Ash: A Secret History (175 page)

“Didn’t you hear it, boss?” Giovanni Petro asked. At her blank look, he added, “Trebuchet strike. Took out the west wing of the Viscount-Mayor’s palace, off the Square of Flowers – shrapnel come flying down the alleys, you copped it.”

“Trebuchet—”

“Bloody big chunk of limestone.”

“Fucking Christ!” Ash swore.

Someone, behind her, shoved as she tried to regain her feet, and she found herself standing, swaying. A sharp pain went through her body. She put her bloodied fingers to her cuirass. The pages removed her sallet: she turned her head and saw Florian.

Half-Duchess, half-surgeon,
Ash thought dizzily. Florian wore a cloth-of-gold kirtle, with a vair-lined gown thrown over it; belted up any old how with a dagger and herb-sack hanging from her waist. The rich garments trailed, dirt-draggled, black for eighteen inches up from the hem. Under her kirtle, Ash could see she was still wearing doublet and hose.

She wore neither coif nor begemmed headdress, but she was not bareheaded. Carved and shining, the white oval of a crown enclosed her brows.

It was neither gold, nor silver, nor regular. White-brown spikes jutted up in a rough coronet. Skilled hands had carved white antler into a circlet, fastening the polished pieces with gold fittings, forming the horns of the hart into an oval crown. It pressed down on her straw-gold hair.

“Let’s get the armour off you.” Business-like and brusque, Floria del Guiz took a firm grip under Ash’s left arm, and nodded to Rickard. The young man, with two of the pages helping, rapidly cut the points, unbuckled the straps, and lifted her pauldrons off her shoulders. She looked dizzily down at his bowed head as he unbuckled the straps down the right-hand side of her breastplate, plackart and tassets, undid the waist-strap, and let one tasset swing as he unbuckled the fauld.

“Okay—” He popped the cuirass open, hinging open and removing the metal shell all in one go, steel plates clattering. She swayed again, struck by the freezing air, feeling naked in nothing but arming doublet and hose, leg- and arm-defences. Her teeth chattered,

“
Fucking
hell!”

Still holding the armour, he demanded, “Are you all right, boss? Boss, are you all right?”

His adolescent voice squeaked; going high for the first time in weeks.

“Shit – I’m fine. Fine!” Ash held her arms out from her sides. Her hands shook. The little brush-haired page slit the points of her arming doublet. “Where’d it get me?”

Rickard laid the body-armour down in a clatter of steel, staring at it. “Right in the chest, boss.”

Florian blocked her view, reaching down to her arming doublet, and carefully pulling the sweaty, filthy garment open.

“Rickard, I’m fine; the rest of you, I’m okay. Now fuck off, will you? Florian, what’s the damage?”

Robert Anselm still hovered in the doorway. “Boss…”

“What part of ‘fuck off’ didn’t you understand?” Ash inquired acidly; and when the Englishman had vanished, yelped under her breath: “Shit, that
hurts!
”

Floria knotted her fists in Ash’s arming doublet again, yanked it wide open, got her hand in to the ribs on Ash’s left-hand side, and felt with remarkably gentle fingers under her breast. Ash had not been wearing a shirt under the arming doublet, and her flesh shrank from the bitingly cold air, from Floria’s chill flesh, and from the prodding fingers on her bruised skin.

“Easy!” Ash winced again; grinned shakily. “Hey. It’s not like they were aiming at me!”

“It’s not like that will matter,” Floria mimicked, sardonically. She peered at Ash’s side, face all but inside the open arming doublet. Her breath steamed in the cold air. Ash felt it shivery-warm against her skin, and momentarily stiffened.

“Haven’t you got something better to do than mess about in hospitals, Duchess?”

There were women with Florian who were not from the company, she realised as she said it. The Duchess’s maids and Jeanne Châlon sniffed, and looked much as if they agreed with Ash.

“No. I’ve got patients here. I’ve got patients up at St Stephen’s, and in the two other abbey hospices…” Florian grinned. “I’d left Blanche in charge here; you’re lucky to have me.”

“Oh, sure I— fuck! Don’t
do
that!”

“I’m checking your ribs.”

Peering down, Ash could see her open doublet, bare breast, and a raised, reddened area of skin perhaps the size of a dinner plate below her left breast. She shifted a little, feeling now the separate aches from hipbone, armpit, pectoral muscle, and – now she realised it – the base of her throat.

“That’s going to go all sorts of pretty colours,” she observed.

