Ash: A Secret History (124 page)

“Too right!” Ash, when the gale of laughter died down, added, “Sorry, I dragged it out as long as I could – I hoped the war’d be over before we got back here!”

“Damn right!” one of the archers yelled.

“We’ve been waiting three months.” The big man looked down at her with a familiar, amazed amusement. Robert Anselm, battered and broad-shouldered; the familiar rasp of his
rosbif
accent unbelievably welcome. “You’re getting a reputation. ‘Ash always comes back.’”

“I like it. Let’s try and keep it that way,” Ash said sardonically. She looked at him, at the men around him, was aware of no friction yet between those who had gone to Carthage and those who had stayed in Dijon. “Find me one of the clerks. I need to write some retrospective commissions of array – Euen Huw and Thomas Rochester to be made sub-captains; Angelotti in overall charge of all missile troops as well as guns, Rostovnaya and Katherine as his subordinates to take over the crossbows and longbows.”

There was a murmur of pleasure and approval. She kept her face bland when Geraint ab Morgan looked at her.

“Geraint, I want you to take over as head of the provosts. I need a man I can trust to keep discipline in the camp.”

Morgan’s face flushed with pride. “I’ll do that, boss, don’t you worry!”

I won’t worry – not with you out of the combat line. Let’s keep you and your doubts where they can’t do any damage – and see if you can learn something about discipline while you’re enforcing it…

“Robert, you’ll have your own recommendations for promotions with the guys here,” she added, “consider them okayed. Now we get our asses in gear, the city council want to talk to me, and I want an officer meeting before we go, Robert, what’s that?”

She finished, breathless, staring at a horse.

Snickers sounded from the men-at-arms; she could feel them grinning without looking at them. The ones that grinned were mainly the troops who had stayed in Dijon.

“It’s a horse,” Robert Anselm said unnecessarily.

“I can
see
it’s a fucking—” Ash took a quick glance under the beast, where it stood by one wall, head contentedly down in a feed-bag. “—a mare. What’s it doing
here?
”

Robert Anselm lifted bland brows. A couple of the resident lance-leaders chuckled.

Ash picked her way between people’s kit, across the dormitory floor, to the straw-strewn area liberally dotted with horse-dung that housed the large chestnut mare. The beast flickered a dark eye at her. “I’m not even going to ask how you persuaded it up the stairs…”

“Blindfolded,” Anselm answered, striding up beside her. “We picked her up in the early hours of this morning.”

“Robert – where from?”

“The Visigoth horse lines.” The big man kept a straight face. “No one wanted her at the time. Even with this.”

At his signal, a billman and a groom unfolded between them a filthy length of cloth. Horse caparisons, she saw. With the Brazen Head livery still visible through the filth.

“Great Boar! That’s the Faris’s horse!”

“Is it? Well, well. Who’d have guessed?” Anselm smiled down at her. “Welcome home.”

Their pleasure was noisy, and extensive; and she gave way to it wholeheartedly. She slapped Robert Anselm on the arm. “Everything they ever said about mercenaries is true! We’re nothing but a bunch of horse-thieves!”

“Takes talent to be a good horse-thief,” Euen Huw remarked professionally, and flushed. “Not that I’d know, see.”

“Perish the thought…” Ash did not approach the mare too closely, reading
war-horse
in her conformation. “Where’s Digorie Paston?”

“Here, ma’am.”

As the clerk pushed his way to the front of the men, she said, “Digorie, write me a message. To the Faris. Have a herald take it down to the Visigoth camp. ‘Chestnut mare, thirteen hands, Barb blood, livery supplied – will exchange for one harness, Milanese plate, complete; and my bloody best sword!’”

A roar.

“I’ll take it!” Rickard emerged from the press of men, flushed.

“Yeah, okay, you and Digorie, but I’ll need you for the council first. Take a parley flag. Don’t be cheeky, and wear a clean livery. She’ll be expecting a message from me—” Ash stopped, grinned cynically, and added: “—just not the one you’re taking her. Meanwhile…”

She lifted her head, looking at her company.

“Food,” she announced, pointedly.

Within a few minutes, sitting on someone’s wicker rucksack, she was tearing dark bread apart with her teeth, greeting men and women not seen for twelve weeks, alert to any signs that they might now be two different companies. They sat or knelt around her, on the floor; the hall full to the point that the window embrasures were crowded with sitting men, swapping stories at full volume.

