Ash: A Secret History (150 page)

Alert, safe in her armour, she tucked her sallet under her arm and looked down from the high saddle. “Are you one of Leofric’s slaves? Did I meet you in Carthage? Are you a friend of Leovigild or Violante?”

“Do I sound like a bloody Carthaginian?” The man’s raw voice held offence, and amusement. He cradled the arquebus under one arm and reached up, pulling his helmet off. Long curls of white hair fell down around his face, fringing a bald patch that took up almost all his scalp, and he pushed the yellow-white hair back with a veined hand. “Christ, girl! You don’t remember me.”

The belling of the hounds faded. The hundreds of people might as well have not been present. Ash stared at black eyes, under stained yellow eyebrows. An utter familiarity, coupled with a complete lack of knowledge, silenced her.
I
do
know you, but how can I know anyone from Carthage?

The man said rawly, “The Goths hire mercenaries, too, girlie; don’t let the livery fool you.”

Deep lines cut down the side of his mouth, ridged his forehead; the man might have been in his fifties or sixties, paunchy under the mail, with bad teeth, and white stubble showing on his cheeks.

The gulf that she felt opening around her was, she realised, nothing but the past; the long fall back to childhood, when everything was different, and everything was for the first time. “Guillaume,” she said. “Guillaume Arnisout.”

He had shrunk, and not just by the fact that she sat so high above him. There would be scars and wounds she knew nothing of, but he was so much the same – even white-haired, even older – so much the gunner that she had known in the Griffin-in-Gold that it took her breath: she sat and stared while the hunt raged past, silenced.

“I thought it had to be you.” Guillaume Arnisout nodded to himself. He still wore a falchion; a filthy great curved blade in a scabbard at his waist, for all he carried a Visigoth copy of a European gun.

“I thought you died. When they executed everybody, I thought you died.”

“I went south again. Healthier overseas.” His eyes squinted, looking up at her, as if he looked into a light. “We found
you
in the south.”

“In Africa.” And, at his nod, she leaned down from the saddle and extended her hand, grasping his as he offered it; forearm and forearm; his covered in mail, hers in plate. A great smile spluttered out of her, into a laugh. “Shit! Neither of us has changed!”

Guillaume Arnisout looked quickly over his shoulder, moving back into the scant concealment of the branches. Thirty feet away, a Visigoth cataphract bawled furiously and obscenely at the standard-bearer, the eagle still tangled between hornbeam clumps.

“Does it matter to you, girlie? Do you want to know?”

There was no malice, no taunt, in his tone; nothing but a serious question, and the rueful acknowledgement of a nearby sergeant likely to exercise proper discipline for this infringement.

“Do I?” Ash straightened, looking down at him. She abruptly put her sallet back on, unbuckled, and swung down from the saddle. She looped the gelding’s reins around a low branch. Safe, unnoticeable among the passing heads, she turned back to the middle-aged man. “Tell me. It makes no difference now, but I want to know.”

“We were in Carthage. Must be twenty years ago.” He shrugged. “The Griffin-in-Gold. A dozen of us were out in the harbour, one night, drunk, on somebody’s stolen boat. Yolande – you never met her, an archer; she’s dead now – heard a baby crying on one of their honeyboats, so she made us row over there and rescue it.”

“The refuse barges?” Ash said.

“Whatever. We called them honeyboats.”

A shrill horn sounded close by. Both she and the white-haired man looked up with identical alertness, registered a Burgundian noble carrying a lymer across his saddle-bow; and then the rider and hound were past, gone into the people still massing to cross the stream.

“
Tell me!
” Ash urged.

He looked at her with a pragmatic sadness. “There isn’t much more to tell. You had this big cut on your throat, bleeding, so Yolande took you to one of the rag-head doctors and got you sewn up. Hired you a wet-nurse. We were going to leave you there, but she wanted to bring you back with us, so I had the charge of you in the ship all the way over to Salerno.”

Guillaume Arnisout’s creased, dirty face creased still further. He wiped at his shiny forehead.

“You cried. A lot. The wet-nurse died of a fever in Salerno, but Yolande took you on into camp. Then she lost interest. I heard she got raped, and killed in a knife-fight later on. I lost track of you after that.”

Open-mouthed, Ash stood for a short time. She felt stunned, conscious of the leaf-mulch under her feet, and the warmth of the gelding’s flank at her shoulder; for the rest, was numb.

