Ash: A Secret History (53 page)

“God’s bollocks!”

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’, shall I?”

They were escorted on down the great hall. There was more: paintings set in niches, tapestries of great hunting expeditions hung from the walls, but Ash couldn’t take it in. Above it all that noble architecture soared up, ogee window and clustered columns, to the clear glass windows that disclosed the other roofs of the ducal palace of Dijon, and the fine, white-gold finials of stone piercing up towards the afternoon sky.

A flutter of doves flurried past the glass. Ash dropped her gaze, halting, her heels trodden on painfully by Dickon de Vere. Both escorts – hers, and de Vere’s – parted, letting the other brothers come through to stand beside the Earl of Oxford. Godfrey kept to the back, his face calm, his eyes giving away nothing of what he might feel, confronted by so many churchmen, as well as so many nobles and their ladies.

Ash stared around, could see no Visigoth robes or mail anywhere.

John de Vere knelt, and his party also; Ash scraping down on to one knee and dragging her hat off in haste.

A youngish man in white puff-sleeved doublet and hose sat on the ducal throne, his head bent, conferring with another man at his elbow. Ash saw his somewhat lugubrious face, and black shoulder-length hair cut straight across the forehead, and realised this must be him: Charles, Duke of Burgundy, nominal vassal of Louis XI, more splendid than most kings.
²

“An inauspicious day, then?” the Duke said, quite clearly, as if unconcerned that his private conversations might be overheard.

“No, sire.” The man at his elbow bowed. He wore a long, azure demi-gown, his arms out of the hanging sleeves, and his hands busy with papers marked with diagrams of wheels and boxes. “Say, rather, an opportunity to avenge an old wrong.”

The Duke signalled him to move away, and leaned back, looking down from the dais at the kneeling Englishmen. The sole man in white, he stood out among his court for simplicity. Ash thought,
Signifies a Virtue – probably his day for representing Nobility or Chivalry or Chastity. I wonder what the rest of us are?

His voice, when he spoke, was pleasant. “My lord of Oxenford.”

“Sire.” De Vere stood up. “I have the honour to introduce to you my mercenary captain, whom your Grace wished to see. Ash.”

“Sire.” Ash stood up. Behind her, Thomas Rochester and Euen Huw wore the Lion Azure livery; Godfrey gripped a Psalter. She smoothed her hair on the left side, assuring herself that it covered the healing injury there.

The rather dour young man on the ducal throne, who could not yet have been thirty, leaned forward with one hand on the arm of it, and stared at Ash with eyes so dark as to be black. A faint colour touched his pale cheeks. “You tried to kill me!”

This was not an occasion to smile, Ash guessed, the Valois Duke of Burgundy not looking particularly susceptible to being charmed. She schooled her face and her bearing to modesty and respect, and remained silent.

“You have a notable warrior there, de Vere,” the Duke remarked, and turning his head away from her, spoke briefly to the woman at his side. The Duke’s wife, Ash noted, did not take her eyes off John de Vere, Earl of Oxford.

“Perhaps,” Margaret of York spoke up in a clear voice, “it’s time this man told us why he takes advantage of your hospitality, Sire.”

“In time, lady.” The Duke beckoned two of his advisors, spoke to them, and then returned his gaze to the group in front of him.

Ash weighed up the cost of the Duke’s simplicity: his demi-gown was buttoned, and with diamond buttons, and the seams of the shoulders looked to be sewn with gold thread. And all the rest of the seams of his garments, sewn with the finest gold thread… In the blue sea of his court, he gleamed like snow with the faintest tinge of winter sun gilding it; and the grip of his bollock dagger was decorated also with gold, and with pearls.

“It is our intention,” the Duke said, “to discover what you know of this Faris, maîtresse Ash.”

Ash swallowed, and managed to speak in a voice that could be heard. “By now, everybody knows what I know, sire. She has three major armies, of which one lies just beyond your southern border. She fights inspired by a voice, which she claims comes from a Brazen Head or Stone Golem device, across the seas in Carthage, and,” Ash said, holding to her line of thought with difficulty under Charles’s stare, “I have myself seen her appear to speak to it. As to the rest of it: the Goths have burned Venice and Florence and Milan because they don’t
need
them – there’s an endless supply of men and materials being shipped across the Med, and when I left, it was still coming.”

