Ash: A Secret History (173 page)

She stepped back, blinking against the apparent brilliance of two dozen candles, as the chamber door opened to admit Olivier de la Marche.

Florian demanded, “What is it?”

“News, your Grace.” The big man came to a halt, in a clatter of plate. His face was not clearly visible under his raised visor, but Ash thought his expression peculiarly rigid.

“More digging?”

“No, your Grace.” De la Marche clasped his hands over the pommel of his sword. “There’s news, from the north – from Antwerp.”

At the same moment that Ash exclaimed, “Reinforcements!”, Florian demanded, “How?”

“Yeah.” Ash flushed. “Not thinking. That’s a damn good question. How did news get in through
that,
messire? Spies?”

The Burgundian commander shook his head slightly. The torchlight glanced from his polished armour, dazzling Ash. Through black after-images, she heard de la Marche say, “No. Not a spy. This news has been allowed through. There was a Visigoth herald; he escorted our messenger in.”

Florian looked puzzled. Ash felt her stomach turn over.

“Better hear him, then, hadn’t we?” Ash said. As an afterthought, she glanced at Florian for acknowledgement. The surgeon-Duchess nodded.

“It isn’t going to be good news. Is it?” Florian said suddenly.

“Nah: they wouldn’t let
good
news through. The only question is, how bad is it?”

At de la Marche’s shout, two Burgundian men-at-arms brought in a third man, and backed out of the ducal chamber again. Ash could not read their expressions as they went. She found her hand clenching into a fist.

The man blinked at Floria del Guiz. He held his arms wrapped across his body, a cloak or some kind of bundle gripped close to himself.

De la Marche walked behind the messenger and rested a hand on his shoulder. No armour, Ash noted: a torn livery tabard and tunic, stained with blood and human vomit and let dry. Nothing recognisable in the heraldry except the St Andrew’s cross of Burgundy.

“Give your message,” Olivier de la Marche said.

The man stayed silent. He had fine sallow skin and dark hair. Exhaustion or hunger, or both, had made his features gaunt.

“The Visigoths brought you here?” Florian prompted. She waited a moment. In the night’s silence, she walked to the dais, and sat on the ducal throne. “What’s your name?”

Ash let Olivier de la Marche say, “Answer the Duchess, boy.”

Only a boy in comparison to de la Marche’s fifty or so, she realised; and the man lifted his head and looked first at the woman on the ducal throne, and then at the woman in armour; all without the slightest sign of interest.

Shit! Ash thought. Oh
shit…

“Do I have to, messire? I don’t want this. No one should be asked to do this. They
sent
me back, I didn’t
ask
—” His voice sounded coarse: a Flemish townsman, by his accent.

“What did they tell you to say?” Florian leaned forward on the arm of the throne.

“I was at the battle?” His tone ended on a question. “Days ago, maybe two weeks?”

His anguished look at de la Marche was not, Ash saw, because he did not want to tell his news to women. He was beyond that.

“They’re all dead,” he said, flatly. “I don’t know what happened on the field. We lost. I saw Gaucelm and Arnaud die. All my lance died. We routed in the dark, but they didn’t kill us; they rounded us up as soon as it was dawn – there was a cordon…”

Seeing Florian about to speak, Ash held up a restraining hand.

The Burgundian man-at-arms hugged his bundled cloak closer to him – not even wool: hessian, Ash saw – and looked around at the clean walls of the Tour Philippe, and the mud that his boots had tracked across the clean oak boards. There was wine on the table, but although he swallowed, he did not appear otherwise to see it.

“It’s all fucked!” he said. “The army in the north. They rounded us all up – baggage train, soldiers, commanders. They marched us into Antwerp—”

Ash grimaced. “The Goths have got Antwerp? Shit!”

Florian waved her to silence. She leaned forward, looking at the man. “And?”

“—they put us all on ships.”

Silence, in the high tower room. Puzzled, Ash looked across at de la Marche.

In a high whine, the man said, “Nobody knew what was going to happen. They hauled me out of there – I was so fucking scared—” He hesitated. After a second, he went on: “I saw them herding everyone else up, pushing them with spears. They made everybody go on board the ships that were at the dock. I mean everybody – soldiers, whores, cooks, the fucking commanders – everybody. I didn’t know why it was happening; I didn’t know why they’d held me back.”

“To come here,” Ash said, almost to herself, but he gave her a look of complete disgust. It startled her for a moment. Evidently not seeing the Maid of Burgundy.

“What would
you
fucking know!” He shook his head. “Some fucking woman done up like a soldier.” He glanced back at de la Marche. “Is this other one really the Duchess?”

De la Marche nodded, without reproach.

