Ash: A Secret History (98 page)

“I SAID
DON’T
FUCKING SHOOT ME YOU ASSHOLES!”

A cautious voice called, “Mark? That you?”

A second voice cut in: “That’s not Tydder. Who goes there?”

“Who do you fucking think?” Ash bawled, still in the Franco-Flemish dialect that was the common patois of the camp.

A silent pause – which brought Ash’s heart up into her mouth, dried out her chest with breathlessness, fear, hope – and then the second voice, rather small, and distinctively Welsh, called uncertainly, “…Boss?”

“Euen?”

“
Boss!
”

“I’m coming in! Don’t be so fucking trigger-happy!”

She trotted up the alley towards the light. Six or seven men with weapons filled the width of it: men in European-style steel helmets, and with razor-edged bills, and swords, and two with crossbows, one frantically winching as if to prove he had not fired his bolt.

“Negligent discharge,” Ash grinned in passing, and then: “Euen!” She reached out, grabbing the small dark man’s hands and wringing them. “Thomas – Michel – Bartolemey—”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Euen Huw said reverently.

“Boss!” Euen’s red-haired 2IC, Thomas Morgan, crossed himself, with the hand that did not hold a spanned crossbow.

“
Shit,
man!” The others – tall, broad-shouldered men with hard, hunger-marked faces – began to grin at her and make comments among themselves. They were standing among neatly piled heaps of wine-casks, velvet gowns, and heavy jute sacks, Ash noted; their shining faces turning to her, plain wonder on their expressions. “Would you ever fucking
believe
it!”

“It’s me,” Ash said, turning back to the wiry, dark Welshman.

Euen Huw was not a particularly prepossessing sight: his jack was faded, salt-stained under the intermittent light from the pierced iron lantern; and an old blackened bandage was wrapped around his left hand and wrist. His other hand grasped the hilt of a riding sword, a ridiculous forty inches of razor-sharpened steel.

“Christ, I might have known it, boss,” Euen said. “Straight out of the middle of a fucking earthquake, you come. Right. What do we do now?”

“Why are you asking me?” Ash inquired wryly, surveying their dirty larcenous faces. “Ah, that’s right – I’m the boss! I knew there was some reason.”

“Where you
been,
boss?” Michel, the other crossbowman, asked.

“In a Visigoth nick. But.” Ash grinned. “Here I am. Okay, this ain’t a fucking social banquet. Tell me. Who’s here, why are we here, and what the fuck is going on?”

Boom!

That gun was close enough that the ground twanged under her feet. Ash fingered her ear with a pained expression, watching them watch her do it, seeing them grin; judging how much strain was also in their expressions, how most of them were losing the momentary amazement of her presence, falling back into the old habit of being commanded by her:
this is Ash, she’ll tell us what to do, get us through this.
In the adrenalin-rush of combat, they are not even surprised: impossible things happen all the time in battle.

In the middle of the heart-city of the Visigoth Empire, surrounded by enemy people and enemy troops—

“What dumb fuck brought you guys here?”

The crossbowman, Michel, shoved a suspicious sack aside with his boot. “Mad Jack Oxford, boss.”

“Oh my God. Who’s with the guns?”

“Master Captain Angelotti,” Euen Huw answered. “He’s up there trying to bust into this shit-rich lord-
amir
‘s house – ’course,
his
house couldn’t fall down like the rest of them, could it? No chance!”

“
Which
lord-
amir
– no, tell me later. What are you motherfuckers doing out here?”

“We’re a picket, boss, wouldn’t you know it? Waiting for all them little rag-heads to turn up and try to mince us into the ground.”

His sardonic sarcasm got answering grins from his lance. Ash let herself chuckle.

“I’m just sorry for the Goths! Okay, stick to it. And watch it! You’re in the middle of an overturned hive here.”

“Don’t we know it!” Euen Huw grinned.

“Mark Tydder’s body’s down one of those alleys, you – Michel – go scout it; then you and another man bring him back, if the road’s clear. We don’t leave our own—”

A sudden image bit into her mind. Godfrey, his green robe black with water and filth, and the white splinters of bone above his tanned brow. Her eyes stung.

“—if we can help it. If any troops show up, report to me fucking fast. I’ll be with HQ.”

