and tugged the sleeve of a gunner’s doublet. Not realising how deaf she was, she shouted, “Where’s
Guillaume?
Guillaume Arnisout?”

“Buried down in the lime pit.”

“
What?
”

The unarmed man shrugged and faced her. She followed his lips as much as the whisper of sound. “Dead and buried in the lime pits.”

“Uhh.” Air left her lungs.

“No,” another man called from beside the fire, “they took him prisoner. The bloody Brides of the Sea have got him.”

“No,” a third man held his hands apart, “he had a hole in his stomach
this
big. But it wasn’t the Most Serene, it was our side, the Great Duke’s men, it was someone he owed money to.”

Ash left them.

No matter what turf the camp was set up on, the camp was always the same. She made her way into the middle of the camp, where she did not often go. Now it was full of armed strangers. At last she found a manicured, blond man with a harassed expression, who wore a gold-edged green surcoat over his armour. He was one of the Lord Captain’s aides and she knew him by sight, not by name; the gunners referred to him derisively as
tabard-lifter.
She already understood why.

“Guillaume Arnisout?” He put his hand through his thick bobbed hair. “Is he your father?”

“Yes.” Ash lied without hesitation. She did the thing she had learned to do and the constriction in her throat went away, so that she could speak. “I
want
him! Tell me where he is!”

The aide pricked down a parchment list. “Arnisout. Here. He was taken prisoner. The Captains are talking. I imagine prisoners may be exchanged after a few hours.”

Ash thanked him in as quiet a voice as she could manage and returned to the edges of the camp to wait.

Evening fell across the valley. The stench of bodies sweetened the air unbearably. Guillaume did not come back to camp. Rumour began to say he had died of his wounds, died of plague caught in the Bride of the Sea’s camp, signed on with the Most Serene as a master gunner at twice the pay, run off with a noblewoman from the Duke’s city, gone home to his farm in Navarre. (Ash hoped for a few weeks. After six months, she stopped hoping.)

By sunset, prisoners moved aimlessly between the camp’s tents, unused to walking around without sword, axe, bow, halberd. The evening sun lay gold over blood and poppies. The air tasted of heat. Ash’s nose numbed itself to the worst of the decomposition. Richard stalked up to her where Ash stood in dung-stained straw, her back to a cart’s wheel, with one of the baggage train’s washerwomen dabbing witch hazel on the yellow bruises down her shins.

“When will we
know?
” Richard shivered, and glared at her. “What will they
do
with us?”

“Us?” Ash’s ears still thinly sang.

The washerwoman grunted. “We’re part of the spoil. Sell us to whorehouses, maybe.”