Ash: A Secret History (66 page)

Ludmilla Rostovnaya shouted up, “It’s dampening our strings, boss.”

“All bows unspanned and unstrung!” Ash ordered. “You’ll get your chance, guys. Keep your bow-strings under your helmets. It’s going to get bloody nasty, round about – now.”

With that, the church bells of distant Auxonne rang out across the hills. A great noise of voices went up from behind the Burgundian battle-line. A choir, singing mass. Ash raised her head. A whiff of incense caught in her nostrils. A little further up the crowded slope, Richard Faversham and Digorie Paston knelt in the mud, crucifixes in hand, young Bertrand holding up a stinking tallow candle. Around Ash, voices muttered, “Miserere, miserere!” She caught a flash of black and white as a magpie flew swooping down across the field, and automatically crossed herself and spat.

A bolt of blue colour, about as big as her fist, shot across the wet crops, under Godluc’s nose. His red-rimmed nostrils flared.

Ash watched the kingfisher dart away.

She tapped spurs into Godluc’s flanks again, rode up and took axe and lance from Rickard, and as she reached to close her bevor up and visor down, the first flakes of white dusted across Godluc’s blue and gold caparisons.

She raised her head, the duck-curled metal tail of her sallet allowing her to look up. Above, in a dark sky, white dots floated down.

In an instant, a howl of whiteness swirled out of the clouds, snowflakes turning from a powdery dust to thick, wet flakes; plastering her plackart, whitening Godluc’s silk caparisons, cutting her off from everyone except the three or four closest: Anselm, Rickard, Ludmilla, Geraint ab Morgan.

“Hold them!” she ordered the Welshman sharply.

Wind drove into her back. Snow flew. The wet mud under Godluc’s hooves went from black-and-brown to white in a matter of seconds. She rode a few yards, collecting her officers, halting close to Richard Faversham’s high-voiced Latin. Lance holstered, hands going up, she wrenched off her sallet and listened, standing upright in her saddle.

Far off, on the left and right wings of the Burgundian army, hoarse loud voices cried orders. A second’s pause, then the unmistakable
thunk
and
whirr!
of arrows being launched. One flight – and no other orders: an inhuman silence, all along the line.

“Shit, they’re good,” she whispered.

Somewhere below, a Visigoth man screamed.

Digorie Paston reached out and closed his bony hands over the English deacon’s, his face screwed up, prayer spilling out of his mouth.

Ash turned her head. Wind lashed her plates-covered shoulders and back. A hard wind, rising – and a blast took the breath from her mouth, her face blinded with snow, and she scraped a gauntlet across her features, grazing skin, and leaned down:

“Ludmilla, go forward!”

The Rus woman slid out of her company and went forward into the driving snow. Ash cocked her head, listening. The shrill snarl of an arrow-storm went up, all in one second, and her bladder pulsed, a trickle of hot urine soaking her hose. It is the sound. Nerve-shredding to hear coming: worse when it stops.

Her clumsy hands got her helmet back on her head; all around her, her men were shoving their visors down and leaning forward, as if into a wind, to present the deflecting surfaces of steel helmets to the arrows’ barbs-and bodkin points.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Geraint ab Morgan swore monotonously.

The abrupt cessation of the whistling sound told her the arrows had hit – something. She rode forward. No one screamed, or fell.

A white-plastered figure, stumbling, caught at her stirrup.

Ludmilla Rostovnaya shouted, “They’re hitting earth! Thirty feet in front of the line!”

“
Yes!
” Ash tried to look behind her, into the wind, coughed out a mouthful of sleet, and shouted, “Rickard!”

The boy ran up, an archer’s sallet crammed over his head, and a falchion at his belt. “Boss?”

“Get runners down here! I can’t see the Blue Boar banner,
¹⁸
we’re going to have to rely on runners and riders. Go!”

“Yes, boss!”

“Ludmilla, ride to the Earl of Oxford,
tell him it’s working!
I want to know if it’s working on the rest of the field!”

The woman lifted a hand, and plunged on up the slope, slipping and sliding in snow and mud. Ash shivered, steel’s cold entering her body even through the padded arming doublet and hose beneath. Her crotch felt chill and wet. She swung Godluc around and rode back and forth in the snow in front of the Lion Azure’s five hundred men, leaving Anselm in charge of the infantry and Geraint in charge of the archers; and the knights under the dubious restraint of Euen Huw.