Floria straightened up, sat down on the medical chest that was doing duty for a bench (tables and chairs long since gone for firewood), and tapped her dirty finger thoughtfully against her teeth. “Your lung’s okay. You might have sprung a rib.”

“No wonder, boss!” Rickard straightened up, still bundled in jack, livery jacket, and fur-lined demi-gown; his hood barely pushed back from his face even inside the tower and close to the remaining hearth-fire. “Look at this.”

He held up Ash’s cuirass by the shoulders, fauld and tassets still attached. The plackart, unstrapped from the upper breastplate, caught the light in a glinting craze.

“Fuck me.” Ash reached out and slid her gloved fingers across the case-hardened steel. The curve of the plackart was shattered, like ice when a rock hits it. At her gesture, he turned the body-armour around. On the back of the breastplate, over the place where her left ribs would be, the softer iron bulged back.

Her fingers went without volition to her bare torso, touching the swelling skin.

“It bloody
cracked
it. My plackart! And the breastplate, too. Two layers of steel, and it fucking
cracked
it!”

The light from the winter-blue sky outside the window flashed from the steel. She slowly removed her gauntlets, and fumbled to pull the edges of her doublet together. Florian took her left hand, probing for stone splinters. Her breath hissed as she stared at the Milanese breastplate in Rickard’s hands. “The armourer can’t hammer
that
out. Sweet Green Christ up a Tree, that’s
my
luck for this siege! Holy Saint George!”

“Never mind the soldier saints,” Floria remarked under her breath, with asperity, “try Saint Jude! Tilde, I’ll need a witch hazel and St John’s wort poultice. Wash this hand in wine. It doesn’t need bandages.”

The maid-in-waiting curtseyed, to Floria’s obvious amusement.

Jeanne Châlon caught Ash’s eye and sniffed again, disapprovingly.

“Niece-Duchess,” she said pointedly, “remember you are called to the council, at Nones.”

“Actually, aunt, I think you’ll find that
I
called
them.
”

Jeanne Châlon flushed. “Of course, my lady.”

“‘Of course, my lady’,” Rickard muttered under his breath, in mincing mockery.

Floria caught his eye and scowled. “You need to get the rest of this metalware off her. Tilde, where’s that poultice?”

A man sat up, on a pallet closer to the hearth. Ash saw it was Euen Huw. Dirty beyond belief, and gaunt, with the fine cat-gut of Floria’s stitches poking up out of his shaven hair, the wiry Welshman still managed to grin woozily at her.

“Hey. Don’t you let her prod you around, boss. Heavy-handed, she is. Working for the rag-’eads, I swear it!”

“You lie down, Euen, or I’ll put some more stitches in that thick Welsh head of yours!”

He smiled at Florian. As he half-fell back on to his pallet, he murmured, “Got a cushy number, now, haven’t we? Comes of having a smart boss, see. Gets our surgeon crowned Duchess. Boss in charge of the army. Even the damn rag-heads give up when they hear that.”

I wish!
Ash thought. She saw it mirrored on Florian’s face.

She held out her arms to Rickard and the pages, who stripped her of couters, vambraces, cannons. Shucking the arming doublet painfully down to her waist, she flinched as Florian prodded at her back.

The woman surgeon straightened up. “Whatever you hit when you landed, the armour saved you. Have you got a shirt I can tear up? I’m going to bind those ribs tight. You’ll be stiff; it’ll hurt; you’ll live.”

“Thanks for your sympathy…” Ash gritted her teeth at the touch of the poultice. “Rickard, you take my kit across to the armoury. Tell ’em boss needs a new breastplate and plackart. They can pull anything they need out of the army stores. But I need it done yesterday!”

“Yes, boss!”

The light here came from one set of opened shutters. Further into the hall, the shutters were closed. Fire-heated bricks, placed under blankets, took a very little of the freezing chill off the air. Men on pallets moved, uneasily; someone groaning continuously, another man muttering to himself. Some had purple-bruised, stitched flesh left uncovered; other men had bloodied bandages. Only a few men sat playing dice, or cleaning their kit, or arguing. Most huddled down.

Ash’s eyes narrowed against the dull light. “You’ve got twice the number of sick here since yesterday. We haven’t had an attack on the walls. Is it the bombardments?”

