Ash: A Secret History (127 page)

“Ah,
fuck
it!” Ash exclaimed. “Now I remember how much I
hate
bloody siege-engines. I like something I can get within axe-reach of!”

“No shit? I’ll tell Raimon the Carpenter that.” Robert Anselm: sardonic. At her inquiring look, he added, “Had to make someone Enguynnur,
¹²
with Tony here buggered off to Africa and likely dead.”

Doubled-up commands aren’t going to make anyone’s life easy…

“Christus Viridianus!” Ash shook her head. “So much for ‘safe inside Dijon’. We’re sitting smack in the gold!
¹³
Okay, brief me, before we get to this damn council – what’s been happening, Roberto?”

“Okay. Debrief.” Robert Anselm wiped his hand across his nose. There was a slight awkwardness about the movement that she guessed meant a wound taken during a Visigoth assault; knew he would not mention it himself.

“They bottled us up here after Auxonne. We could see the sky on fire, every night – burning towns, off in the boonies. First off they set up their engines and guns, gave us a major artillery barrage. Those big trebuchets? They had ‘em lobbing dead bodies in, dead horses, our own casualties from Auxonne. That was when they set up the flame-throwers opposite the three gates, ’bout fifteen to a gate, covering the walls and river. We blew up the south bridge; they started mining in from the north.”

“Didn’t miss a trick.” She blinked at the backs of the men and horses she followed, as they rode into a larger public square, where a slide of bricks blocked half the road.
I wish I couldn’t picture everything he says.

What’s wrong with me? This stuff never bothers me!

“Oh, they done their best to fuck us, all right,” Anselm said grimly. “Been bombarding us from the end of August, soon as they found they couldn’t take the city straight off. They couldn’t get no bombards and siege-engines over on the east of the Ouche river, ground’s too broken, so they stuck their artillery north and west of the city. Ploughed up as much of the place as we thought was in their range.”

He looked down, bringing his mount around a crater that gouged the flagstones. As they passed it, Ash saw the sandstone walls of a church were pocked with holes.

“This lot started shifting their people down into the south-east quarter of the city,” he added. “For safety. Well, about the beginning of October, the Goths let loose with everything they had – on the south-east quarter. Stone shot. Greek Fire. Fucking golem war-machines – ’
course
they were in range. They just wanted to give the civilians a chance to pack up tight in one area… The Burgundians lost a lot of troops too. Since then, it’s been ‘guess the target area, and where in the city do you want to sleep tonight?’”

“The company’s tower looks sound.”

“They’ve put the fighting men in places that’ll stand bombardment.” He looked across at her. “Then the human-wave assaults started on the walls. That’s been hot. The rag-heads are losing men – and they don’t
need
to. They’ve got two or three
fucking
big saps under way. Going for the north-west gate. Where you come in? Up there. You get down in the foundations of the gate-tower, and you can fucking
hear
them coming. They don’t need to keep piling up the wall at us!”

“How long has this place got?”

Confronted with a direct question, Robert Anselm didn’t answer. He looked at her with a slow smile. “By God, girl, you look different, but you don’t sound it. Carthage ’asn’t changed you that much.”

“’Course not. Long way to go to get a haircut, that’s all.”

They exchanged glances.

Strong winds snapped the Lion Affronté, over her head. The group of men riding around her speeded their pace a little, unconsciously. She didn’t counter it.

“How often
do
the Goths try and come over the walls?”

“Well, they ain’t relying on hunger and disease to break this city. It’s been fucking hot up at the north-west gate,” Anselm admitted. He lifted a hand, scarred as a smith’s or farmer’s hands, to signal the banner-bearer to slow to a less panicky pace. “You spoke to their boss. The rag-heads want Dijon. Never mind Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent. I reckon they must want the Duke – if he don’t die of his wounds, first. That means assaults. It’s been every few days. Some nights. Fucking
stupid
siege tactics.”

“Yeah. It is. But, looking out there, they must outnumber the Burgundians four or five to one…”

Searing cold air cut her face. Overhead, ragged clouds ran south on a high wind. A white façade – a guild hall? – was visible now, over the heads of the Burgundian escort. She didn’t recognise the area from the summer. The group of riders straggled to a halt. Looking ahead, Ash saw the leader of the Burgundians in fluent discussion with some civilian at the foot of the guild hall steps.

