Ash: A Secret History (134 page)

“ON ME!” she yelled. Rickard’s face appeared in front of her, in the press of people. She shoved the Lion Affronté into his hands; grabbing at the short axe he carried for her. Shouldering her way against the crowd, shouting into men’s faces, she sensed the slowest possible hesitation.

“
Follow
me!”

Further down towards the White Tower, the brattice was alight; and the stone surface of the parapet alive with unquenchable flames of spilled Greek Fire. The nearest brattice was untouched. Faintly above the shrieking and yelling, she heard noise from below; switched to a two-handed grip on the axe, and put all her weight into shoving two archers and a gunner’s mate back out of her way.

“Bring that fucking flag!” she snarled at Rickard, not stopping to see what the white-faced boy did; slammed her gauntlet into the back of one man’s helmet, and cleared herself a way up into the embrasure.

“
On me, you fucking sons of bitches!
”

She felt her own voice come out muffled, the sound reflected back by the wood and hide roof of the brattice; had a second to think,
Jesu Christus! I wish I could have worn a bevor, or even a sallet with a visor!,
and flipped the shaft of the poleaxe over in her hand. It slapped home into the linen palms of her gauntlets.

A face appeared up through the hole in the wooden hoarding in front of her.

In a conscious irony entirely separate from the combat-awareness of her mind, she thought,
What I’d give to be able to talk to the
machina rei militaris
right now.

The wooden shaft of the axe fitted smoothly and familiarly into her grip: left hand forward, right hand in support. She let the axe-head go back, then thrust forward with the shaft, and slammed the butt-spike into the Visigoth auxiliary’s face.

The point skidded off his helmet’s nasal bar.

The man’s bearded mouth opened: shock or anger. He roared. He thrust himself up on the top of a scaling ladder, invisible beneath the planks of the brattice, hauling his sword through the gap.

She let the weapon’s momentum carry her body forward a step. Breath coming hard in her throat, whole body tensed in anticipation of his blow, she mentally screamed at herself
I’m not moving fast enough!
and let the axe swing round and back and over her head, sliding her right hand down to the bottom of the axe-shaft to join her left, accelerating the cutting edge of the weapon over and down. Four pounds of metal, but moving in a tight four-foot arc. She slammed the blade into his face as he looked up.

A spray of wet speckled her arms. She felt the edge bite: couldn’t hear his screaming for the shouts behind her, the clash of edged steel, the cracks of arquebuses, and the sound of other men shrieking. Not a mortal wound, not enough to put a man down—

A spear-point jabbed up between her feet. It caught in the roughly sawn planks: jammed.

She leaped back. One of her heels caught on the edge of the embrasure behind her. The poleaxe flew up in her grasp, ripped the soaked hides that roofed the brattice as she fell backwards, and sat down hard in one of the crenellations. The impact jolted her whole spine.

Quietly, without fuss, and from a sitting position, she lifted up the axe and slammed the butt-spike forward again, punching a hole just below the brow of the steel helmet of the first man.

His eyes stayed open, fixed on the planks, as he fell forward, half-in, half-out of the gap. Thick, dark-red blood and brain-matter came out with the spike as she twisted it free.

No footsteps behind her, no banner, no shout from Rickard. A shrieking, bellowing clamour from below—

For all I know, I’m alone up here now—

“
On me, for fuck’s sake!
”

The spear-point levered itself out of the planking from below. The dead body jerked, the Visigoth soldier being pulled down by others on the ladder beneath; she heard them shrieking orders, swearing. Unaware that she was very grimly smiling, she got back up on to her feet.

“Boss!” Euen Huw leaped over the battlements and slammed into her side. He staggered. Blood soaked his hose from thigh to knee.

“Oh, thank fuck! Where’s Rickard? Where’s my banner? Ludmilla, get your archers up here! It’s a fucking bird-shoot!” Ash slapped the shoulders of Huw’s infantry and Rostovnaya’s archers, ten or fifteen men piling on to the brattice now, feeding them on past her. She swung herself over the dead man by gripping a beam above her, and ran down to the next gap. Her boots echoed on the planking.

