Ash: A Secret History (101 page)

“Shit.
Shit,
yes.” Ash spread her hands towards the Italian gunner. “Angeli, I never – this is the first time I had to attack somewhere where I
know
the defenders…”

Where I’ve lived with them.

She added, with difficulty, “I have – blood kin, within House Leofric.”

“
Kin?
” Angelotti, startled out of his Byzantine calm.

“Okay, they’re slaves,” she said steadily. “They’re still related to me. And no one else is.”

Gazing around at the group, she saw Dickon de Vere merely puzzled, excited with the anticipation of battle; his older brother with a calm, concerned face; Geraint shifting from one foot to another and scratching under his hose; Angelotti taken aback.

Violante. Leovigild. Even Alderic, even the ’
arif,
even the bloody rats; I
know
these people – if they’re inside, if the earth tremor hasn’t killed them, if—

If they’re inside now, and I order this attack, they’re on my conscience.

“I never had family before,” she said.

“Area’s clear!” Carracci bawled from the far end of the alley. “I’ve cleared the men back three streets! Boss, come on back, and we’ll blow it!”

Men anxious to attack, now, before momentum and courage slacken.

Dickon de Vere said in a high-pitched voice to his brother, “Do it, before someone on the roof sees this! If someone drops a torch on those casks, we’re dead!”

Pull back from this wall, reinforce the perimeter, let no one approach this end of the headland, blow open the House—

It is no voice in her head, but she feels her own thoughts almost as automatic, as pragmatic, with the same absence of human feeling.

She thought, It’s only my trade, it’s only what I do, it isn’t
me.

“When I give the signal!” Ash shouted to Angelotti, where he stood swinging the slow match and waiting her word to touch it to the fuse.

She turned, loping urgently back with the English Earl, Geraint and Dickon de Vere. The mass of men in the back streets had grown large. She watched their bobbing heads: faces under visors, hands gripping swords, axes, crossbows.

“Listen up!” she yelled in growing desperation to their upturned faces, raw with readiness, shitting themselves to be at it, in the overwhelming excitement and terror of actual fighting. “Listen—”

It is too little, too late.

“—We’re going in. My orders are,
don’t hurt the house slaves.
Spare the slaves! They have fair hair, and iron collars.
Only kill the fighting men.
Spare the commons!”

It is an old cry, from the English wars; John de Vere nods brief approval. Possible in battle. Sometimes. Men being what they are, on the verge of killing other men, they will listen to her to get them through this fight, but as for other orders…

And powder will not listen: not when you plan to use casks to blow the walls to smithereens and anyone inside to bloody rags of meat.

I can’t claim to be trapped in this, Ash thought. Even if it does feel like being caught up in a mill-wheel: grind or be ground. It’s still my decision.

“
Angelotti, blow this place wide open!
”

Carracci, further forward, relayed her shout. In seconds, he and Antonio Angelotti came pounding back down the alley, armoured elbows tucked into their ribs, running at the sprint. She spun around, following them; the cobbles hard under her boots, around one corner, around the next, plunging into the middle of a group of men: Euen Huw and his lance, all their faces wild with excitement, the unbearably prolonged moment before battle.

BOOM!

She did not hear the explosion so much as feel it, instantly deaf with the unbelievable roar of sixty casks of powder going up. The street jumped under her feet; a swirl of movement ahead is a building sliding into a slow collapse, black powder ending what the quake began; dust filled her face and she coughed, choked, Angelotti’s slender hand thumping her shoulders; a tongue of fire leaping up like lightning in reverse, to strike the heavens, somewhere somebody shrieking in utter agony; John de Vere’s mouth opening and shutting soundlessly.

Not hearing any word he said, she swung around, faced the mass of men, and shrieked, “Come on, you bastards!”

She cannot hear herself yell, lifts her arm, lifts the sword, points forward; and is running, all of them running with her and her banner, her head ringing, eardrums pierced with a thin wire of pain; running through great clouds of dust, stone chips, mortar-dust, flakes of granite embedded in the cobbles; running to where the side of House Leofric stands.

There is nothing.

A great cloud of dust hurtles around her head. She screams, “Lanterns! Torches!”, not knowing if she will be heard.

