Ash: A Secret History (121 page)

“I could hire your men,” the Faris said absently, “but not to fight under your command: I would need you elsewhere. Father wants you,” she added. “He told me so, before he grew ill. Sisnandus tells me he still orders your presence.”

Oh shit, I bet he does!

“Your ‘father’ Leofric wants to dissect me, to know how
you
work.” Ash lifted her eyes to discover an expression of bewilderment on the woman’s face. “Didn’t you know that? Probably he’d want it even more badly, now! If you and I can hear a
dead
man—”

A voice outside bellowed, “To arms!”

Oh, Christus, not now! What a time to be interrupted!

A fist hammered at the outer door of the command building. Ash heard shouting, did not shift her gaze from the Visigoth woman’s face.

“Maybe,” Ash said, “it isn’t just Leofric and this Sisnandus who want me in Carthage. Do you
know
who’s giving you orders, Faris?”

“
To arms!
” a male voice bawled again, outside the chamber door.

The Faris swung around, breaking eye-contact with Ash; marched to the door and flung the curtains aside, just before a slave male could do it.

“Give me a proper report, ’
Arif,
” she snapped.

The man-at-arms, with the ’
arifs
rank on his livery, gasped, “They’re attacking the camp—!”

“Which perimeter?”

“South-west. I think,
al-sayyid
.”
²

“Ah. That will be a diversion. Get me the
qa’id
for the engineers‘ camp, but first, send a message to alert the
qa’id
of the east camp. Get me ’
Arif
Alderic and his troop, here, now. Slaves! Clothe me!”

She flung back into the room, brushing past Ash, who had to take a step back to keep her balance. Jolted, Ash had time to think,
Is that what
I
look like when I
get in gear?

“I’m not sending you to Carthage, yet. Father will have to wait. I need the city. I’m sending you back to Dijon,
jund.
” The Faris looked up from the clothing on her bed, with a brief, surprising smile. “With an escort. Just in case you get ambushed on the way.”

Back
to Dijon.
Into
Dijon!

A handful of slaves pushed past Ash, two or three of them showing stark surprise and recognition at seeing her. They began to strip robe and shift from the Visigoth general, and dress her from the skin out.

“You’re giving me an
escort?
”

“Dijon is where you are crucial to me, now. I need the city! We will talk again. About these… Wild Machines. And your dead priest. Later.”

Ash shook her head, spluttering between frustration and anger. “No.
Now,
Faris. You know what war is! Don’t leave something because you think you can do it tomorrow.”

The other ’
arif
rushed back in. “Now they are attacking the eastern perimeter,
al-sayyid
!”

Ash opened her mouth, all but said, aloud and incredulously,
Two
attacks? She shut her mouth again.

“And that will be the true attack. Get your men to arms! You were a distraction, to allow these sallies out of the city? Well, you may still have your price!” Not waiting for a confirmation, and still with a wicked smile covering her immense weariness, the Visigoth woman put her arms up as her slaves lowered her mail hauberk over her head, wriggling arms and body and neck until the mail snugged down over her body.

I need another hour with her! Ash thought, frustrated. She
wants
to talk, I can
feel
it—

As a child tied the waist of the hauberk to her belt with aiglettes, the Faris continued:

“Alderic will take you to the gates once we have contained these attacks. We
will
talk again – sister.”

Stunned at the swiftness of it, Ash found herself stumbling out, down steps into the moonlit camp, into a flurry of lanterns, men running with spears and recurved bows,
nazirs
bawling hoarse orders; all the ordered confusion one might wish to see in a camp surprised by a night-attack. By the time she got her helmet on and her night-vision back, she was being hurried along between two of ’
Arif
Alderic’s men, boots ringing on the frosted earth, towards the great dark bulk of the city walls of Dijon.

She can’t just send me off like this! Not without answers
—!

Torches moved outside the impromptu holding-area. Her feet grew numb in her boots.

From somewhere to the east she heard steel blades slamming together.

Two
attacks? One will be mine. I wonder if Robert’s sent a force out of the sally-gate himself? It’d be like him. Twice the confusion.