“You’re saying you saved my life casually and then got bored.”

“Probably wouldn’t have done it if we hadn’t been drunk.” The man’s worn, livid face coloured slightly. “A few years later, I was pretty sure you were the same kid, no one else had that thistledown-colour hair, so I tried to make up for it, a bit.”

“Sweet Christ.”

There’s nothing in this I didn’t know or couldn’t have guessed. Why are my hands and feet numb; why am I dizzy with this?

“You’re the big boss, nowadays.” Guillaume’s rasping voice held scepticism, and a hint of flattery. “Not that I wouldn’t have expected it. You were always keen.”

“Do you expect me to be grateful?”

“I tried to show you how to look after yourself. Stay sharp. Guess it worked. And now you’re this general’s sister, and a big shot on your own account, from what I hear.” His lined cheeks twisted into a smile. “Want to take an old soldier into your company, girlie?”

She wears a fortune on her back, strapped around her body: forged and hardened metal that it would take Guillaume Arnisout decades to buy – if, indeed, he could buy a whole harness in his lifetime. Hers comes from third-share enemy ransoms: one third for the man who makes the capture, one-third for his captain, and one-third for the company commander. At this second, it is nothing but a prison of metal that she would like to shuck off, run through the woods as freely as she did as a child.

“You don’t know the half of it, Guillaume,” Ash says. And then: “I
am
grateful. There was no reason for you to do any of it. Even casual interest, at the right second – believe me, I’m thankful.”

“So get me out of this bloody serf-army!”

So much for disinterested information.

The wind rubs bare branches together above their heads. The ammoniac stench of disturbed leaf-mulch comes up from the bed of the stream, the black water churned into grey mud by passing men. Ash’s gelding whickers. The flow of people is becoming thinner, now; the Visigoth eagle glints under the thickets of evergreen holly.

I would do it for any man – any mercenary – if he asked me at this moment.

“Lose the kit.” She scrabbled with gauntlet-fingers at the ties of her livery tabard, and gown, that she wears over her armour. By the time the ties loosened, she looked up to see the Carthage-manufactured gun gone who-knows-where, the helmet slung overarm into the stream, and Guillaume with his dirty linen coif tied tight down over his balding head.

She thrust her demi-gown and the crumpled blue-and-gold cloth at him, turned, and sprang herself up into the saddle, the weight of the armour ignored.

“Burgundian!” a harsh voice bawled.

Ash spurred the gelding out of the low-hanging branches and twigs under the beech tree. At her stirrup, an anonymous man in a demi-gown and Lion livery ran beside her, limping from an ancient wound. Mail and falchion: plainly just another European mercenary.

“Which way rides the hunt?”

“
Every
way!” the Visigoth
nazir
yelled, in the Carthaginian camp patois. Ash couldn’t help a grin at his frustration. He threw his arms wide in a gesture of despair. “Lady warrior, what in Christ’s sweet name are we doing in this wood?”

“Don’t ask me, I only work here. You!” Ash ordered Guillaume Arnisout, “let’s find the Burgundians, sharpish!”

Burgundians, hell: let’s find the Lion Azure!

The ground was too bad to push the gelding to more than a walk. She spurred across the stream, Guillaume Arnisout splashing after her, and slowed again, riding forward. The sun through the tree-cover let her see roughly where south might be.
Another couple of furlongs, and turn west, try and find the edge of the forest, and the river-ford…

“Fuck of a hunt
this
is,” Guillaume remarked, from beside her stirrup. “Bloody Burgundians. Couldn’t organise a piss-up in an English brewery.”

“Fucking waste of time,” she agreed. She has enjoyed hunting, when the opportunity has presented itself: a noisy organised riot of a rush through bad countryside, not unlike war. This…

Ash removed her sallet again. She rode bareheaded in the chill wind, that the trees robbed of an edge. Too far, by many leagues now, to hear the bell tolling from the Dijon Abbey, and if there are two bells: if Charles the Bold has breathed his last. A brief solemnity touched her.

And too confusing to be able to tell which of the baying hounds, hunting horns, voices shouting “Ho moy!” and horses neighing – all glimpsed a hundred yards away, between tree-trunks – which might be the main body of the hunt.

