Ash: A Secret History (62 page)

That stopped most of them moving. Joscelyn van Mander stepped forward from the officers’ group, his movements uncertain. He glanced around. Ash saw him make eye-contact with Paul di Conti and half a dozen Flemish lance-leaders.

“Come here.” She beckoned, insistently. As soon as he came within reach, she bent down and seized his hand, shook it firmly, and turned to the men crowding in close, and held the Flemish knight’s arm up with hers. “This man! I am going to do something I haven’t done before—” she leaned forward and embraced the startled van Mander, her cheek against his rough cheek.

Deep voices whooped, in startlement and glee. Those men-at-arms and knights who had begun to drift off pushed back into the central ground. A thunder of questions arose.

“Okay!” Ash spun around, holding both hands up again, and getting silence. “I want to publicly acknowledge my debt to this man. Here and now! He’s done great things for the Lion Azure. The only thing is – there’s nothing else I can teach him!”

Flemish men-at-arms, deliriously proud, banged fists against breastplates, their faces alight. Van Mander’s broad features were caught halfway between pride and apprehension. Ash kept herself from grim laughter.
Get out of this one,
sonny…

Waiting while the noise died down again, she watched Paul di Conti’s face, the other lance-leaders. And Joscelyn van Mander’s expression.

Your officers don’t take orders from me now, they take orders from you. Therefore they are not my officers…

Therefore, they have no reason to be in my camp.

“Sir Joscelyn,” she said, strongly and formally, “there is a time for the apprentice and the journeyman to leave the master. I have taught you everything I know. It is no longer for me to command you. It is time now for you to lead your own company.”

She gauged the quality of the hush that followed; judged it satisfactory.

She swung her arm around, indicating the assembled troops. “Joscelyn, there are twenty lances, two hundred Flemish men here, who will follow you. I myself began the Lion Azure with no smaller number of men.”

“But I don’t want to leave the Lion Azure,” van Mander blurted.

Ash kept a smile on her face.

Of course you don’t. You’d rather stay as a significant number of men and officers in my company, and try and sway the way
I
run it. That’s why you want a weak leader – you get all the power and none of the responsibility.

Put you on your own and you’re a very small number of men, with no influence whatsoever, and the buck stops with
you.
Well, tough. I’ve had enough of this company-within-a-company. I’ve had enough of things I can’t trust – Stone Golem included. I certainly won’t take a split company into a battle in four days’ time…

Joscelyn van Mander began frowning. “I won’t leave.”

“I have—” Ash spoke loudly over him, getting their attention again. “I have spoken to my lord of Oxford, and my lord Olivier de la Marche, Duke’s Champion of Burgundy.”

A pause to let that sink in.

“If you wish, Sir Joscelyn, my lord Oxford will give you a contract with him. Or, if you want to be employed on the same terms as Cola de Monforte and his sons,” – she saw the famous names of these mercenaries hit home among the Flemish lances, and moreover, saw van Mander see it – “
then Charles, Duke of Burgundy, will employ you direct.
”

The Flemish knights roared. Looking around, Ash could already judge which of the Flemish men-at-arms would be sneaking back into the Lion Azure camp tonight under assumed names; and which English billmen would be speaking fluent Walloon under Olivier de la Marche’s direct command.

Ash shifted her weight back on to one heel. The upturned barrel was solid beneath her. She let the warm air blow over her face, and, with one finger to the mail standard at her neck, let a little air into the sweaty warmth of her neck. Joscelyn van Mander looked up, his lips pressed together into a thin line. She could make a guess at the words he was holding back – would have to hold back, now, or precipitate a public quarrel.

Which will have the same effect: he and his lances will have to leave.
Ash let her gaze travel over the heads of the men-at-arms, and the crowding support staff from the wagons; reckoning up with a practised eye how clean a split it might be.

Better five hundred men I can trust than eight hundred I’m doubtful about.

A hand tugged the skirt of her doublet. Ash looked down.

Richard Faversham, deacon, said in his high English voice, “Might we hold a celebratory mass, to pray for God’s good fortune on this newly made company of the Flemish knights?”

Ash surveyed Faversham’s face, boyish despite the black beard. “Yes. Good idea.”