Light comes: partly from armed men with torches, partly from a roaring fire-rimmed cavern ahead. Men stream past her, she swats at their shoulders, urging them on and through, down the alleys; Geraint and Angelotti with her, shouting their own commands; Oxford and his brother at the head of the billmen; all faces contorted, all mouths open and yelling, but for her in the silence of the deaf.

The dust began to clear.

Ash, at the head of them by the time they reached the side alley, jerked up her hand for them to halt. Bodies crowded in back of her, shoving her forward.

To left and right, the side of the houses were gone. As if something had reached down and bitten a great hole in the walls. Most of the road surface was gone, a great deep pit where the barrels had stood.

And ahead of her was open air.

The wall of the Citadel – breached.

Great basalt masonry gone, blocks at the edges hanging out into empty darkness – and she saw the sea beyond, the northern sea and the road home.

House Leofric burned. Half of the side of the alley was nothing, now, except stone, rubble, beams, timbers, broken furniture, men in white robes screaming bloody, a woman in an iron collar coughing her guts into her skirt, a broken mosaic of the Boar and the Tree, exposed wood blackened and burning.

“Take the ground floor! Secure the windows!” Ash bawled. Carracci nodded, running forward. Her hearing just began to come back, accompanied by a thin, high whistling.

“We’re in!” Carracci: back at her side, grinning through dust-blackened sweat. “Geraint’s bowmen are at the courtyard windows! The arquebuses are there, too!”

“Thomas Rochester, keep the perimeter! I’m going in!”

Now is the time when you do not feel the restrictions of armour, the body, can do anything, buoyed up with the exhilaration of fighting. Euen Huw and his lance crowded shoulder to shoulder tightly round her: commander’s escort. Thomas Morgan dipped the pole of the Lion Azure banner as she strode forward, in the wake of the shouting mob of armed men, over the piled broken foundations of the wall, still hot and glowing with scraps of powder and burning fragments of cloth, into a great room with pavises now up at the shattered stone-lace windows, Geraint ab Morgan striding up and down behind the ranks of crossbowmen and arquebusiers; John de Vere at the head of the soldiers fighting—

That was over as she looked: a dozen or more men in white robes and mail cut down, one doubled over de Vere’s blade, his guts spilling out pink on the mosaic floor; Carracci bringing his bill straight down on a
nazir
’s helmet, shearing the metal wide open, the man collapsing like a dropped stone. No prisoners.

Another
nazir
lay at her feet, his mouth full of blood, dead or unconscious.

For the first time in combat, Ash found herself looking to see if she knew an enemy’s face: she did not.

Her ears hurt, badly. The Earl of Oxford shouted something, his bright steel arm lifting; and a unit, two dozen or more men, thundered across the room and took positions either side of the door.

“
Stairs!
” Ash yelled, coming up with de Vere, and footsteps on the roof above made her glance up, once. “Stairwell, beyond that door!”

“Where is the master gunner?”

“
Angelotti!
”

The Italian gunner came over rubble at a run, more men with torches behind him. Ash stared around the broken stone cavern that had been a room, hangings still on fire, floor slippery with blood and excrement.

“Grenades!”

“Coming up!”

“Get back from the door!” Ash yelled; and gauged it – a stone slab, of antique design, that slides on metal rollers. It will keep the blast in. “
Go!
”

A dozen of the company’s gun-crew piled in, de Vere urging the billmen to pull back the stone door; a dozen crossbowmen covering the entrance, and Ash felt a hand on her breastplate push her sharply back.

A shower of bolts shot up through the open door – from the stairs below, by angle – and she ducked her head automatically, grinning at Euen Huw. A runner from Geraint at the far side reached her at the same time as Dickon de Vere thumped down at her other side.

“Courtyard’s clear!” the runner bawled.

She risked a glance – dust, rubble; and beyond the stone windows, on the tiles by the fountain, two or three sprawled men in mail and white surcoats. Stone window frames spurted dust with the impact of black-fletched arrows. A
nazir
screeched orders and pain from across the great inner yard.

“Keep it that way! Don’t waste bolts! We have to get out of here, too. Dickon?”

“The door on the far side of the stairwell is open, they are firing from the far side of that room!”