A thrumming whirr burst on the air.

Ash held Godluc in, needing the rein to do it. The big beast under her shivered. She stood in the stirrups, bowels unsettled; and very slowly paced up and down before the ranks. One arrow buried its fletching in the mud fifteen feet in front of her.

The sound of bowstrings cut the air. Arrow shafts shrilled. The noise grew until she thought there could not be another arrow left in Christendom, flight upon flight from the recurved Visigoth bows, flight after flight of German arrows, from the Imperial troops glimpsed down among the enemy.

The wind from behind the Burgundian lines blew so hard that the snow flew horizontally southwards.

“Keep praying!” she yelled at Digorie and Richard. The mass from Charles’s mainward came by fits and starts through the howling wind.

“
Now
…” she breathed.

It isn’t much of a miracle – given what weather conditions are like anyway, with the sun out – but it
is
a miracle.

The snow. The snow – and the
wind.

Whiteness blocked the air, swirling, until she lost all sense of depth or distance. She held on to Godluc’s warmth, and his steaming breath, and rode in close among the lines; a word here to a man with a brother-in-law fighting for Cola de Monforte, a word there to a woman archer who drank with the whores following a refugee contingent of German knights, all of it serving no particular purpose of information, only it brought them near enough to her to see, hear or touch her.

“This is what we do, this is what we’re here for,” she said, again and again. “Let them keep shooting. Wasting arrows. A few more minutes, and we’ll give them the biggest shock of their lives. The
last
shock!”

The snow thinned.

Digorie Paston and Richard Faversham held each other up, kneeling in the mud. Bertrand put a wine flask to the lips of each in turn, his fat white face gaunt with fear. They prayed in harsh gasps. Christus, she thought,
Godfrey, we
need you!

Digorie Paston pitched over, flat on his face in two inches of snow.

“Prepare to shoot!” she yelled to Geraint ab Morgan.

The snow thinned still more. The sky grew brighter. The wind began to drop. Ash turned and spurred Godluc across the slope; page, squire, escort and banner-bearer with her; to Geraint ab Morgan and the archers; one fist up, sword out and held high. She watched the skyline as she rode, searching hard among the banners in the mainward for the Blue Boar.

Up the slope, Richard Faversham fainted.

The fall of snow stopped, abruptly; the air clearing.

The Boar standard dipped.

Ash didn’t wait for the runner. As the west grew lighter, and the snow dropped to powdery drifts, she jerked her sword down. “Span and string!”

“Nock! Loose!” Geraint ab Morgan’s harsh Welsh bellow echoed flatly across the hillside. Ash heard other orders roared, in the wings and further along the mainward; and she unconsciously braced herself. The Lion Azure’s archers and crossbowmen readied their weapons, spanned bolts and nocked arrows, and at Geraint’s second shout, loosed.

The better part of two thousand arrows blackened the cold twilight air. A thousand of which, she reflected in a moment’s irony, undoubtedly came from the bows of Philippe de Poitiers and Ferry de Cuisance, whose archers from Picardy and Hainault she had run away from at Neuss.

I was right, too…

Ash’s whole body quivered with their release, and she lifted her head as they flew; and the second flight of shafts was already black in the air, crossbows cranking furiously, longbow archers loosing at ten or twelve shafts a minute, snatched up from the porcupines of arrows jammed into the wet wheat and mud – still shooting with the wind behind them—

A distant horse squealed.

Ash stood up in the stirrups.

Three hundred yards away, down a hill littered with a brushwood barrier of thousands of Visigoth arrows, the first shafts of the Burgundian army struck home.

She can just see, at this distance: Visigoth men fall, clutching at their faces, spiked through eye and cheekbone and mouth. Their riders jerk on wheeling mounts. A great bulk of horses screamed and bolted, crashing back and south, opening holes in the lines of men with pike and swords; a man in white robes sprawling, skull crushed by a hoof, banners dipping in chaos—

Ash looked over her shoulder at the exact moment that Angelotti, and the other gunners with Duke Charles’s centre, opened fire. A thundering
bang!
shook the ground under Godluc’s hooves, and the stallion reared up a good eighteen inches, this in full armour.