Euen Huw said cheerfully, “Boss, you
are
HQ.”

“Not until I know what the hell Oxford thinks he’s doing! You.” She indicated the redheaded lance-second, Thomas Morgan. “Lead me to Oxford and Angelotti. And you guys here,
close that fucking lantern up!
I could see you a mile off! None of you have got the brains of a field mouse, but that’s no reason you shouldn’t make it home – just follow my orders! Okay, let’s go! Move it!”

As she moved off, Thomas Morgan’s tall broad back blocking the hastily closed lantern, she heard a man mutter, “Shit, lil’ scarface is back…”

“Too fucking right,” Ash growled.

They’re alive!

With the lantern gone and the cloud-cover thick, it was impossible to see anything but blackness, but there were voices ahead of her now, and the shouts of men sponging gun-breeches and loading them: she tucked her mittened fingers under the back of Thomas Morgan’s belt and followed his uncertain progress as he tapped his way down the cobbles with the shaft of his bill, the wood knocking against spilled masonry and rubble.

A coldness crept into her belly. Her mind put nightmare pictures on the darkness in front of her: these men, men that she knows, trapped in these streets, trapped inside the middle of a walled city – a walled city
within
a walled city – and all of Carthage outside, the
amirs
, their household troops, the King-Caliph’s army, the merchants and the workers and the slaves, each an enemy—

What fucking dangerous
lunatic
brought them here? Ash wondered bleakly, furiously. How do I get them
out
of here?

And do what we have to do, first?

Thomas Morgan stumbled, muttered something obscene, clattered his bill-shaft against a splintered masonry block, and stepped to the right. She kept her footing and followed.

How
many
of my guys are here now?
What the fuck is Oxford thinking of?
Just because we’re mercenaries doesn’t mean you can stick us out as a forlorn hope and leave us to die – well, maybe
he
thinks it does – I thought better of him—

The quality of the air changed.

Glancing up, Ash saw how the clouds, shredding, opened on bright stars: the constellations of the Eternal Twilight. Quickly she lowered her gaze. Her night vision took enough from the starlight to let her see where she stepped, drop her hand from Thomas Morgan’s belt, and focus on the corner of the blank-walled house in front of her.

Way down on her right, ahead, the building’s massive iron-banded main gates hung splintered and blasted – cannon-fire, not quake damage. Gun-crews crowded the corner here, behind a cluster of pavises.
¹
Two swivel guns
²
had their supporting spikes jammed down into the dirt where the quake had split the cobblestones. Men, swearing bitterly and shouting; were trying to shoot fifty yards cross-wise down the alley and blast the gates open – no room to get cannon up close, opposite the House gate, not in an alley no more than ten feet wide.

More men came running in, pavises going up, looted wooden doors piled as makeshift defences. A silent flight of bolts impacted ten yards from her feet, blasting up splinters of stone. Antonio Angelotti’s voice –
Angeli!
Ash grinned, delighted at the recognition, his presence – screamed a beautiful obscenity. On the House roof, men briefly moved: shooting down: Visigoths, Visigoth House guards, this house—

Ash felt a sudden stab of memory. Genuine? Illusory?
I think we’ve come
north, I’ve come all the way back from the King-Caliph’s palace, this is how I was brought into Leofric’s house – this
is
House Leofric
—!

Realisation hit her.

Oh shit. I know why Oxford’s here.

He’s doing what I said
I
was going to do.

He’s here for the Stone Golem.

Thomas Morgan bellowed, “Here they are, boss,” in a tone that suddenly held doubt.

Ash trotted past him, into the alley that dead-ended on her right, lit with lanterns and torches; all filled up with men and their shouting, men running, two more swivel guns commanding the alley directly in front of House Leofric, having their breeches frantically sponged and shot rammed home. A tall, fair-haired man in Italian doublet and demi-gown crouched by the gun-crews, shouting – Angelotti – and a dozen other familiar faces: the deacon Richard Faversham, a skinny blond man with his hands wrist-deep in a sack of bandages, behind a big pavise and two billmen – Florian de Lacey, Floria del Guiz – and beyond her a massive cluster of men in breastplates and leg-harness, with maces and arquebuses, and Lion livery – and a young corn-haired knight in half-armour, Dickon de Vere; and John de Vere himself taking off his sallet to wipe his forehead—

She has a split-second to study them while they, busy in ordered chaos, ignore her arrival. It puts a curdle of panic into her bowels: to be facing men, soldiers, who ignore her as if she isn’t there – this is the commander’s dread of authority (that spider-thread) disappearing like mist. Who is she, that anyone should do what she says?

