Ash: A Secret History (207 page)

Can I do this?

No: but nobody can do this!

Ah, the hell with it—

At the foot of the wall, she grabbed Anselm’s arm in the dimness. “Time to do it. Is everyone in position?”

“There’s a delay with some of the Burgundian billmen.”

“Oh, tough shit! We got to move!”

“Apart from them, it’s a go.”

“Okay, where’s Angeli—” She glimpsed Angelotti in the gloom. “Okay, get your guys out:
do
it. And don’t let me down!”

The Italian gunner went off at the run.

“That’s it,” she said. She looked up at Anselm, not able to see his face. “Either everybody does what we’ve trained for – or we’re fucked. We can’t change this in mid-stream!”

He grunted. “Like letting an avalanche go. We just got to go with it!”

If I get hit, let it be a clean kill; I don’t want to be maimed.

“If I go down, you take over; if you go,” she said, “Tom will take it; de la Marche will have to pick it up if we’re all fucked!”

The command group trod on her heels as she strode back across the rough ground to the barricades. A lantern gave little light on the frozen mud-ruts. She slipped, swore; heard something before she saw it, and realised that she had come to one end of the company line. John Burren, Willem Verhaecht, and Adriaen Campin were conferring urgently.

“We’re in position here, boss.” Willem Verhaecht spat, and spared a glance for the mass of men in Lion Azure livery, clutching their bills and poleaxes, grinning back at him. “Ready to go. I’d do anything to move, in this cold!”

Some forty men stood behind. Bills jutted above their heads. Men strapped into whatever armour they possessed, much of it taken now from the dead. She heard a lot of low-voiced last-minute joking, settling of debts and forgiveness, and prayer.

“We’re ready, boss,” John Burren said, nodding towards the unit in front.

In the gloom, Jan-Jacob Clovet and Pieter Tyrrell struggled with a six-foot oak door, stripped out of some building. Tyrrell’s half-hand skidded on the frozen wood. A short, podgy figure in sallet and cut-off kirtle stepped in behind him, taking the weight on her shoulder. Hearing a female voice swear, Ash recognised Margaret Schmidt. Two more crossbowmen grabbed the door. Past them, she saw the other crossbow troops carrying doors, long planks, pavises, and torn-out shutters from ogee windows.

“We’re here, boss!” Katherine Hammell’s voice said, at her side. Only the jutting staves above her troops’ heads showed them to be a mass of archers.

Down the line, past them, Ash sees in this growing cold light, Geraint ab Morgan’s armed provosts; a dozen women from the baggage train, their skirts kilted up, and razor-sharp ash spears in their hands; Thomas Morgan holding the great Lion Azure battle standard. And faces behind them, under helmets, faces that she knows, has known for years in some cases: the line snaking on across the rubble, a little over three hundred strong.

I do not want to lead these men into this.

“Move ’em up,” she said curtly, to Anselm. “I’d better kick some Burgundian ass—”

The silence shattered.

A sudden sequence of cracks and booms from the eastern side of the city made her skin her lips back from her teeth in a wild grin. A long chill shiver went through her body. Through the ground under her feet, she felt the boom of guns; she heard the deceptive soft
thwack!
of rock-hurling siege-engines.

“There goes Jussey! Better late than fucking never!”

Eternal, now, this hasty shuffling of men into position; and one drops his bill with a clear
clang!
against a broken wall, and a dozen others cheer. Shoved into position by sergeants, spitting on their shaking hands, giving a last tug at fastened points and war-hat buckles –
how long is this taking?
Ash thinks, over the shattering noise of Jussey’s bombardment.
How much longer have we got?

Captain Jonvelle loped out from behind the long lines of Burgundian troops.

“They’ve mobilised most of a legion!” He turned to confirm with a runner. “Pulled it out of the trenches – they think we’re staging a break-out to the
east
bridge – deploying over there—”

“
Got
the fuckers! Okay, now
wait.
Let ’em commit themselves.”

Counting in her head, she lets an agonising eight minutes pass.

