Ash: A Secret History (45 page)

“Fl-Florian says you’re well enough to talk business.”

“Now you’re doing it! She does, does she? That’s damn good of her.”

A sparrow darted down, dipping its beak for the crumbs she held on her palm. Ash chirruped as it fluffed brown feathers at her, watching her with one black, pupilless eye.

She said, “I suppose we’re deemed,
de facto,
to have broken our contract with the Visigoths. The Faris certainly broke whatever agreement she had with me. I think we’ve chosen the side we’re
not
going to be on in this war.”

Godfrey said, “I wish it was that simple.”

A sharp beak pecked her palm.

Ash raised her head, to gaze up at Godfrey Maximillian. “I know that just staying out of the way won’t be good enough. The Visigoths are coming north anyway.”

“They’ve come as far as Auxonne.” Godfrey shrugged. “I have sources. We came through Auxonne, on the way from Basle. It’s no more than thirty-five, forty miles from here.”

“Forty miles!” Ash’s hand jerked. The sparrow abruptly flicked into flight, dipping across the courtyard crowded with women. The sound of nuns’ voices and the noise of water slopping in tubs drifted up to the window.

“That’s … getting to the point where I’m going to have to
do
something. The question is, what? The company, first. I need the lads back on-line…”

A flash of sunlight on slate roofs, bright as a kingfisher’s wing, took her eye. Past the convent wall, beyond strip-fields and copses, the white walls and blue slate roofs of a city shone clean and bright and clear under the midday light. Under the sun.

“Godfrey, I have to ask you something. As my clerk.
⁹
Call this my confession. Can I lead them into combat – if I can’t trust my voice?”

One look at the frown creasing his face was enough.

“Oh yes.” Ash nodded. “The Faris does have a war-machine, a
machina rei militaris.
I watched her speak to it. Wherever it is – Carthage, or closer at hand – it wasn’t in the same place as she was when she spoke to it. But she heard it. And I … heard it. It’s my voice, Godfrey. It’s the Lion.”

She kept her voice steady, but water stung the lids of her eyes.

“Oh, child.” He cupped his hands around her shoulders. “Oh, dear child!”

“No. I can stand that. It was a genuine miracle, a genuine Beast, but – children imagine things. Maybe I wasn’t even present, I just heard the men talking. Maybe I made up seeing the Lion myself when I started hearing voices.” Ash moved her shoulders, freeing herself from his hands. “The Visigoths, the Faris – she’ll be suspicious now. Before, they had no reason to think anyone else could use the machine. Now … they might be able to stop me doing it. They might be able to make it
lie
to me. Tell me to do the wrong thing, in the field, get us all killed…”

Godfrey’s face showed shock. “Christ and the Tree!”

“I’ve been thinking about it, this morning.” Ash smiled crookedly, there being nothing else to do but haul herself together. “You see the problem.”

“I see that you would be wise to tell no one about this! This is Under the Tree.” Godfrey Maximillian crossed himself. “The camp is rowdy. Disturbed. Morale could go either way. Child,
can
you fight without your voice?”

The sun burned sparks from flints in the convent’s wall, glittering in the corner of her eye. A waft of warm air brought her thyme, rosemary, chervil, and more Cuckoo Pint from the herb garden. Ash looked at him flatly.

“I always knew I might have to find out. That’s why, when we fought Tewkesbury field – I never called on my voice the whole of the day. If I was going to lead men out to fight, where they could be killed, I didn’t want it depending on some damn saint, some Lion-born-of-a-Virgin, I wanted it depending on
me.
”

Godfrey gave a choked sound. Ash, puzzled, looked up at the bearded man. His expression wavered somewhere between outright laughter, and something very close to tears.

“Christ and the Holy Mother!” he exclaimed.

“What? Godfrey,
what?
”

“You didn’t want it depending on ‘some damn saint’—” His deep, resonant laugh boomed out; loudly enough to make some of the nearer nuns lift their heads and stare up at the window, eyes squinting against the brilliance of the sun.

“I don’t see what—”

“No,” Godfrey interrupted, wiping his eyes, “I don’t suppose you do.”

He beamed at her, warmly.

“Miracles aren’t enough for you! You need to know that you can do it by yourself.”

“When there are people depending on me, yes, I do.” Ash hesitated. “That was five years ago. Six years. I don’t know that I can do without my voice
now.
All I do know is, I can’t trust it any more.”