Florian looked up briefly. “Let’s see. I’ve got twenty-four men wounded here. Three men are going to die, because I can’t do anything about the shock and bleeding; one man from a stinking wound, the other from a poisoned wound. The broken shoulder-bones, ribs, and broken wrists should mend. I don’t know about the stove-in breastbone. Baldina took an arrow out of one of Loyecte’s men; I haven’t wanted to move him out of here. There are ten burn-cases, that’s Greek Fire. They’ll survive.”

She spoke without reference to the parchment notes stuffed in the corner of the medicine chest.

“There’s more than twenty-four men in here.”

“Twenty men down with campaign fever,” Florian stated. Her expression, studying Ash’s half-bare body, was clinical in the extreme. She ignored the hiss of breath as the poultice touched Ash’s skin.

“Dysentery,” she elucidated, whipping bandages with a sure hand. “Ash, I tell them to bury bodies away from the wells. The ground’s rock-hard. I tell them to make sure there are slit-trenches dug, on the waste-ground back of the forge.
²
They shit anywhere they please. I’ve got civilian cases of dysentery in the abbeys. More than there were yesterday. And that’s more than there was the day before. Once it gets a hold…”

“What about stores?”

“No fresh herbs. Even with the civilian abbeys, we’re low on Self-Heal, goldenrod, Lady’s Mantle, Solomon’s Seal. Baldina and the girls can give them camomile, to calm them down. Marjoram, on sprains. That’s it.” Her gaze flicked to Ash’s face. “I’m out of everything else. We bandage. We sew.” She smiled wryly. “My people are washing out wounds with Burgundy’s finest wines. Best use for them.”

Ash shrugged herself painfully back into her doublet. Rickard held out a brigandine, brought by one of the pages, and began to buckle her into it.

“I got to go. In case they think I
am
dead. Morale.”

Florian glanced at the pallets, her attention on a man with a chopping cut across the side of his jaw. “I hadn’t finished my rounds. I’ll see you at the palace. Dusk.”

“Yes
sir
…” Smiling, Ash essayed a few steps, a little shaky, but mostly balanced.

Back on the first floor, she found the stench of cuckoo-pint starch and billowing steam filling the entire hall. Damp warmth hit her. Women with sore hands, kirtles caught up into their belts, banged around the tubs, through the wet; shouting orders and lewd comments. She found herself behind Blanche and Baldina at the foot of the stairs as Antonio Angelotti appeared, holding out a yellowed linen shirt and complaining in rapid-fire Milanese.

“Madonna,” he broke off to greet her. His expression changed, seeing her damaged left hand. “Jussey wants you at the mills.”

“Yeah, I was on my way there. You come with me—”

“Boss,” a female voice said.

Ash halted, as Blanche put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders, the dyed blond heads together. Baldina’s kirtle as she turned to face Ash was laced only loosely at the front.

Under it, the belly of a woman great with child showed as a sharp curve.
Not visible before Auxonne. But she must have been carrying it from spring: at Neuss, say?

“You should be eating better,” Ash said automatically. “Ask Hildegarde: tell her I said so.”

Baldina put her hands on her belly in an immemorial gesture. Winter sunlight shot through the steam, illuminating her in a glaze of light; and Angelotti’s icon-face and yellow ringlets beside her made Ash think caustically,
Haven’t I seen you guys in a church fresco somewhere?

“Have you got a father for it?” Ash added.

Baldina grinned wryly. “Now what do you think, boss?”

“Well, draw on company funds: an extra third-share.”

Not that that amounts to much, now.

The younger woman nodded. Her mother, a little awkwardly, said, “Put your hand on it, boss. For luck.”

“For—” Ash’s silver brows went up. She put her unbandaged hand palm-flat on Baldina’s belly, feeling the heat of the woman’s body though kirtle and shirt and gauntlet-glove.

In Ash’s memory, a woman-physician of the Carthaginians says
The gate of the womb is spoiled; she will never carry to term.
A pang, that might have been for anything – lost chances, perhaps – went through her, stinging her eyes.

“Here’s luck, then. When do you drop?”

“Near Our Lord’s mass. We’re naming it for Saint Godfrey, if it’s a boy.” Baldina turned her head as someone else yelled. “All
right!
Coming! Thanks, boss.”

Ash smiled, saw the escort gathering ahead of her at the door, and walked away from the stairs, on across the great hall, Angelotti falling into step beside her.

“Well, there’s one thing I’m sure of,” she said, in a rasping attempt at humour: “It isn’t yours!”

Angelotti gave a calm smile, at odds with his vulgar Italian: “Not until pretty bum-boys give birth.”