Ash gave a quick nod, walked out towards the wall, and turned, standing between the two advance crossbow units, to face the units behind. Amorphous clumps of men: each a hundred strong. Unit pennons going up, now, in the dim light, but so few – barely a dozen.
Gun-crews on the walls, engineers in the saps: even with everyone who can
walk
down here, we don’t amount to more than thirteen hundred men.
Shit…

She drew breath, shouting, her voice carrying over the distant Burgundian guns.

“Here’s what we do. We attack now! They don’t expect us. They’re expecting us to surrender! We
won’t
be surrendering.”

A rumble of voices, those few yards in front of her. Apprehension, excitement, blood-lust, fear: all of it present. Some of them are looking at the way cleared to the north-west gate: that choke-point – outside of which, where the sun may already be reaching the frost-white edges of ruts and stones, is a killing-ground.

She cocked her head, short bright hair flying, eyes alight; and deliberately surveyed them.

“You shit-faced bastards, you don’t need me to tell you what to do!
Kill Gelimer!
”

It echoes off the walls as they scream it back at her.

In full armour and livery, Rochester with the Lion Affronté at her shoulder, she bellows an old familiar shout, to Lions and Burgundian men-at-arms alike:

“Do we want to win!”

“
Yes!
”

“Can’t hear you! I said do we want to
win\
”

“YES!”

“Kill Gelimer!”

“KILL GELIMER!”

Everything lost, now, in the surge of adrenalin.

“Boss!” Rickard, beside her, held up her sallet. She stopped for as long as it took him to buckle on her bevor and helmet. The sound of sakers, serpentine, and organ-guns from the east is already growing less regular, less loud. She shoved her visor up; taking as well a short, four-foot pole-hammer, carrying it loosely from her left hand.

A solid
boom!
banged out from the city wall behind her.

“Yeah! Go, Ludmilla!”

A rapid firecracker-sequence of bangs, the reverberation of a mangonel cup thudding up hard against its bar – and every swivel gun, hackbut, cannon and organ-gun on the walls around the north-west gate opens up. Ash winced, for the nearness of the fire, even muffled by her helmet lining.

But is that all we’ve got?

Under her breath, she muttered, “
Angeli, come on!
”

She swung back to face the battle line. They have worked themselves up to where she is now, to a magnificent
fuck it!
to all suicidal risks, and probably for the same reason: the fear that rips through her bowel.

“I know I can rely on you guys!. You’re too stupid to know when you’re beaten!”

A loud chant went up. For a second, she could not make it out. Then, in half a dozen languages: “Lion! Lion of Burgundy! She-Lion!” and “
The Maid!
”

Something quivered under her feet.

The ice that puddled the mud under her feet cracked. A dull, loud, earth-lifting roar went up. Rocks, masonry fragments and beams flew in a hail: every man ducking as one and putting his helmet down to the blast.

Ash lifted her head, and visor.

Beyond the cleared no-man’s-land, the whole section of city wall between the Byward Tower and the White Tower puffed out dust from between every block of masonry.

“Angeli!
Yes!
”

Angelotti and the Burgundian engineers: opening the sap, widening the diggings under the wall, all through this last night. And sweating to put powder in place, and pray that it’s enough—

The wall stood for a moment. Ash had a heartbeat’s time in which to think
If Angelotti got this wrong, it’ll fall this way, and then we’re dead,
and the wall shattered and fell.

Silently, in a second, it fell away on to the air – outwards.

The impact of it on the iron-cold earth shook her into a stagger. She got her balance, swearing. Beyond the swirling clouds of dust, sweeping chokingly back, two hundred yards of wall lay collapsed into rubble across the moat. Nothing but five or six hundred yards of ground, now, before the first trenches of the Visigoth camp.

“That’s it.” She spoke aloud, dazed, to herself; staring over the heads of the men in front of her at the two-hundred-yard gap in the wall. “Dijon isn’t defensible any more. No choice now.”

“St George!” Robert Anselm bellowed in her ear.

Thomas Morgan’s voice, under the Lion standard, yelled, “
Saint Godfrey for Burgundy!
”

Ash choked her throat clear, drew breath, hauled her voice up from her belly and screamed at brass-pitch: “
Attack!
”

IV

A trumpet shrilled right in her ear. Her helmet muffled it.