As she loped, feet shifting sideways, she kept her back to the safety of the wall, head switching rapidly from side to side, trying to watch for an attack from any quarter. The tingling vulnerability of exposed, unarmoured thighs, shins, forearms, elbows; all of this fires her to extreme perceptiveness, extreme efficiency.

“
Here!
Get the ones below, on the ladder!”

An archer, whose greasy ringlets and unshaven face shone with sweat, loped up and ducked his head down through the gap in front of her. Within seconds, he bawled at his pavise-mate for more shafts; stood astride the gap, drawing his bow with difficulty in the confined space, shot down at the foot of the siege ladder, fifty feet below.

Two crossbowmen rapidly elbowed him out of the way: more room for their weapons in the gap.

Ash bent her head for a quick squint out through an archery port in the planks.
If they can storm
—
If they come over the wall, it’s all irrelevant: voices, everything!

A constant
thunk!
of bolts and shafts echoed along the brattice now; points hitting wood and stone. Her body tensed against the searing rush of Greek Fire.
No, not while their own men are scaling the walls
—

The hook of a scaling ladder thumped into another brattice, further along the wall; she had a bare second to see that the men with swords and axes beginning to swarm up it were not Visigoth auxiliary troops, but men with Crescent Moons on blue livery jackets.

She’s seen my banner on this section of the wall – this is deliberate – sending men we’ve fought beside – a psychological attack: getting Frankish mercenaries to kill each other—

“Look who it ain’t!” Euen Huw bellowed, slamming his wiry body between the wall and her. Over his shoulder as he ran on, he bawled, “Been having it easy, ’aven’t they? See about that!”

A glance back along the hoarding showed her Angelotti’s brilliant curls under the edge of a sallet, his heavy-bladed falchion rising and falling in an appalling, close-combat press of bodies jammed together. His left arm hung, bleeding, buckler gone somewhere. His men crowded that side: warding him.

Christ, half the Visigoth army’s on its way!

“Boss!” Robert Anselm, Rickard, and the banner appeared at the embrasure behind her; the older man limping, his face twisted in a bellowed warning.

Ash swung around, saw in a second that the dead auxiliary’s’ body was dislodged now, two soldiers wearing the Crescent Moon scrambling up scaling ladders and through the openings in the plank floor.

Euen Huw parried the first man’s sword down with his own in a shower of sparks and kicked the man’s leg under the edge of his mail hauberk. Two or three pounds pressure will pop a kneecap. The man – no time to guess at the face; if this is someone known, or someone Joscelyn van Mander has picked up in the months since he left the Lion Azure – the man fell forward dead-weight, like a sack of grain.

The roof and beams cramped her. Ash stuck the shaft of her poleaxe forward past Euen as he recovered his balance. She hooked the curved back edge of the blade behind the second man’s knee. Bracing both feet, she yanked.

The razor edge of the axe hooked the man’s knee forward, his mouth opening in a scream as the cut hamstrung him. He went over, on to his back, crumpling against the front wall of the brattice. Euen Huw stabbed with his sword, up between the legs, under his hauberk, into his groin.

The first man struggled upright, on to one knee, his other leg jutting at a twisted angle. Too close. Ash dropped the axe, grabbed her dagger out of its scabbard with her right hand, and threw herself down on to his back.

She wrapped her forearm around his helmet, twisted his head around, and slammed the blade down into his eye-socket, straight into the brain.

Despite helmet, despite blood and the scream and the disfigurement of his face, she had a moment to recognise the man.
Bartolomey St John – Joscelyn’s
second – I know him!

Knew
him.

Anselm bellowed something. Two or three dozen men in Lion livery piled over the battlements into the brattice, iron cook-pots manoeuvred gingerly between them on bill-shafts. The first two tipped their cauldrons, and a white mist of steam hissed up: boiling water spilling through the gaps and planks alike. More men: Henri Brant and Wat Rodway heaving a cauldron between them,
laughing
under the clamour, tipping hot sand down through the nearest opening—

A yard under Ash’s feet, men screamed, shrieked; there was the recognisable crack of a siege ladder shattering under panicking men’s weights. Screams diminishing, bodies falling into the bright air.

“Shit, boss, that was close!” Euen bellowed, mouth at her ear, one hand reached out absently to pull her to her feet.