“Well, fuck subtlety,” Ash said – teeth white in a blackened face, an appalling flat grin on her face, her voice hoarse, her ears singing, her face frozen by the wind whipping dust across the broken room, where there is no longer a city wall to obstruct it – “Fuck subtlety, chuck in the grenades! And shut the fucking door!”

Angelotti bellowed. His crews lit fuses, and rolled the sputtering casks across the floor and into the stairwell. De Vere put his shoulder to the stone door with her men: all shoving.

The metal rollers screamed and stuck.

The door jammed, three-quarters open.

Ash yelled, “DOWN!” in a voice that ripped her throat, and fell flat on to sharp, sticky rubble.

Boom!

The semi-muffled blast lifted her, bodily, she felt it. Two more followed, on the heels of the first; Euen Huw in his padded jack almost suffocated her, where he sprawled across her armoured back, and then she was up on her feet, the Welshman beside her; her and his lance scrambling across the room, the archers swearing loudly and getting up from below the windows, John de Vere and the three lances with him standing up, one screaming man being bandaged by Floria, her face dirty, intent, utterly concentrated; and Ash ran to the end of the jammed door.

“DUMB BITCH!” Euen Huw screamed in her ear.

“Someone’s got to do it!”

Riding adrenalin, bubbling laughter behind the metal bevor that protects her mouth, body in metal plate that digs and restricts, she hurtled through the gap between door and wall, out on to the pie-shaped step in the stairwell, into blackness lit by flaring torches from the room opposite and a man charging out straight at her.

She registers that it is someone wearing an acorn-shaped helmet, mail hauberk, flowing robes, and with a sword lifted up. It is a snapshot recognition of an enemy silhouette. She is already moving, swinging her sword up in a two-handed grip, bringing it over her head; her shoulder-muscles forcing the metal to whip over in a tight arc and slice down, smack, on his upraised arm.

Her blade doesn’t slice mail: riveted links absorb the edge’s cut. But under the arm of his hauberk, smashed back with the power of her blow, his elbow-joint shatters at the impact.

“
Aahh
—!” His piercing-high scream: pain, rage?

Anyone with him? Behind him?

Jarred through mail gauntlets and armour, Ash whips her blade down, through, and up again: over and down – no split-second hesitation between the blows: she hits the man hard on the junction between his helmet and his falling arm, stopped by the mail between neck and shoulder.

“Uhhnh!”

Hits him again—

“Uhh! Uhhnh!
Uhhh!
”

—and again, and again, grunting uncontrollably, putting him down with ferocity and speed; he falls down on the floor, long before she stops striking; ready for the man behind him—

No one.

Her breastplate drips, red running thinly over mirror-polished steel. The bottom edge of the steel is cutting painfully into her hipbone.

A snapshot apprehension of dust, smoke, silence in the far room, every nerve shrieking with alertness—

Thomas Morgan stumbled into her shoulder, bearing her banner, shouting: “Haro! The lion!”

Euen Huw’s wiry body tried to shove her aside, at the head of the men of his lance: it ended with both of them stumbling into the far wall together, to a raucous cheer from Geraint’s archers.

Nothing else moving, nobody—

An empty room opposite, empty platform, no one running up the stone stairs—

The powder-blackened walls of the stairwell dripped.

Ash stopped, a fierce smile on her face.

Her stomach heaved dryly at the hot smell of burned flesh.

There had been a squad running up the stairs at precisely the wrong moment. One man’s arm, blown clear off, lay at her feet, ragged and bleeding from the white knob of the shoulder-joint, sword still gripped in the hand. A heap of men lay tangled midway down the clockwise curve of the stairs. As dead men always do, they looked like men sprawling in a heap, splashed with red limewash or dye, their swords and bows dropped any old how. But arms do not bend at that angle, legs do not lie under bodies that way; and a blackened, fried face stared up at Ash through the dust: Theudibert,
Nazir
Theudibert; no point in looking at the faces of the men with him, his eight, no point now.

She looked, all the same. Gaiseric and Barbas and Gaina, young men, boys not much older than she is. Their faces are recognisable, although Gaiseric’s helmet, blown off by the blast, has taken a large part of his jawbone with it. Barbas’s open eye reflects the greasy light of torches: Euen’s men, behind her, with Rochester’s lance, Ned Mowlett, Henri de Tréville; their men stomping in.