The man said, “They cast the ships off. No crew, just let ’em drift out into Antwerp harbour. Then there was one almighty fucking
whoosh!
” He gestured. “And the nearest ship just burst into fire. It wouldn’t go out. They just kept shooting Greek Fire at the ships, and when our men started trying to swim, they used them for crossbow practice. There was all torches along the quay. Nobody got out. All the water was burning. That stuff just floated. Bodies, floating. Burning.”

De la Marche wiped his hand across his face.

“Most of us died outside Antwerp.” The man went on: “I don’t know how many of us there was left after the field. Enough of us to fill six or seven ships, packed in tight. And now there’s nobody. They sent me with this.”

He held out the cloth bundle. As dark and stiff as the rest of his clothes, it was nevertheless not, Ash saw, his cloak. Hessian sacks.

“Show me.” Florian spoke loudly.

The man squatted down, cut and filthy fingers plucking at the tied necks of the sacks. De la Marche reached over him, dagger out, and cut the twine with his blade. The man took two corner edges of one sack and lifted. A large heavy object rolled out on to the oak boards.

“
Fuck.
” Florian stared.

Ash swallowed, at the stench.
Damn, I should have recognised that. Decay.
She looked questioningly at de la Marche.

The refugee man-at-arms reached out and lifted the matted, white-and-blue object, seating it down facing the surgeon.

His voice sounded completely calm. “This is Messire Anthony de la Roche’s head.”

The severed head’s eyes were filmed over and sunken, Ash saw, like the eyes of rotting fish; and the dark beard and hair might have been any colour before blood soaked them.

“Is it?” she asked de la Marche.

He nodded. “Yes. I know him. Know him very well. Demoiselle Florian, if you need to be spared the others—”

“I’m a surgeon. Get on with it.”

The man-at-arms removed a second, then a third, severed head from his sacks; handling these two with a kind of bewildered delicacy, as if they could still feel his touch. Both were women, both had been fair-haired. It was not clear whether the marks were bruises or decomposition. Long hair, matted with blood and mud and semen, fell lank on to the floorboards.

Ash stared at the waxy skin. Despite death, the head of the older of the women was recognisable.
The last time I saw her was in court here, in August.

So much hanging on this: Ash can feel herself trying to see a different woman, a noblewoman, or a peasant, sent in to spread false fear. The features are too recognisable. For all the sunken, colourless eyes, this is the same woman that she saw shrewishly berating John de Vere, Earl of Oxford; this is Charles’s wife, the pious Queen of Bruges.

The man-at-arms said, “Mère-Duchesse Margaret. And her daughter Marie.”

Ash could recognise nothing about the second head, except that the woman had been younger. Looking up, she saw Olivier de la Marche’s face streaked with tears.
Mary of Burgundy, then.

The man said, “I saw them killed on the quay at Antwerp. They raped them first. I could hear the Mère-Duchesse praying. She called on Christ, and the saints, but the saints had no pity. They let her survive long enough to see the girl die.”

A silence, in the cold room. The sweet smell of decay permeated the air. A whisper of rain beat against the closed shutters.

“They’ve been dead less than a week,” Ash said, straightening up, surprised to find that her voice cracked when she spoke. “That’ll put the field when, about the time that Duke Charles died? A day or so before?”

Florian merely sat shaking her head, not in negation. She abruptly sat straight. “You don’t want people talking to this man,” she said to Olivier de la Marche. “He’s coming to my hospice in the company tower. He needs cleaning up, and rest. God knows what else.”

Ash said dryly, “I shouldn’t worry about rumour. The Lion will know anything you don’t want known, anyway. You can’t hide this for long.”

“We can’t,” de la Marche agreed. “Your Grace, I don’t know if you realise—”

“I can hear!” Florian said. “I’m not stupid. There’s no army in the north now. There’s no one alive to raise another force outside Dijon. Isn’t that right?”

Ash turned her back on the crouching man, the Burgundian commander, the surgeon-Duchess. She let her gaze go to the shutters, visualising the night air, and the rejoicing Visigoth camp beyond the walls.

She said, “That’s right. We got no army of the north coming here. We’re on our own now.”

  Message: #377 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash

Date:    16/12/00 at 06.11 a.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna –

So many seismographic ears listening, so many satellites overhead – post-Cold War technology – and the political instability in the Middle East – I doubt a sparrow falls without it being logged by the appropriate authorities!

Certainly nothing that affects the Mediterranean seabed would go unnoticed; therefore, if there are no records

sorry, wait, Isobel needs this.

Too deep in the translation to say more, I MUST get it FINISHED.

– Pierce

  Message: #378 (Anna Longman)