“Strong roof over our heads would be nice,” she murmured, quietening Orgueil. “Till some bugger drops a ton of rock on it, I suppose…”

The banner-bearer murmured, “Looks like we’re moving, boss.”

What had delayed them had evidently been some debate about ceremony: as they dismounted and entered the Viscount-Mayor’s hall, a herald’s clarion rang out under its painted, vaulted roof.

The nobles, merchants, and mayor of Dijon looked up from seats at a long, beech-wood table. The tapestried chamber filled with their voices. A flock of armed men and civilians sat, or stood. A few, Ash judged by the hennin headdresses lost in the crowd, must be female: merchant’s wives, traders on their own accounts, minor nobility. She took note of the liveries on the armed men with them. Not all Burgundian households.

“Frenchmen? Germans?” she murmured.

“Noble refugees,” Anselm said, with a wealth of cynicism.

“Who want to carry the war on against the Visigoths?”

“So they say.”

In full armour, with Chamberlain-Counsellor Ternant beside him, Olivier de la Marche stood up from the chair of state. He looked, Ash thought, tired and dirty and not at all like the man who had commanded the Duke of Burgundy’s army at Auxonne. She frowned.

“As the deputy of the Duke,” Olivier de la Marche said without preamble, “I welcome the hero of Carthage into our company. Demoiselle-Captain Ash, we bid you and your men welcome. Welcome!”

De la Marche bowed, formally, to her.

“The—” Ash kept her face expressionless with an effort.
Hero of Carthage!
She returned the bow; awkward; as ever, not knowing whether a curtsey would have been better. “Thank you, my lord.”

Seats towards at the head of the table were rapidly vacated. She sat down, muttering under her breath to her officers, “‘Hero’ of Carthage? ‘Hero’!”

Robert Anselm’s grim face looked twenty years younger as he snuffled back a laugh. “Don’t ask
me.
God only knows what rumours have been spread here!”

“Inaccurate ones, madonna!” Angelotti said softly.

Ash finally grinned. “So. A hero, by accident. Well – that makes up for the dozens of utterly splendid things I’ve done that nobody ever noticed!” She sobered. “Trouble with being a hero is, people expect things of you. I don’t think I do ‘hero’, guys.”

Anselm punched her shoulder, briefly and very fast. “Girl, I don’t think you have a choice!”

Thomas Rochester and the escort took up places behind them. Ash looked around, grateful for Angelotti’s evidently blisteringly expensive demi-gown; seeing every reaction from contempt to awe on the faces down the table. She beamed, broadly, at the man across the table, with the Viscount-Mayor of Dijon’s chain resting on his rich robes; a man bundled up in furs and velvets, who was glowering covertly at ‘the hero of Carthage’.

“Yes, madonna,” Angelotti said, before she could speak, “that is the man who would allow no merchant to give us credit, when we first arrived here from Basle and you were sick. The Viscount-Mayor, Richard Follo.”

“Called us ‘scruffy mercenaries’, didn’t he?” Ash beamed. “Which I doubt he repeated to John de Vere! Well, that’s Rota Fortuna
¹⁴
for you…”

Ash looked around at the assembly of Burgundians and the foreign nobles present, those who had precedence sitting at the long table, those who had not crowding the room to the walls behind them. An air of aggressive desperation, familiar to her from other sieges, hung about them. What friction there might be between lords, burghers, the Viscount-Mayor, and the people of Dijon itself, she decided she would not concern herself with at the moment.

“We bid you welcome,” de la Marche concluded, seating himself.

She caught his eye, thought,
Let’s throw the cat in the fire, then!
and spoke. “My lord, it’s taken me and my men more than two months to get here from Carthage. My intelligence isn’t current or good. I need to know, on behalf of my company – how strong is this city, and how much Burgundian territory is still holding out against the Visigoths?”

“Our lands?” de la Marche rumbled. “The Duchy, Franche-Comté, the north; Lorraine is not certain—”

A thin-faced noble hammered his hand on the table, turning to Olivier de la Marche. “You
see!
Our Duke should consider. I have lands in Charolais. Where is his loyalty to our King? If you would only seek King Louis’ protection—”

“—or call on the feudal ties he has with the Empire—”

Ash barely realised the second voice was speaking in German when the two Burgundian knights, almost in unison, finished: “And sign a peace with the King-Caliph!”