She lifted a fist for attention, got it, and projected her voice out to the edges of the crowd to make this known. Her own attention remained on Joscelyn van Mander, huddled in a knot with his officers. She checked by line of sight where her escort was, where her dogs were, and the impassive expressions of Robert Anselm and Geraint and Angelotti. Nowhere in the packed mass of people could she pick out Florian de Lacey, or Godfrey Maximillian.

Fuck,
she thought, and turned back to find Paul di Conti raising, on a bill-shaft, a hastily tied livery coat – one of van Mander’s original ones: the Ship and Crescent Moon. This makeshift standard lifted into the air, the better part of the two hundred men that Ash had earmarked for this began to move towards it.

“Before you leave the camp,” she said, “we will hear mass, and pray for your souls, and for ours. And pray that we meet again, Mynheer van Mander, in four days, with the army of the Visigoths lying dead on the earth between us.”

As Deacon Faversham raised his voice to order things, Ash got down from the barrel, and found herself standing beside John de Vere, Earl of Oxford.

The Earl turned from a conversation with Olivier de la Marche. “More news, madam Captain. The Duke’s intelligence brings him word that the Visigoth lines are overstretched – their supplies liable to be cut off. There are Turkish troops a scant ten miles from here.”

“
Turks?
” Ash stared at the Englishman. He, composed, and with a glint of excitement in his faded blue eyes, murmured, “Yes, madam. Six hundred of the Sultan’s cavalry.”

“Turks. Fuck me.” Ash took two steps on the rough turf and straw, ignoring the crowd of men; swung around, her gaze elsewhere, calculating. “No, it makes sense! It’s exactly what I’d do, if I were the Sultan. Wait for the Carthaginian army to commit itself, take out their supply lines, get them cut up by us, and pick up the pieces… Does Duke Charles
really
think he won’t have a Turkish army on his doorstep, the morning after we beat the Visigoths?”

“He is anxious,” the Earl said gravely, “to have an army left, to take the field against them. He is calling his priests to him, now.”

Ash absently crossed herself.

“For the rest,” de Vere added, “the bulk of his army will march south, detachments moving today and tomorrow: we move with the rest of the mercenaries, the morning after next. Leave a base camp here. Get your men ready for a forced march. We will see, madam, how much of a commander you are without your saints.”

Twenty-four hours passed in chaos, herded into order by the Lion’s officers: neither Ash nor any man in the command group slept more than two hours.

Yellow clouds massed on the western horizon, nickering with summer lightning. Humid heat increased. Men scratched under constricting armour, swore; fights broke out over loading kit on to packhorses. Ash was everywhere. She listened to three, four, five different voices at a time, gave orders, responded, checked supplies, checked weapons; dealt with the provosts and gate-guards.

She held her final command meeting in the armoury tent, in the stink of charcoal, fires, soot, and the banging of munition harness being hammered out rough and ready.

“Green Christ!” Robert Anselm yelled, wiping his streaming forehead. “Why can’t it fucking rain?”

“You want to march this lot in bad weather? We’re
lucky!
”

The oppressiveness of the storm nonetheless made Ash’s head throb. She shifted, uncomfortably, as Dickon Stour strapped a new greave to her shins, the metal rough and black from the forge. She flexed her knee to the ninety-degree angle that that armour allowed.

“No, it’s cutting into the back of my knee.” She watched him undo roughly riveted straps. “Leave it: I’ve got boots, I’ll just wear upper leg harness and poleyns.”

“I got you a breastplate.” Dickon Stour turned, picked it up, held it out in black hands. “I’ve cut the arm-holes back?”

There is not time to forge a new harness. She turned, let him hold it against her, brought her arms together in front of her as if she gripped a sword. The breastplate’s edges rammed into her inner arms. “Too wide. Cut it back again. I don’t care about rolled edges on the metal, I just want something I can wear for four hours, that’ll deflect arrows.”

The armourer grunted discontentedly.

“Have the Great Duke’s men gone?”

“Moved out at dawn,” Geraint ab Morgan shouted, over the noise of arrowheads being hammered out, at production-line speed.

In these twenty-four hours, nearly twenty thousand men and supplies have gone south: it will take them until the feast-day of the saint to cover the forty miles between here and Auxonne, here and the Faris’s army. Empty dust, mud, and trodden common ground surrounds Dijon. The town and the country for miles around are stripped of supplies.