“Is the Earl still out there?” Robert Anselm asked, squatting beside her.

He smelled of wood-smoke condensed in confined quarters, eye-wateringly strong. Ash grinned at him through a mouthful of bread. “Oxford’s not in Burgundy as far as I know.”

Anselm’s jerk of the head took in all the company occupying the hall. “If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t be here. He made it a retreat, not a rout. Four days back from Auxonne, all the Burgundian leaders dead or wounded, Oxford holding everybody together, step by step by step.”

“With the rag-heads snapping at your ass all the way?”

“Yeah. If we hadn’t held together as fighting units, they’d have wiped out the rest of the Burgundian army right there.” Anselm rubbed his hands together, and reached out for some of the bread. Through it, thickly, he added, “If not for de Vere, there wouldn’t be a siege going on here. All of south Burgundy would be overrun.”

“The man’s a soldier.” Ash, aware that they were being listened to, said carefully, “As far as I know, and if he’s been lucky, my lord of Oxford is currently in the court of the Sultan at Constantinople.”

Anselm sprayed wet crumbs. “He’s
what?
”

Over a general murmur, Ash said, “Don’t bust your points. If Burgundy is weakening, now’s a good time for the Turks to hit the Visigoths. Before they get too strong. Make the rag-heads fight a war on two fronts.”

“Make them the jam in the shit sandwich.”

“Robert Anselm, you have a real way with words…”

His brow furrowed. “How much chance of my lord Oxford getting Turkish help?”

“God in His mercy knows, Robert. I don’t.” Ash made a rapid change of subject, jerking her thumb at the nearest window and the greying sky. She said briskly, “I see there’s a tilt-yard down the end there. Some of the lads could do with getting up to speed on weapons practice. After that hike, I’d like to give them a day or two training before we put them into the field.”

Robert Anselm shook his head. “Boss, you didn’t see Auxonne.”

“Not the end of it, no,” Ash remarked dryly. “What’s your point, Captain?”

“As far as casualties are concerned, Auxonne was Agincourt and the Burgundians went down like the French.”
⁷

Blankly amazed, Ash said, “Fuck me.”

“
I’d
be out with the Goths,” Anselm said grimly, “if I didn’t know what treatment the Lion Azure can expect. We got about a tenth left of the Duke’s army – between two and a half, three thousand men. And the city militia, for what they’re worth – I give ’em this: on their home ground, they’re determined. And we got an entire city wall to defend.”

Ash looked at him in silence.

“You brought back two hundred fighting men,” Robert Anselm said. “Girl, you don’t know how much of a difference two hundred men can make right now.”

Ash raised silver brows. “Man, I
thought
I was popular! So that’s why this ‘siege council’ wants to talk to me.”

“That and the fact that ‘Carthage fell down’,” Anselm completed her thought.

Ash nodded, consideringly, and looked at the men around her.

“Robert, I don’t know how much Angelotti and Geraint have told you—”

“These new demon-machines in the south?”

Warmed by his quickness, and by the lack of any alteration in the way he spoke to her, Ash nodded and moved closer to the hearth. There was a scurry of men-at-arms moving their kit out of the way; the escort sitting down on the floorboards a yard or two off, giving at least an illusion of privacy. Ash sat down on a joint stool, resting her elbows on her knees, and letting her cloak fall open to the fire’s warmth.

“Sit down, Robert. There are things you need to hear from me.”

He squatted beside her. “Are we staying?”

It was blunt.

“You came back for us,” Anselm elaborated. “What’s the options now, girl? Do we stick with this siege? Or try to negotiate a way out past the Visigoth lines?”

“You saw what food we brought in, Robert. Fuck-all. It took a
lot
longer getting here than I’d bargained for… We’d have to negotiate with the Visigoths themselves for supplies, for a forced march. I know the Faris is anxious for a quick end to the siege. As for leaving here…” Ash turned her gaze away from the burning wood’s scarlet buttresses, on the hearth. She looked at Robert Anselm’s sweating face.

“Robert, there’s stuff you need to know. About the ‘demon-machines’, yes; and the Stone Golem. About my sister, the Faris – and why she’s so damn determined to keep this crusade here in Burgundy.”

Distant in her memory, her own voice asking a question comes to her:
why
Burgundy?