“Is this Faris a knight of honour, a Bradamante?”
³
Duke Charles asked.

Ash judged it time to make herself both less spectacular and more human in his eyes. Rather bitterly, she replied, “A Bradamante wouldn’t have stolen and kept my best armour, Sire!”

A subdued merriment made itself felt in the court, dying out as soon as it became apparent that Duke Charles was not smiling. Ash held his gaze, the bright black eyes and almost ugly face – certainly a Valois! – and added, “As for knights, heavy cavalry doesn’t seem to be their strong point, sire. No tournaments. They have medium cavalry, huge numbers of foot-soldiers, and golems.”

Duke Charles glanced at Olivier de la Marche, and the big man, with a nod for Ash, loped up the dais steps in a very uncourtly manner. The Duke whispered in his ear. He nodded, dropped to one knee to kiss the Duke’s hand, and strode off. Ash didn’t turn her head to watch, but guessed he was actually leaving the hall.

“These dishonourable men of the south,” Charles said, more publicly, “dare to put out the sun above Christian men, and shroud us in the same penance as their own Eternal Twilight. They have not expiated the sin of the Empty Chair. We – under God, we are not sinless! But we do not deserve to have the sun which is the Son taken from us.”

Ash untangled that one after a glance at Godfrey. She nodded hastily.

“Therefore—” the Duke of Burgundy broke off at an insistent mutter from Margaret, seated beside him on a smaller throne. A short and, Ash thought, rather sharp exchange ended with the Valois Duke leaning back magnanimously. “If it eases your mind, we will consent to your asking him. De Vere! The Lady Margaret wishes a word with you.”

Slightly above Ash’s head, George de Vere whispered, “That’ll be the first time!”, and Dickon snickered.

The English noblewoman gazed down at de Vere, his brothers and Beaumont, ignoring Ash and her priest and banner. “Oxford, why have you come here? You know you cannot be welcome. My brother, King Edward, hates you. Why do you follow me here?”

“Not you, madam.” John de Vere, equally blunt, gave her no noble title. “Your husband. I have a question to ask him, but since you have an army on your borders, my question will wait for a better time.”

“No! Now. You will ask it now!”

Ash, aware that so many currents ran deep under this particular river, thought that Margaret of York might not ordinarily be a shrill woman, or an impetuous one.
But something’s biting her. Biting her hard.

“It is not the time,” the Earl of Oxford said.

Charles of Burgundy leaned forward, frowning. “If my Duchess asks, it is certainly time for you to answer, de Vere. Courtesy is a knightly virtue.”

Ash shot a glance at de Vere. The Englishman’s lips were pressed tightly together. As she watched, his face relaxed, and he gave a chuckle.

“Since your husband wishes it, madam Margaret, I will tell you. His Grace King Henry, sixth of that name, being dead and leaving no close heir of his body,
⁴
I have come to ask the next Lancastrian claimant to the English throne to raise an army, so that I may put a legitimate and honest man there, instead of your brother.”

And I thought
I
could be tactless…

Under cover of the outrage and shocked comments, Ash glanced back down the mirror-stone tiled floor, judging the distance to the great doors and the Ducal Guard.

Great. The Visigoth Faris puts me in prison. I get here. I get hired by de Vere. De Vere gets us all put in prison. This is not how I wanted things to be!

A tiny ripping noise sounded: the edge of Margaret of York’s veil knotted and torn between her clenched fingers. “My brother Edward is a great king!”

Oxford’s voice cracked out loud and hard enough to make Ash jump.

“Your brother Edward had my brother Aubrey’s bowels torn from his body, while he lived, and his cock cut off and burned in front of his eyes. A Yorkist execution. Your brother Edward had my father’s head cut off, with no ounce of English law behind him, since he has no claim to the throne!”

Margaret got to her feet. “Our claim is better than yours!”

“But your claim, madam, is not as good as your husband’s!”

Silence dropped, like a blade coming down. Ash became aware she was holding her breath. All the de Vere brothers stood upright, hands to scabbards; and the Earl of Oxford himself glared, like a war-weathered bird of prey, at the woman on the throne. His pale gaze moved to Charles, and he inclined his head stiffly.

“You must know, Sire, that being as you are the great-grandson of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster, then the nearest living Lancastrian heir to the English throne is now – yourself.”
⁵

We’re dead.

