Ash: A Secret History (177 page)

“My God,” she said, “am I glad to see you!”

“Madam, your expression alone is worth gold!”

The Earl clapped his hands together, partly in satisfaction, partly against the cold. His eyes travelled across the crowd. Ash followed the direction of his gaze. She saw it take him noticeable seconds to realise who he stared at.

“God’s bollocks! It’s true, then? Your physician is Charles’s heir? Your Florian is Duchess of Burgundy now?”

“True as I’m standing here.” Ash’s face ached with the smile she couldn’t keep off it. She added, thoughtfully, “My lord.”

“Give me your hand,” he said, “and not your ‘my lord’.”

Ash stripped off her gauntlet and clasped his hand, moved almost to tears of her own. “If it comes to that, I guess you have the distinction of being the only Englishman ever to employ the reigning prince of Burgundy – since she’s still on my books, and I’m still on yours.”

“The more reason for you to have trusted me to return.”

Floria del Guiz appeared through the crowd that parted to let the Duchess of Burgundy pass. The Earl of Oxford sank gracefully down on one knee. His brothers joined him, and Viscount Beaumont; kneeling before her, and the Burgundian nobles.

“God be with you, madam doctor,” John de Vere said, not appearing at all incommoded to be kneeling. “You have been given a harder task than any man would wish.”

Ash opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, and shut it again. She put her hands behind her back, forcing herself to wait for Floria to speak first.
Duchess Florian,
she reminded herself uncomfortably.

Floria’s sudden smile dazzled. “We have to talk, my lord Oxford. Is this all your men? Are there more?”

“These are all,” de Vere said, getting to his feet. Ash saw him glance back automatically at the Turkish troops in their neat, disciplined rows.

“Regrettably, Mistress Florian, I speak little of their language.” The Earl of Oxford pointed to a moustached soldier in mail hauberk and peaked helm. “My sole interpreter. He’s from Wallachia; a Voynik auxiliary. Do you have anyone here who speaks Turkish?”

Ash, glancing at Floria before she answered, said, “Not me, my lord. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Robert,” she signalled Anselm over. “Do we have anyone who speaks Turkish?”

“I do.” Anselm made an awkward bow to the Earl; and pointed over at the Italian gunner, who had joined Ludmilla Rostovnaya and the missile troops. “Angelotti does. We fought in the Morea
³
in sixty-seven and sixty-eight. Maybe as late as seventy. Some damn Florentine shot me in the leg; I hauled Angelotti out of the Adriatic. Never been to sea since.” He took a breath, still unsteadily gazing at the Earl of Oxford. “Yeah. I speak the language.”

“Good,” de Vere approved absently. “I do not wish to be dependent on one man who may be killed.”

His eyes stayed fixed on Floria del Guiz, in her female clothing. Ash saw him shake his head in wonderment.

Losing patience, Ash demanded, “Are you going to tell us what’s going on here, my lord?”

“It is Burgundy’s Duchess that I should tell.” De Vere’s face creased with humour. “I dare say she’ll let you listen, madam.”

Floria del Guiz, surrounded by maids, Burgundian nobles, and Thomas Rochester’s lance in their self-imposed duty as bodyguard, grinned broadly at Ash. “No chance!”

“Oh, she might. She might.” Ash beamed at John de Vere. She spread her hands a little. “Meet the Captain-General of Burgundy’s armies, my lord – the Maid of Dijon.”

The Earl of Oxford gazed at her beatifically for several seconds. His head went back in a great bark of laughter. Beaumont and the de Vere brothers joined in. What Ash saw in de Vere’s expression, as he registered the bristling disapproval of de la Marche and the Burgundian knights, was sheer delight.

He walloped her solidly on the arm. “So. This is how you hold to your
condotta
with me, madam?”

“I’m at your command now you’re back, my lord.”

“Of course you are.” His faded blue eyes glowed with humour. “Of course. As an Englishman, madam, I’m more than happy to leave Holy Virgins to foreigners. Much safer.” More soberly, he added, “What news have you had of late from outside the walls?”

Floria said grimly, “For about the last three weeks, nothing.”

Robert Anselm added, “The Visigoths aren’t taking the walls, but they’ve got this place shut up tighter than a duck’s arse, my lord.”

“You have had no intelligence at all?”