“Ash.”

She looked up to meet Godfrey’s sobering gaze.

The priest pointed towards the distant town. “Duke Charles is here. In Dijon. He’s been holding court here since he withdrew his army from Neuss.”

“Yeah, Florian told me. I thought he’d’ve gone north to Bruges or somewhere.”

“The Duke is here. So is the court. And the army.” Godfrey Maximillian rested his hand over her arm. “And other mercenaries.”

What she had taken to be a distant continuation of Dijon’s white walls, she now saw to be white canvas. Sun-bleached tents. Hundreds of tents – more, as her eye ran along their peaked canopies. Thousands. The glitter of light on armour and guns. The swarming of men and horses, too far away for livery to be distinguished, but she could guess them to be Rossano, Monforte, as well as Charles’s own troops under Olivier de la Marche.

Sombrely, Godfrey said, “You have eight hundred fighting men out there in the Lion Azure, not to mention the baggage train, and they all talk. It’s known you’ve been with the Visigoths – and with their Faris-General. Consequently, there are
many
people who are anxiously waiting to speak to you, when you recover and leave this place.”

“Oh. Shit. Oh,
shit!
”

“And I don’t know how long they will wait.”

IV

The next morning’s heat laid a blue glaze over the distant trees, and turned the sky a hot, powdery grey. Ash walked down between daisy-thick banks and towering cow-parsley, leaving her demi-gown and doublet sleeves behind, to where the Lion Azure had their camp, the promised quarter of a mile beyond the convent grounds. She came at it covertly through a copse of birches, and the company’s tethered cattle and goats, grazing the rich water meadow.

Ash scratched at one of the wicker pavises strapped to the side of a baggage wagon, some distance from the main gate, making a mental note that Geraint’s idea of how far apart one should space pickets was sadly lacking.

“I shouldn’t be able to do this…”

She stared at the camp beyond the wagons, the fire-breaks between tents trodden down to dust, and the figures of men in Lion livery mostly sprawled around dead fire-pits, eating oat-porridge from wooden bowls.

Okay. What’s been changed? What’s different? Who—

“Ash!”

Ash tilted her head back, shading her eyes against the sun, staring up at the top of the wagon. Heat crisped the skin across her nose and cheeks. “Blanche? That you?”

A flash of white legs, and a woman swung herself out over the wagon-shafts, and threw her arms around Ash. The yellow-haired ex-whore thumped her back. Tears sprang to Ash’s eyes.

“Whoa! Steady on, girl! I’m back, but you don’t want to kill me before I get inside!”

“Shit.” Blanche beamed, happily. White sunlight showed wet smears on her cheeks. “We thought you were dying. We thought we were stuck with that Welsh bastard. Henri! Jan-Jacob! Come here!”

Ash heaved herself over the wagon-shafts, jumping down on to the flattened straw that strewed this part of the camp, further away from the knight’s tents; and straightened to find her hand being wrung by her steward Henri Brant, and Jan-Jacob Clovet struggling to lace his cod-flap with his injured arm and thump her on the back at the same time. Blanche’s daughter Baldina, a red-haired woman, dropped her skirts with aplomb and got up from the straw where she had been accommodating the man-at-arms.

“Boss!” she called croakily, “are you back for good?”

Ash ruffled the whore’s flaming hair. “No, I’m marrying Duke Charles of Burgundy, and we’re going to spend every day eating ’til we burst, and fucking on swansdown mattresses.”

Baldina said broadly, “Suits us. We’ll make you a widow so you can. That’s if that little limp-dick you married is still alive somewhere.”

Ash made no answer, being engulfed in the wiry embrace of Euen Huw, and a torrent of Welsh admiration and complaint; and finding herself at the centre of a rapidly growing mob, made up of the company’s boys, musicians, washerwomen, whores, grooms, cooks and archers; and being swept off – as she had intended – towards the centre of the camp.

First of all the men-at-arms, Thomas Rochester threw his arms around her; his harsh face streamed with tears.

“Typical emotional
rosbifs!
” Ash thumped his back. Josse and Michael piled in on top of her; and half the English lances with them.

Fifteen minutes later, her head pounding and half-blind with renewed pain, Joscelyn van Mander was shaking her hand with a grip that left red imprints on her fingers, his blue eyes brimming with wetness.