Ash grabbed the axe with her free hand, hauling it out from under Bartolomey St John’s dead body. Her hands were, she realised, shaking; with the same uncontrollable tremor that one has when badly injured.
But nothing’s
touched me: the blood isn’t mine!

She lifted her head, couldn’t see Anselm, could hear him and her sergeants yelling orders back on the battlements –
he’s done it, we’re holding!

“Euen, send a runner! The Byward Tower,
now.
What the fuck are the Burgundians doing up there? We need covering fire! They’ve got no business letting these guys get anywhere near the foot of this wall!”

One of Euen’s squires pelted off down the brattice, regained the battlements, and vanished in the direction of the nearest tower.
Can we cover it still, from the
Byward Tower to the White Tower?

Ash ducked back, and stepped off the hoardings on to the walls. Only the backs of men visible, now; a hundred or so here: blue-and-yellow Lion livery for the most part; a couple of Burgundian red Xs. Further along, where the brattices had been on fire, and chopped away because of that, she saw swords, axes; men hooking bills over the tops of ladders – no time for anything subtle: slam them into position along the battlements and tip down everything available on the scaling ladders below.

Robert Anselm jogged up in a clatter of armour and hard breathing. “I’ve sent my lance to the tower to kick some sense into the Burgundian missile troops!”

“Good! We got ’em turned round here, Roberto!”

Something bright and burning dropped out of the sky, with the whistle of flames fanned by the wind.

The stench of it warned her.

“
Greek Fire!
”

Oh, sweet Jesu, they
will
fire on their own men if it means getting us too, they just don’t care!

She threw herself back across the battlements to the inside of the wall, hauling Anselm with her, yelling orders: “Back! Off the walls!
Away from the walls!
”

Fire hit and splashed.

Inside a second, the nearer brattices burst into flame. She saw the flaming greasy liquid splash and spread. One high voice shrieked. No use to call for water—

“Cut the hoardings free!” she ordered, swinging her axe up and over, chopping down at the supporting beams, and she stood back as the men of three more lances took over.

The shrieking figure rolled on the stone battlements, Greek Fire clinging, a stench of burning coming from blackened skin. Ash recognised red hose and brown padded jack, and the frizzled hair under the melting steel of her sallet: Ludmilla Rostovnaya, half her torso and one arm coated in gelatinous, burning fire.

Anselm yelled, “Thomas Tydder!”

The boy and the rest of his fire detail rushed up along the wall, doused leather buckets of sand over the screaming woman, scraping the stuff away. Ash glimpsed their hands going red in the process.

“Stand aside!” Floria del Guiz sprinted past her with a stretcher team.

The brattice creaked, tilted; gave way with a rush. Flaming wood collapsed out into the empty air.

Ash moved forward to the wall. Below, she saw siege ladders tipping back, screaming men falling from them. Bodies in twenties and thirties plummeted to the broken ground at the foot of the city wall. Visigoth slaves – without armour, without weapons – ran about on the escarpment, darting forward, lifting and carrying men with broken limbs.

As she watched, one pale-haired slave fell with a bolt in him. A few yards away, a soldier wearing the Crescent Moon knelt down beside another trooper who writhed with a broken back, gave him the
coup de grace
with his dagger, and ran on, leaving the slave jerking and twitching and alive.

Ash looked up to the Byward Tower. Archers and crossbow troops surged past to the shuttered embrasures and arrow-loops; some of the Welsh longbowmen recklessly shooting over the merlons.

Another bolt of Greek Fire impacted, further down the wall.

Under her breath, Ash muttered, “Come
on.
Take that machine
out!
”

She grabbed the edges of the battlements, staring out from the walls. Under the pale sun, four carved limbs of turning stone flashed white in the November day. Four carved marble cups, on stone beams, like the cups of a mangonel, revolved around a stone spindle. There wasn’t a soldier or a slave within yards of it to wind it. Ash watched it moving, golem-like, of itself.

Stone chips exploded off it, under a hail of crossbow bolts.

A shrill voice from the Byward Tower yelled, “
Gotcha!
”

As Ash watched, the brass-bound wheels of its carriage began to turn, and it swivelled away from the walls and back towards the Visigoth camp to reload. Blue flickers of fire still burned in the cups at the end of each of its four arms.