“‘Hurry up and wait’,” she remarked to Alderic’s
nazir
, a small, spare man in well-worn mail. He said nothing, but he gave a brief smile. No different in this man’s army.

After an interminable wait, the sounds of combat moved off. Nothing then but torches moving in the Visigoth camp; legionaries on fire-watch shouting in frustration; war-horses neighing from their lines. She considered asking if the cooks had been woken up too; decided against it; found herself almost falling asleep on her feet, the length of the wait blurring in her mind.

“
Nazir
!” The ’
arif
Alderic strode back into the circle of torchlight, nodded abruptly at his men, and they all moved off; Ash in the middle of the eight, the cold forcing her half-sleeping mind back to alertness.

She stumbled down trenches, behind palisades, the smell of earth and powder thick in her nostrils; then out into the open, beyond the last of the defensive barriers. Ahead, across a wide expanse of blasted, raw earth, torches already began to flare – up on the hoardings hanging out from the battlements, above the north-west gate.

“Best of luck,” the ’
arif
said brusquely. Glimpsing Alderic’s face, she saw the last of his guilt-induced kindness.

He and his men vanished back into the trenches, the darkness, the flames.

“God
damn
it!” Ash remarked into the cold air.

She let me go. Yeah. Because she can. She’s sending me into a siege. Because she wants me to betray Dijon. She doesn’t think I’m going
any
where.

And she thinks she can get me for Leofric any time…

“Cow!”

Ash stopped dead, on the battered, rutted, rough ground, up to her ankles in mud. Cold wind made her eyes leak tears down her numb, scarred cheeks. Through the helmet’s padding, she could hear the river running somewhere off on her right-hand side; water not yet frozen over. Closer, dancing in her vision, she saw sheer towering walls; and lights in front of her, over the north-west gate of Dijon.

“Oh, the cow. She’s
already
got my armour. Now she’s kept my bloody
sword,
too!”

A nervous voice came from the parapet above the portcullis and gates. “Sarge, there’s someone out there
laughing.
”

Ash wiped her eyes.
Godammit, they should have had word about me – fine time to go down to friendly fire!

“Some crazy rag-‘ead tart,” a second, invisible male voice commented. “You going to go down there and give ’er one?”

“Yo, the wall!” She walked forward, at an easy pace, into the circle of light now spread by the lanterns; keeping an eye on the combat-ready and twitchy men lining the parapet of the gate above her. She squinted. In the poor light, their livery was unclear.

“Whose men?” she sang out.

“De la Marche!” a beer-roughened voice bawled, arrogantly.

“Who the fuck are
you?
” another, anonymous, voice demanded.

Ash looked up at bows, bills; one man in armour with a poleaxe.

“Don’t for the Green Christ’s sake shoot me now,” she said unsteadily. “Not after what I’ve just been through! Go tell your boss he wants to see me.”

There was a silence of sheer, dumbstruck amazement.

“You
what?
”

“I said, go tell your boss de la Marche he wants to see me. He does. So open the gate!”

One of the Burgundian men-at-arms snorted. “Cheeky
bitch!
”

“Who is that?”

“Can’t see, sir. Not in the cloak. It’s a woman, sir.”

Still, grinning, Ash put her cloak back over her shoulders.

Over her brigandine, dirty-yellow but perfectly distinct, the livery of the lion Azure shone in the light of their torches.

A clutch of Burgundian men-at-arms, swords drawn, hustled her through the man-high door cut into Dijon’s great gates; hustled her into darkness, and echoes off masonry, and the smell of sweat and shit and pitch-torches burned down to the socket.

I’m in! I’m inside the
walls!

The relief of such safety deafened her, for a second, to the voices of men and officers.

“She could be a spy!” an over-excited billman shouted.

“A woman dressed as a man?
Whore!
”

A lance-leader stuttered, “No, last August I s-saw her in the English Earl’s affinity—”

She blinked, eyes gradually adjusting to the torchlight in the long tunnel of the gates, and the faint glimmer of light – dawn? torches? – at the arched exit.

And I’m sane. Or – a
smile hidden by helmet and hood –
as sane as the Faris, anyway, which may not be saying much.