They shot into the wind, and fell short. We shot with the wind and didn’t. And they couldn’t see that!

“Deo gratias!” Ash yelled.

The gunfire from the centre ran raggedly out to silence – it was always a moot point if the gun-teams could re-load before the enemy charged. Ash reined Godluc in as he thumped one hoof down on the reverberate ground and skittered his haunches around, wanting to charge forward.

“Runners!” she yelled at the scattered escort as they re-formed; took a minute to spur Godluc back of the battle-line, her personal banner following. Armed men on horseback closed in around her. She wheeled the stallion, seeing a man-at-arms come running down the slope towards the company, towards her banner—

A bone-shaking jolt threw her forward in the saddle.

One man’s hand was under her chest, pushing her back up. She shoved Thomas Rochester aside, spat, shook her head dizzily; and found herself staring at a scar in the earth. A giant furrow, a spray of soil and turf and a man’s severed hand—

She has time to think
They’re not supposed to have guns!
and a second impact thuds into the ground close to the group of horsemen. Mud flies up, splatters her face.

“Captain!” One of the runners, hanging on her stirrup. “The Earl says pull back! Pull the line back! Over the top of the hill!”

“ANSELM!” she yells, prising mud out of her mouth with armoured fingers. She spurs to him. “Get them back over that hill,
now\
You – and you –
run
– orders for Geraint:
get them back.
”

She can hear trumpets signalling, orders being shouted, the bark of lance-leaders hauling their men back, up the snow- and mud-slippery corn towards the skyline; only then does she turn.

Down at the foot of the slope, in the rain-pale twilight, the mass of Visigoth men in the centre battle have moved aside. There are wagons there.

As she watches, a figure that is larger than a man pushes a wagon into place, marble-and-bronze body wheeling it with no apparent effort. Light glints off the sides of the wagon. It is iron-slabbed, armoured: a Visigoth war-wagon. The sides, released, fall forward and down – studded with nail-points; you can’t run at them, ride up them – and the great wooden cup of a mangonel goes back: snaps forward—

A boulder the size of a man’s torso arcs through the air.

Ash shifted her weight sideways, brought Godluc round, and leaned forward to urge him up the hill. Men’s backs closed around her; the banner jiggled overhead. A thud: a great screaming noise – rock-splinters whined through the air, ploughing into men’s bodies.

She lifted her head and looked at a swathe cut through the battle line. Earth and corn crushed, heads and bodies crushed; a ploughed mass of dark red blood under the pale sky.

She rode behind the company, the mud under Godluc’s hooves red with blood, blue-pink with intestines; men screaming; women pulling them up the hill towards the skyline. Rode slow – walking pace – Thomas Rochester at her left flank with tears running down his face, under his visor.

Bang!

“For Christ’s pity, ride!” Rochester screamed.

Ash turned, as far as high saddle and brigandine would allow, staring back down the hill.

Twenty or thirty of the iron-armoured wagons stood at the foot of the hill. Men swarmed around them, hammering chocks under the mangonels, adjusting the elevation of the catapults; and tall above them, on the weapons-platforms, the clay figures of golems bent down, effortlessly lifting rocks into the cups, effortlessly hauling the cup down to cock it, not even bothering to wind the time-consuming winch – everything that a man can do, that
men
can do; but stronger,
faster.

Five boulders ploughed into the slope to her right, impacting with great sprays of mud; another five hit in sequence –
bang! bang! bang! bang! bang!
– and the far end of the line of knights stopped being men riding. She stared at a mass of threshing hooves, rolling bodies, bloody liveries; a few unharmed riders trying to climb to their feet—

Rate of fire’s phenomenal, Ash thought dreamily; at the same time that she was shouting, “Rickard, get to Angelotti! Tell him to pull back! I don’t care what the rest of the guns are doing, the Lion’s pulling back! We got to get over the hill!”

Ahead, the great swallow-tailed lion standard dipped, recovered, and went steadily back up the slope. She muttered, “Come on, Euen, come
on!
” and put both spurs back into Godluc’s sides. The gelding slid, caught himself, and sprang up the slope, bringing her up level with the backs of the great mass of running billmen and archers.

Thomas Rochester yelled, “
Shit!
”