She reached out; touched Robert Anselm’s dirty sleeve. “And about Godfrey Maximillian.”

Anselm rubbed both bare hands back over his scalp; she heard stubble rasp.

“Florian told me. He’s dead.”

Aware suddenly of the three-month hiatus between them – aware that she may not know, yet, how Robert Anselm has changed, three months in command of his own men – Ash nodded, slowly.

I could wait. Leave it; tell him later.

We’re either one company, or we’re not. I either trust him, or I don’t. I have to risk it.

“Godfrey’s dead,” she said, “but I’ve heard his voice, Roberto. Exactly the way I’ve always heard the Lion – the
machina rei militaris.
And – so has the Faris.”

Some fifteen minutes later, Ash moved back into the main body of the hall.

To Baldina, Henri Brant, and a woman called Hildegarde, a sutler who appeared to have stepped into Wat Rodway’s place in his absence from Dijon, she said, “How are we off for supplies, here?”

“I’ve shown Henri the cellars, boss.” Hildegarde’s red face creased. “Town supplies aren’t good.”

“They’re not? I thought they’d have a year’s supplies put by – they’ve had sieges here before.”

Henri Brant said sardonically, “They had all of the Duke’s standing army billeted here for weeks before Auxonne. I’ve been checking – it’s bloodmonth, and they’ve had fuck-all to slaughter!
⁸
They ate the place all but bare, boss.”

Hildegarde put in, “But we won’t need to worry, will we? Not now the Goths are beaten.”

“Beaten?” Ash exclaimed.

The woman shrugged, a movement which strained the laces of her bodice. “Only a matter of time, my dear, isn’t it? With their demon-city fallen in bits about their ears. What’s their army to do? They’ll lift the siege before solstice.”

By the nods of agreement around her, Hildegarde was not the only one of that opinion. Ash caught Floria’s eye, where the surgeon sat with her long legs sprawled out on the floor – and a rapidly emptying wine jug beside her.

“There’s still a government in Carthage,” Floria pointed out. “That army out there haven’t surrendered!”

“Never argue with morale,” Ash murmured… “No – never argue with
high
morale.”

“Why am I surrounded by idiots?” Florian remarked, rhetorically.

“
Dottore,
you should consider that thought very carefully.” Angelotti chuckled, where he sat between Geraint and Euen Huw. “As the
rosbifs
have it, ‘like calls to like’!”

The heat of the hall began at last to penetrate. Ash put her hands up and slid her hood back, stripped her gauntlets and helmet off, and looked up to find Robert Anselm and a whole lot of the garrison troops staring at her, suddenly silent.

She became aware again of her roughly cropped short hair. Aware that the river-fall of shining glory is gone, that she is only a leggy, dirty, strong woman with her hair cropped as close as a slave’s, shorter than most of the men’s. That the one in armour and glory, now, is the Faris.

“At least now you can tell me and the Visigoth bitch apart,” she remarked dryly, into the silence.

Robert Anselm said, “We always could. You’re the ugly one.”

There was a split second of belly-chilling silence, in which the men around her worked out firstly that only Anselm could have said it, and secondly that his brutal grin was being answered by one of Ash’s own.

“Hey,” she said. “I had to get scars before
I
could frighten children.”

Anselm’s grin widened. “Some of us do it with natural talent.”

“Yeah.” She threw a gauntlet at him: he snagged it out of the air. “Robert, I don’t know if you frighten the enemy, but you scare the shit out of me…”

There was a glow in the room, nothing material, that came from the garrison’s appreciation of the banter; came with their realisation that Anselm would not challenge her for the company; came with her arrival beyond hope out of the unknown sunless south. Ash basked in it, for a moment. She took a look around, at the lances eating together, deep in exchange of stories, catching up on old quarrels and gossip.

Okay, she thought. No time like the present.

“You guys better listen up.” She raised her voice, addressing the room generally. “Because I’m going to tell you why you’ll be better off without me.”

It got their attention, as she thought it might. Talk died down. Men and women looked at their lance-mates, and moved closer, to be able to hear. A baggage-cart child said something which made her friend giggle. Ash let the hall become silent.

“Your lance-leaders and officers will bring you up to speed on this,” she said. “You guys hold a company meeting, while I’m at this siege-council. The main thing you need to know is, I saw the Faris last night—”