Her smile faded.

And it
is
Godfrey … dear God:
how?

Ash returned her attention: raised her voice. “I have to find my men—!”

I’m in. Are
they?
Fuck!

And – if we are – now how the hell do I get us out again?

II

Growing first light showed her devastation – a shattered no-man’s-land stretching two hundred yards from the north-west gate back into the city, and as far to either side as she could see. Dawn picked out man-high heaps of rubble, the broken beams of bombard-wrecked houses and shops; scarred cobbles, burned thatch; one teetering retaining wall.

Ash stumbled, between the Burgundian soldiers; the cold wind numbing her scarred cheeks. She spared a glance for heraldry and faces: definitely Olivier de la Marche’s troops. And therefore Charles of Burgundy’s loyal men.

We were with them at Auxonne, they’ll be assuming we’re still hired on with them—

But we might just be a damn sight better off selling Dijon to the Visigoths, and heading east to the Sultan and his armies. Mercenaries are always welcome.

If we’re not all dead out there.

Noise shocked the air.

Above Ash’s head, in the chill pre-light before dawn, the bells of Dijon suddenly began to peal out. Church after church, St Philibert and Notre Dame, noise running back from the street where she stood; abbey and monastery, within the city walls; all their great bells pealing out high and low, shrill and clear, shaking the birds up from the roofs and the citizens awake in their houses: the bells of Dijon clamouring out into the morning, cascading with joy.

“What the fuck—?” Ash yelled.

The Burgundian officers fell back. She glimpsed Thomas Rochester shoving his way through the pack –
Christus, the first familiar face in hours!
– battered, not badly injured; safe in the city; an escort of company men-at-arms with him under the tattered Lion standard. Seeing her, he signalled, and one of the men-at-arms unrolled and raised her personal banner beside it.

“Where the fuck have
you
been?” Ash bellowed.

The dark Englishman shouted something, inaudible in the Dijon street for the noise. Pushing in close, shoulder to shoulder, he lowered his mouth to her ear, and she thumbed up one side of her sallet to hear him shouting:

“…got in! They swam rope-bridges across at the south gate! Where the bridge has been mined?”

The scent of summer dust is suddenly heavy in her memory: she recalls riding into Dijon by that bridge, at the side of John de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Into a white, fair city.

Floria del Guiz appeared from behind Rochester, yelling; Ash read her lips rather than heard her above the bells and the shouting: “News has got out! I thought we’d never find you!”

“Where’s Robert?
What
news?”

The woman grinned: might have said, “Sometimes you’re
slow!
”

Voices shrieked at windows above Ash’s head. She glanced up, listening – the earth still darker than the lightening sky – and a body cannoned into her and Thomas Rochester together. She caught her balance, shoving back at a burly man tumbling out of his scarred wooden front door, a fat woman fumbling at his shoulder and tying his points; two small children howling underfoot.

“Jesus
wept
!”

Amazed, Ash signalled to the banner, attempting to back off across the trebuchet-battered cobbled streets. Among the familiar military silhouettes in the crowd – pinch-waisted doublets, hose, bill-points and sallets – there were civilian men bundling themselves into their gowns, cramming on their tall felt hats: neighbour shrieking to neighbours, all questions, all demands.

“Find me Roberto!” Ash directed Thomas Rochester, at battlefield-pitch. The Englishman nodded, and signalled to the men-at-arms.

Now bodies pressed up against Ash from all sides. Their breath whitened the air; the smell of old sweat and dirt filled her nostrils. She shoved.
Hopeless!
she thought. There was no way to move without using force. Rochester looked back at her and raised his shoulders, in the press of bodies. She shook her head at him, ruefully, almost relaxing into the chaos; still dazzled by the implicit safety of the city’s towering walls.

The press of bodies swayed against her; the narrow street spilling people out into the no-man’s-land of demolished streets and burned-out houses. Not all civilians. Ash noted; Burgundian-liveried men in mail and plate, or in archer’s jacks, were also running out across the bombarded ground, towards the northwest gate and walls of the city. The pressure of the crowd began to push her inexorably back in that direction.