“Sod this for a game of soldiers.” Ash checked the position of the Visigoth troops behind her. “Ease off to the west…”

With Guillaume beside her, and the pale gelding picking a careful way between tree roots and badger setts, Ash rode across the trampled woodland floor. Briars held tags of cloth on long thorns, witness to men passing.

The white flash of a hound showed a furlong ahead, for a moment, questing busily.

Guillaume Arnisout, and a rider on a scrawny horse emerging from a holly thicket, bawled “
Gone away!
” at the same moment.

“There it is!” The rider – flushed, standing in her stirrups, hood down and hair thick with twigs – was Floria del Guiz. She spurred in a circle and pointed. “Ash! The
hart!
”

Within seconds, they were the centre of attention: a slew of riders cantering up, with the red Xs of Burgundian livery on their jackets; two ’
arifs
and the eagle and a flood of serfs in munition-quality helmets pouring into the clearing; twenty huntsmen with leashed couples of hounds pounding between tree-trunks, over fallen branches and briars, sounding horns. The hounds, freed, quested busily, bayed, and shot off in a long trailing column into the forest ahead.

Shit! So much for sneaking off—

A pale flash of colour, ahead. Ash stood in her stirrups. Floria pointed again, shouting something; the horns blowing to let other huntsmen ahead know the hounds had been released drowned her out.

“
There it goes!
”

Two greyhounds tore past, under the gelding’s hooves. The reins jerked through her fingers. Ash swore, blood thumping in her veins, pulled back, and felt the gelding gripping the bit between its teeth. It thrust forward into the crowd of Burgundian noblemen, shouldering aside a grey; and cantered beside a chestnut, partnering it, ignored Ash’s attempt to bring it back by wrenching her weight back.

“
Ho moy!
” Floria bawled to the running-hounds, riding stirrup by stirrup with Ash. Her face flushed puce in the cold air. Ash saw her dig her spurs into the scrawny grey’s flanks, all caution forgotten, everything else lost in the wild excitement of the hunt. “The hart! The hart!”

With her legs almost at full extension from war saddle to stirrups, Ash could do nothing but grab the pommel and cling on. She flew ahead of Guillaume Arnisout. The rough, broken canter jolted her up and down in the saddle. Armour clattered. The gelding, trained for war, chose to forget his training; stretched out to a full gallop and Ash threw herself down as a branch whipped across her face.

Pain blinded her momentarily. She spat out blood. Her sallet was gone, fallen from the pommel of the saddle. She straightened up, yanked the reins, felt the bit bite, and prepared to haul the gelding’s mouth bloody.

His ears came erect again, the noise of the hunt lost; and he slowed.

“God
damn
you,” Ash said feelingly. She looked back, without hope, for her helmet. Nothing.

The wood’s full of soldiers. I’ve seen the last of
that.

The pale gelding lathered up, under his caparisons. Dark patches stained the dyed blue linen cloth. Ash let him place his hoofs delicately, picking a way down the winding track. Pebbles bounced down ahead, into the chine. A crumbling chalk bluff rose up, out of the trees, raggedly topped by thorn bushes and scrub. It was no higher than the tops of the trees beyond it.

The sun shone weakly. Ash lifted her gaze, expecting to glimpse cloud cover through the tree-tops. Beyond the bare branches, she saw nothing, only clear autumn sky and the white sun at tree-top height. The myriad bare twigs and branches swaying in the wind blurred her vision. She reached up carefully with metal-shod fingers to rub at her eyes.

The sunlight lessened again: not its light, but its quality.

Fear constricted her heart. Alone, the rest of the hunt gone Christ-knows-where, she rode on down the slope. The high war saddle creaked as she let herself rest back, pelvis swaying to the horse’s gait. A faint haze of rust already browned the cuisses covering her thighs, and the backs of her gauntlets; and she smiled, thinking of how Rickard would round up half a dozen of the youngest pages to do the cleaning, back in Dijon.

If I get back to Dijon. If there is any of Burgundy left.

“Halloo!” Ash bellowed, bringing her voice up from deep in her belly. It did not crack, despite the dread she felt. “Halloo, a Lion!
A moi!
A Lion!”

Her voice fell flat in the wood: no echo.

The quality of the light changed again.

We’re too late. He’s dying; the last breaths
—

Now, the wind blowing cold between the trees, all the high bare branches swayed, rubbing bark against bark, creaking and surging like the sea. The face of the chalk bluff glowed, as clouds do before a storm, when there is still some sunlight to gleam off their white ramparts.