“Thanks to Christ!” he blurted. He looked around, at the mob of men-at-arms and archers and billmen pressing close, and the knights elbowing in; all trying to reach Ash. “Lady, thanks to Christ! You’re alive!”

“Not for much longer,” Ash said under her breath. She managed to free her hands. One arm went comradely over Euen Huw’s shoulder, and she rested her weight on the little Welshman; the other held Baldina’s hand, the red-headed whore not willing to be parted from her for a second, mopping her face with the hem of her kirtle.

Lowering his voice for confidentiality, and breathing warm wine-breath in her face, Joscelyn van Mander interrupted. “I’ve been speaking to the Viscount-Mayor on behalf of the company; we have trouble with allowing knights into the town—”

Oh,
you’ve
been speaking on behalf of the company, have you? Uh-huh.

Ash beamed at the Flemish knight. “I’ll sort it.”

She grinned around at the thronging faces.

“It’s boss!”

“She’s back!”

“So – where’s Geraint-the-Welsh-bastard?” Ash inquired, in a voice of piercing good humour.

Amid a roar of laughter, Geraint ab Morgan forced his way through the crowd in front of the command tent. The big man was stuffing his shirt into the back of his hose, between a set of broken points. His bloodshot blue eyes flinched, seeing Ash in the middle of a throng of delirious admirers.

Geraint shoved out with both arms to clear a space, and thumped down on both knees on the earth in front of her. “It’s all yours, boss!”

Ash grinned at the note of heartfelt relief in his voice. “Sure you don’t want to keep my job?”

At this point, she knew exactly the answer he would make. Geraint didn’t have any choice. She had chosen to come in by way of the menial members of the company, who had no chance, nor would ever have a chance, of competing for rank within it. Their genuine joy carried itself to the men, and that left the knights – given van Mander’s
volte face
– with nothing to do but forget any quite viable ambitions that had started to grow in her absence, any unauthorised promotions and demotions, and cheer her to the echo.

In broad Welsh, Geraint said, “Stuff your fucking job, boss, have it and welcome!”

“Lightbringer!” someone shouted behind her, and someone else, Jan-Jacob Clovet, she thought, bellowed, “Lioness!”

“Listen up!” Ash loosened her grip and held up both hands for silence. The camp’s failings could wait an hour, she decided. “Okay! I’m here, I’m back, and I’m going up to the chapel now. Anyone else who wants to give thanks for our deliverance from the darkness,
follow me!
”

She couldn’t make herself heard for sixty seconds. Eventually she stopped trying, thumped Euen Huw on the back, and pointed. They moved towards the camp’s main gate, at least four hundred strong; and Ash answered questions and asked for news and congratulated men recovering from wounds, all in one breath, under a staggering hot sky.

Being a chapel of Mithras,
¹⁰
it was naturally on separate land to the convent. Ash led the way uphill to the nearby copse, lost in the great crowd.

Trees in full leaf shuttered out the sun. Ash breathed a long sigh, not aware of how dazzled she had been by heat and light until now. She looked ahead, down the path, to where her officers waited outside the low, heavy masonry entrance: Floria, Godfrey, Robert and Angelotti, standing in sepia dappled shadow. She gave one very tiny nod of her head and saw them relax.

Floria fell in step with her as she came up to them; Godfrey on the other side. Angelotti bowed; he and Robert Anselm dropping back to let her pass.

Ash gave the two men a thoughtful glance over her shoulder.

Priests stood in the chapel entrance. She linked arms with Florian and Godfrey. Behind her, knowing there would be no room below, men-at-arms and archers were sinking to their knees on the leaf-mould, filthy men dappled with the sun’s light through the green leaves, pulling off helmets and hats, talking at the tops of their voices, and laughing. Junior priests of Mithras moved away from the entrance towards the groups of armed men, so that the service could be held here as well as below.

She fell in beside Godfrey, linking arms, going under the lintel and down the steps; exchanging the scent of dry woodland for the moist cold of the earth-walled passage. “So – what did you hear at court? Will the Duke fight?”

“There are rumours. No information I would trust. Surely he can’t ignore an army forty miles away, but— But I’ve never seen such magnificence!” Godfrey Maximillian spluttered. “He must have
three hundred
books here in his library!”