Ash blinked against the low brilliance of the winter noon. “They tied us up solid, about the same time they stopped pressing the assaults on the walls. We haven’t got any spies out or messengers of our own in, since.”

At the mention of assaults, she saw de Vere’s face change, but he said nothing.

Robert Anselm said cynically, “We stopped sending people out when they started coming back in by trebuchet, in two separate sacks. Last one was that French guy, Armand de Lannoy.” He shook his head. “He’s been feeding the crows for a week now. Don’t know why he thought it was so damn important to get out.”

“I can answer that question, Master Anselm,” the Earl of Oxford said. As the last of his exuberance died down, Ash noted the strain underneath. “Madam Duchess, better to say it to you and your advisors all at the same time.”

Ash overrode what the surgeon might have been about to say. “How
the fuck
my lord – did you get in here?” She found that she was waving her own hands, in much the same way as the English, and put them down by her side. “Did you sail from Carthage to Constantinople? Have you seen the Sultan? Is this all your troops? What’s happened?”

“All in time, madam. And in the lady Duchess’s hearing.” John de Vere glanced momentarily from the surgeon in her filthy jewelled gown to the white sun in the winter sky.

“Plainly,” he said, “you are Burgundy’s Duchess, as Charles was the late Duke. Tell me, madam, are you – you
must
be what Duke Charles was. Or we would not have a sun in the sky above us.”

Floria’s dirty, stained hands went to her breast. A white pectoral Briar Cross hung from a golden chain, itself not rich, but carved from the same horn of the hart as her ducal crown. Her knuckles whitened: she did not, for a second, meet the eyes of any of the Burgundian nobles surrounding her.

“She’s Charles’s successor,” Olivier de la Marche said in the tone of a man who hears a law of nature – the tide, perhaps, or the return of the moon – questioned.

“Oh, she’s the Duchess, all right.” Ash, conscious of her bruised ribs, and the weight of her armour, shifted from foot to foot in the cold wind.
She is what the Wild Machines need to destroy, now.
“I’ll tell you something I
do
know, my lord Oxford. The Faris knows that. She’s sitting out there in that camp – she’s been sitting out there for five weeks now – and she knows that Florian is the person she needs to kill. And she isn’t doing a damn thing about it.”

With raised fair eyebrows, John de Vere gazed around at the battered buildings and deserted streets of Dijon.

Ash shrugged. “Oh, she’s letting hunger and disease do her work for her, but she’s almost stopped the assaults. I’d give half the company war-chest to know what her officers are saying. And the other half to know what she’s thinking, right now.”

The Earl of Oxford said, “I believe that I can tell you that also. Captain Ash.”

The sound of distant siege-engine fire echoed through the air from the west of the city. Faint vibrations shook the earth under her feet.

“Get your Turks away from the walls. We’ll take council of war,” Floria said briefly, “I
n
doors.”

As the court entered the private chambers of the Duchess, the Earl of Oxford and his brothers were again swept up into a crush of more of the lords of Burgundy; greetings being exchanged, questions shouted. The Janissary captains followed in Oxford’s wake with expressions of polite bewilderment.

Each of the dismounted Turks wore the same thing, Ash noted in astonishment: a fawn-coloured robe with hanging sleeves, over a mail hauberk; a curved sword belted at the waist; bow and shield; and a helmet with a sleeve of white cloth hanging down behind. The uniformity of their clothing and their bearded faces made her feel that she was in the chamber with one man twenty times over, and not with twenty men. The contrast with her own escort, Thomas Rochester’s lance – war-hats buckled down over their cowls, wearing a selection of mail, leather and stolen plate armour; each man in his own chosen colour of filthy hose gone through at the knee – was marked.

“We’ll never feed them,” Floria said flatly, walking in at Ash’s side. She caught Ash’s glance. “Henri Brant’s been advising me. As well as the castellan of Dijon. We can’t feed the people we’ve got.”

“Try thinking of it this way. Five hundred cavalry mounts is two hundred and fifty tons of meat.”

“Good God, girl! Will they wear it?”

“The Turks? Not for a second, I shouldn’t think. Let’s not borrow trouble,” Ash said thoughtfully. “Find out why he’s brought them here, first.”

The glassed windows in the ducal chamber kept out much of the freezing wind, but it whined in the chimneys; a hollow sound under the raucous voices. Here, silk hangings still decorated the bed, and there were chairs as well as chests, and a great fire burning in the hearth.