Anselm muttered, “Shit, why not? Everywhere else in Christendom has!”

The hundred or so men and women in the hall began to shout, in at least four different languages.

“
Silence!
”

De la Marche’s full-throated shout –
you could hear that over cannon!
Ash reflected – banged off the roof-beams and brought a shuffling quiet to the council hall.

“Jesus, what a dog-fight!” Ash muttered. She realised she had been heard, and felt her face heat. Fear – of the army outside, of a twin, of all the incestuous south; of all the lack of answers there or here – made her bad-tempered. She shrugged at de la Marche. “I’ll be frank. I wondered what Cola de Monforte and his boys were doing out there with the Visigoths. I’m starting to see why. Burgundy’s coming apart at the seams, isn’t it?”

Unexpectedly, the chamberlain-counsellor who sat beside de la Marche, Philippe Ternant, chuckled. “No, Demoiselle-Captain, no more than usual! These are family quarrels. They grow heated, when our father the Duke is out of the room.”

Ash, seeing Ternant’s watery blue eyes and age-spotted hands, weighed up his probable experience of Burgundian politics. She said politely, “As you say, messire,” and flicked a glance at Robert Anselm.
I need to take decisions! I thought – if we got here – at least we’d have a breathing-space
—

“What is Burgundy?” de la Marche demanded, his weather-beaten face turning towards Ash. “Demoiselle-Captain, what are we? Here in the south, we’re two Burgundies: both the Duchy and the County. Then the conquered province, Lorraine. All the northern lands: Hainault, Holland, Flanders…
¹⁵
What our Duke does not owe as a French fief to King Louis, he owes as an Imperial fief to the Emperor Frederick! Demoiselle, we speak French in the two Burgundies, Dutch and Flemish in Flanders, and Imperial German in Luxembourg! Only one thing holds us together – one man – Duke Charles. Without him, we would collapse again into a hundred quarrelling properties of other kingdoms.”
¹⁶

Philippe Ternant looked amused. “My lord, much as I bow to your military prowess, let me say that a single chancellor, chancery, and system of tax binds us equally—”

“And that would last
how
long, without Duke Charles?” Olivier de la Marche’s hand came down flat on the wooden table, with a bang that startled all of the crowded room. “The Duke unifies us!”

A flicker of green cloth: Ash caught sight of an abbot, his face hidden from her in the crush of bodies further down the guild hall.

“We are the ancient German people of Burgundia,” the abbot said, still invisible; “and we have been the Kingdom of Aries, when Christendom was divided into Neustria and Austrasia. We are older than the Valois Dukes.”

His deep voice reminded her briefly of Godfrey Maximillian: she was unaware of the sharp crease that appeared in the flesh between her eyebrows.

“Names do not matter, my lord de la Marche. Here in the forests of the south, there in the cities of the north, we are one people. From Holland to Lake Geneva,
we are one.
Our lord the Duke is the embodiment of that, as his father was before him; but Burgundy will outlast Charles of Valois. Of that I am certain.”

Into the hush, Ash found herself saying thoughtfully, “Not if someone doesn’t do something about the Visigoth army out there!”

Faces turned towards her; white discs in the sunlight that now streamed in through the ancient stone windows.

“The Duke unites us.” The Viscount-Mayor, Follo, spoke up. “And therefore, since he is here – the north will come south, and rescue us.”

It will?
Restraining a sudden, blind hope, Ash turned towards de la Marche. “What’s the news from the north?”

“The last message spoke of fighting around Bruges; but that news was a month old when it arrived. The armies of the Lady Margaret may have won a victory by now.”

“Will they come? Just for one town under siege?”

“Dijon is not merely ‘one town under siege’,” the chamberlain-counsellor Philippe Ternant said, looking at Ash. “You stand in the heart of Burgundy, here; in the duchy itself.”

“My Duke,” Olivier de la Marche said, “wrote, three years ago, that God has instituted and ordained princes to rule principalities and lordships so that the regions, provinces and peoples are joined together and organised in union, concord and loyal discipline.
¹⁷
Since the Duke is here – they will come.”