The person who persuaded them off their farms and into this business. Into many wet mornings on grassy blood-soaked hills, many nights in burning towns sprawling with mutilated bodies. The person whom they will think can get them through this alive.

Two or three nearer heads turned, Thomas Morgan’s visible presence penetrating their attention. One of the gunners put down his worm, staring; another man dropped the breech of the second gun. Three Flemish billmen stopped talking and gaped.

Antonio Angelotti said a foul word in utterly musical Italian.

Floria slowly stood up, her face in the flaring light broken with hope, with amazement, with a sudden wrenching fear.

“Get down in
cover!
” Ash bawled at her.

Ash nevertheless remained in the open. She reached up and unbuckled the strap of Mark Tydder’s sallet, easing it off her vulnerable head. Her cropped silver hair stood up in spikes, sweaty despite the freezing air.
Even with the risk
of some bastard getting me with a composite bow, they have to see me.

“
Fuck,
” someone said, awe-struck.

Ash tucked the sallet under her arm. The metal was freezing, even through the leather palms of her mittens. Lantern light fell on the livery tabard that she wore, black and stiff with dried blood at the throat, the Lion Azure plain across her chest. Her hands, muffled in too-large mail mittens, and her feet in too-large boots, gave her the appearance of a child in adult clothing. A tall skinny child with three scars standing out dark against the skin of her frozen white cheeks.

And then she moved, put her other fist on her hip, to be recognisably their Ash, Captain Ash, condottiere: a woman unlawfully dressed as a man, in doublet and hose, hair cut short as a serf’s, face gaunt with hunger and pain, but with a shining grin that lit up her eyes.

“It’s the
boss!
” Thomas Morgan called, his voice shaky.

“ASH!”

She couldn’t tell who shouted: they were all moving by then, careless of the armed household a few yards away; men running, shouting the news to their lance-mates, Angelotti reaching her first, tears streaming down his powder-black features, throwing his arms around her; Floria shoving him bodily aside to grab her arms, stare into her face, all questions; and then a throng: Henri de Tréville, Ludmilla Rostovnaya, Dickon Stour, Pieter Tyrrell, and Thomas Rochester with the Lion banner, Geraint ab Morgan in deep-voiced Welsh amazement: all piling on to her, mailed hands thumping her back, voices shouting, everyone too loud for her to make herself heard:

“Shit, look what happens to you motherfuckers when I leave you alone for five minutes! Where the fuck is Roberto?”

“Dijon!” Floria, a tall dirty-faced man to all appearances, grabbed at her arm. “
Is
it you? You look older. Your hair— You’ve been prisoner here? You escaped?” And at Ash’s nod of agreement: “Our Lady! You didn’t have to walk back in on this. You could have walked away. One man could make it out of here alone—”

She’s right.
Ash felt a startled realisation. I stood a much better chance of slipping away alone. I didn’t have to come up this street and put myself in the middle of a – very small – bunch of armed lunatics.

But it didn’t occur to me not to.

There was no regret in her mind, not even wonder; all the amazement was on Floria’s face. The disguised woman surgeon touched Ash’s cold, scarred cheek. “Why would I expect anything different? Welcome to the madhouse!”

I’ll tell her about Godfrey later,
Ash decided; and lifted her head and looked around at the circle of faces, the men sweating despite the chill air, weapons unsheathed, two men further away climbing down from a high wall.

“Get me my officers!”

“Yes, boss!” Morgan ran.

We’re in one of the alleys that run around three sides of House Leofric to the end of the cliff, Ash thought with a minute and detailed realisation. The fourth side is the Citadel wall itself.

She looked down the cross-alley.

I am looking north. To the Citadel wall. Over that wall – and a fucking long way down – is Carthage harbour.

In the torch and lantern light she cannot be sure: there may be a glow beyond the wall, and noise, far down below.