Floria fixed Jeanne Châlon with a challenging eye. “Spiced wine, Tante.”

“Yes, Niece-Duchess, of course. At once! If the kitchens have any left.”

“If that lot of thieving bastards don’t have a cask squirrelled away somewhere,” the Duchess of Burgundy remarked, “then we might as well surrender to the Visigoths right now…”

Ash snorted. Floria left her side, walking forward into the chamber, and the men drew aside for her without thinking about it. Ash bit her lip. She shook her head, amused at herself, and followed the surgeon towards the fire.

Floria called to her pages: “Pull the chairs around the hearth. No need to freeze while we talk.”

Breath whitened the air. Despite the fire, it was cold enough to make Ash’s teeth ache. She moved forward, among the general rearrangements, and stood with her back to one side of the carved stone hearth, below a Christ-figure with intricate foliage curling around Him.

Floria seated herself on the carved oak chair that it had taken two pages to shift closer to the warmth. The Burgundian knights and lords and bishops turned towards her, falling silent, watching their bedraggled, bright-eyed, and completely confident Duchess.

The Earl of Oxford said, “May I suggest, madam, that you clear the chamber somewhat? We shall do our business more speedily if we are not burdened with over-much debate.”

Floria rattled out a handful of names. Within minutes, all but a dozen of the court dispersed – in remarkable good temper, and anticipation, Ash realised – and the mulled wine came in; and the Duchess looked at the English Earl over the rim of her gold goblet.

“Talk,” she said.

“All of it, madam? It has been three months and more since we stood on the beach at Carthage.”

Floria rapped out, “
God give me strength and, failing that, patience!
”

John de Vere bellowed with laughter. He sank down, not asking ducal permission, on to a chair close to the burning logs. A scent of sweat and horse emanated from him, with the rising heat. Ash, watching him and his brothers and Beaumont, had a sharp flash of how it had been with the sun of August on Dijon’s fields, when they had dined together. Despite the presence of Olivier de la Marche and the Turkish commander, she felt a strong and welcome familiarity.

“Start with him, Master de Vere.” Floria del Guiz tilted the cup slightly towards the remaining Turkish Janissary officer.

“Start with why you’re in here, not out there, and not dead,” Ash clarified. “That’s a whole battalion you just brought in here!”

The Earl of Oxford stretched out his boots to the flames. “You would have me begin at the end. Very well. I am here and alive, because I have this man and his cavalry with me. Plainly, five hundred men are no match for six thousand encamped Visigoths. However – I informed the Faris, in all truth and honour, that if his men die here, the Osmanli
⁴
Sultan Mehmet, second of that name, will consider himself to be instantly at war with the Visigoth Empire.”

A moment’s silence, in which nothing could be heard but the fire crackling, and the wind in the chimney.

John de Vere added, “She knew it to be true. Her spies must have informed her by now of the troop build-up on the western border of the Sultan’s empire.”

Ash softly whistled. “Yeah, well, he can afford to make threats like that.”
⁵

“This is no threat.”

“Thank Christ and all His sweet saints for that.” Ash shifted, pain jabbing her ribs under the cuirass. “So, let me get this right, you just rode across from Dalmatia or wherever—”

“Five hundred men are a big enough troop not to be bothered,” the Earl of Oxford said mildly, “while being no threat to the King-Caliph’s army.”

“—and then you rode up to Dijon, and you said, ‘Let me inside the besieged city with fresh troops’, and they said, ‘Oh, okay’—”

Dickon de Vere flushed and said hotly, “We risk our lives, and what do you do but carp and jeer!”

“Be quiet, boy.” The Earl of Oxford spoke firmly. He smiled at Ash. “You have not stood siege for so long. Let Captain-General Ash ask her questions after her own fashion.”

Impetus gone and slightly deflated, Ash said, “They’re not fresh troops, these Turks. They’re hostages.”

The Ottoman commander said in halting German,
⁶
“I do not know this word.”

Ash looked at him, startled. He was, under the felt cap and beard, fair in colouring; probably a Christian by birth.

“It means, if they attack us, if you die; then those men out there—” She indicated the window. “—the Visigoths, they die too. All the while you’re in Dijon, an attack on the city is an attack on the Sultan.”