Summer thunder rumbled, all but inaudible under the sharp clangs of the armourers hammering out arrow-heads by the hundred. Ash thinks briefly of the road south. A few miles down the river valley and Dijon will be behind them: there is nothing but a few farms, villages in clearings in the forest, and great swathes of empty pasture, common land, and wilderness. An empty world.

“Okay – two hours and we ride.”

Travelling south, the land grows colder.

By evening, ten miles south of Dijon, Ash rode aside from the long column of men and packhorses, spurring her riding horse up on to a rise. Smudges of black rose from fields ahead.

“What’s that?” She leaned down to Rickard, as the boy ran up.

“They’re trying to save the vines!”

“
Vines?
”

“I asked this old guy? They had frost here last night. They’re making smoky fires in the vineyard, trying to keep the frost from forming tonight. Otherwise there’ll be no harvest.”

Two or three men-at-arms were riding out from the column: further orders needed. Ash spared one more glance for the hillsides and the vineyards, row upon long row of cropped vines clinging to the earth; and the distant figures of peasants moving between the smudge-fires.

“Damn; no wine,” she said. Turning her horse, she noted Rickard had four or five fresh coney-carcasses slung off his belt.

“This will be a bad year,” the Earl of Oxford remarked, bringing his barrel-chested gelding up with her.

“I’ll tell the lads we’re fighting for the wine harvest.
That’ll
make them kick Visigoth ass!”

The English Earl narrowed his gaze, staring at the countryside to the south. One church’s double spire marked an isolated village. For the rest, there was nothing but forests, uncultivated land; the road to Auxonne clearly marked by deep ruts, horse-droppings, trodden grass and the debris of an army passing.

“At least we shan’t ride astray,” Ash ventured.

“Twenty thousand is an unwieldy number of men, madam.”

“It’s more than she’s got.”

The evening sky darkened in the east. And now, perceptibly, darkened in the south as well: a shadow that did not fade with any day’s dawn, the closer they drew to Auxonne.

“So that is the Eternal Twilight,” the Earl of Oxford said. “It grows, the closer we come.”

On the eve of the twenty-first of August, the Lion encampment stretched under the eaves of the wildwood three miles west of Auxonne. Ash picked her way between makeshift shelters, and men queuing for the evening rations, being careful to seem cheerful whenever she spoke to anyone.

Henri Brant, the chief groom with him, walked up to ask, “Will we fight before tomorrow morning? Shall we start feeding the war-horses up in preparation?”

Even trained war-horses are still herbivores who need to constantly graze for strength. More than an hour’s fight, and they will lose stamina.

A thunder-purple sky was just visible through the oak leaves above her head; humid air moved against her skin. Ash wiped her face. “Assume the horses will need to be fit to fight any hour between dawn and nine, tomorrow. Start giving them the enriched feed.”

“Yes, boss.”

Thomas Rochester and the rest of her escort had fallen into conversation, under the trees, with Blanche and some of the other women. Ash breathed in, realised
No one is asking me questions! Amazing!
and then let out a sigh.

Shit. I preferred it when I didn’t have time to think.

And there’s still something to do.

“I’m not going far,” she said to the nearest man-at-arms. “Tell Rochester I’m in the physic-tent.”

Floria’s tent stood a few yards away. Ash stumbled over guy-ropes tethering it to tree-trunks, in the root-knotted soil, as the sky yellowed and the first big drops of cold rain dropped on to the leaves above.

“Boss?” Deacon Faversham said, emerging from the tent.

Concealing apprehension, Ash said, “Is the master surgeon there?”

“She’s inside.” The Englishman did not seem at all uncomfortable.

Ash nodded an acknowledgement, and ducked under the tent-flap he held up. Inside, by the light of a number of lanterns, she saw not an empty tent, as she had feared, but half a dozen men on pallets. Their conversation stopped abruptly, then picked up in undertones.

“We’re moving too fast.” Floria del Guiz, bandaging an arm fracture, didn’t look up. “In my office, boss.”

Ash, with a word to the injured men – two crushed foot injuries, from loading sword-boxes on to packhorses; one burn; one self-inflicted injury with a dagger, falling over when drunk – went through the inner, empty chamber of the pavilion, to the small curtained-off area at the far end.