Ash clasped her hands behind her back, keeping her fingers away from the hilt of her second-favourite sword with an effort powered by sheer fear.

We’re dead, we’re done for, our ass is grass; sweet Christ, Oxford, couldn’t you just for once keep your mouth
shut
when someone asks you for the truth?

She was astonished to open her mouth and hear herself say, quite loudly, “And if that doesn’t work, I suppose we can always invade Cornwall…”

An instant of appalled silence, so short it was only long enough to stop the breath in her throat, broke with a shout of laughter from a hundred voices; this a fraction of a second after Duke Charles of Burgundy smiled. A very wintry, tiny smile; but nonetheless, he smiled.

“Noble Duke,” Ash said quickly, “the French Dauphin had his
Pucelle.
I’m sorry I can’t manage one of those for you – I’m a married woman, after all. But I pray that I also have the favour of God, as Joan did; and if you give me, not troops, but some of the wealth of your army, then I’ll try and do for you what she did for France. Kill your enemies, Sire.”

“And what will your seventy-one lances do for Burgundy, maîtresse?” the Duke asked.

Ash flicked up an eyebrow, having not had the exact numbers from Anselm’s muster that long herself. She kept her head raised, aware that her face and hair were to some degree speaking for her, and that she would have been far more impressive in full harness. “It would be better not in open court, Sire.”

The Duke of Burgundy clapped his hands. Clarions sounded, the choirs at the sides of the great hall burst into song, ladies rose, men in rich pleated short gowns made their exits, and Ash – and Godfrey, and the de Veres – were ushered into a chapel or side room.

Quite some time later, Charles of Burgundy came in, a handful of attendants with him.

“You’ve upset the Queen of Bruges,” he remarked to Oxford, waving his staff away.

Ash, bewildered, glanced at Oxford and the Duke.

“My wife, being governor of that city, is sometimes called its queen,” the Valois Duke said, lowering himself into a chair. His demi-gown, unbuttoned, showed a gold-embroidered pourpoint beneath, and a drawstring-neck shirt of linen so fine it was hardly visible. “She has no love for you, my lord Earl of Oxford.”

“I never thought she did,” Oxford said. “You forced me to that one, Sire.”

“Yes.” The Duke switched his prim gaze to Ash. “You have an interesting fool. She is young,” he added.

“I can command my men, Sire.” Ash, uncertain whether to cover her head, which marks respect in a woman, or uncover it, as a man does, settled for standing bareheaded, her hat in her hand. “You already have the best army in Christendom. Send me to do what your armies won’t – take out the heart of the Visigoth attack.”

“And where does that heart lie?”

“In Carthage,” Ash said.

Oxford said, “It’s not lunatic, Sire. Only audacious.”

The walls of this chamber were set about with tapestries, in which the Burgundian Heraldic Beast, the Hart, shone white and gold through the wild wood; pursued by hunters and worshippers. Ash shifted, hot in the late afternoon sun through the windows, and met the fiat, gold-embroidered stare of the Hart, the Green Cross worked finely between its many-tined antlers.

“You are an honest man, and a good soldier,” the Duke of Burgundy observed, as a page served him, and then Oxford, with wine. “Otherwise I would suspect this for some Lancastrian device.”

“I am only devious on the field of battle,” the Englishman said. Ash heard amusement in his tone; could see it pass Charles of Burgundy by.

“Then, do we have here the proof? That this ‘Stone Golem’ is where they claim – over the sea, far from us, and yet speaking to this Faris?”

“I believe that we do, Sire.”

“That would be much.”

So much depends on this man, Ash suddenly thought. This ugly, black-browed boy, with twenty thousand men and more guns than the Visigoths: so much depends on his decisions.

“I have the Faris’s blood, Sire,” she said.

“So my advisors tell me. They tell me,” Charles added, “that the likeness is remarkable. God send you are good, maîtresse, and not some device of the devil.”

“My priest can answer you best, Sire.”

Waved forward by her hand, Godfrey Maximillian said, “Your Grace, this woman hears mass and takes communion, and has made confession to me these past eight years.”

The Duke of Burgundy said, “Prince as I am, I cannot silence rumour’s tongues. It begins to be said that the Visigoth general’s voice is a devilish engine, and that we have no defence against it. I do not know, Lord Oxford, how long your condottiere’s name will be kept out of this.”