Fallen masonry grated and slid under her boots.

Her chest heaved, breath hissing dry in her throat, and her feet came down on hard mud, and she ran – sprinting among armoured men, her view of them jolting through the slit of her visor; steel-covered legs pounding, forcing her muscles to push her on across the frozen earth – out into open ground.

Bodies crowded her. She glimpsed her banner-staff to her left. The rough ground threw her. Stone or bone, she lost her footing; felt someone’s hand catch her under the arm and throw her on, not missing a beat.

A square dark shape lifted up against the sky in front of her.

Before she could think
what?
it went over and down. Her own boots were skidding on the icy wood before she recognised it as a door. Either side of her, planks and shutters slammed down on to the frozen mud. A brief sight of a six-foot-deep trench, off one side of the makeshift bridge—

That’s their trench; the first defence!

She came off the planks, Anselm and Rickard tight with her. A confused mass of liveries blocked her view – red crosses, blue and yellow. The sudden jut and curve of a longbow stave went up on her left – someone shooting – and in the noise of brass horns, shouting men, and clattering armour came the
thwick!
of bowstrings.

She cannoned into the back of the man in front, bounced off, spared a glance for the banner and Rochester – an armoured figure at her left shoulder, the escort sprinting with him – and saw nothing around her but helmeted heads, against the pale sky, and
there!
the Lion standard—

“Don’t lose it!” she bellowed, “keep going,
keep going!
”

A tent-peg caught her foot. She staggered, still running forward; a blade sliced down to her right, chopping at the frost-loose guy-ropes, only getting tangled up in the slack. She kicked the man’s sword free without a pause. Another man’s body ploughed into her, falling across her feet, face down, arms up flying over his forge-black sallet, bare sword dropping between his unarmoured legs.

She wrenched her leg free, hauled him up by shoulder and arm, one of Rochester’s men at his other side; yelled: “Keep
going!
”

Running men’s backs surround her. Nothing more than two feet away is visible. The trumpet shrilled, off to her left. The bar-slit of her vision blurred. Canvas ripped under her sabatons, someone thrust a bill down into it; she heard a choked-off squeal from underneath; flailed down with the hammer, not slowing.

Collapsing tents sagged at her feet. She caught sight of fire arcing through the sky over her head. A pitch-torch landed among the lightly armoured men at her right: men screamed, shouted curses; the torch rolled uselessly down the wet canvas and sank into the beaten earth in front of her.

The crowd of men surged forward into free movement at the same second that she thought
hard-packed earth: the camp’s roads!

Armour clatters, men jogging forward, breathing hard; two men go down on her right, one on her left—

A thin billman in a jack fell flat in front of her. She pitched over him on to her face. He screamed. Something cracked in her hand where she held the pole-hammer shaft. Someone grabbed the back of her livery jacket and hauled her on to her feet –
Anselm?
– and an arrow stuck out of the billman’s groin, waggling as he rolled, screeching, blood soaking his hose and hands.

“
Are we right?
” Anselm bellowed in her ear. He jogged beside her, bare sword in one hand. “Which
way
—”

Panic hit her:
Have we turned around
—
?
“Keep going!”

A hiss like water thrown on to hot grease came from somewhere: she couldn’t see which direction. Screams rose over the noise of orders, armour, men panting. A hollow breathlessness scraped at her lungs; her legs ached; her hot, wet breath bounced the smell of steel back off the inside of her helmet.

A gap opened up in front of her.

She saw a pounded-earth road; a lone, broken longbow.

I’m dropping behind, that’s why there’s a gap
—

She forced herself to run harder. The gap didn’t close.

Shit, I can’t do it—

Her visor’s slit blackened. Blind, she stumbled on. Scraping at it, her hand came away wet. She shoved the sallet up with a bloody glove, tilting it. The smell choked in her throat. Directly in front, men lifted bill-shafts and stabbed hooked blades down; above their heads, the great yellow-and-blue expanse of the Lion standard, next to the standard of the Burgundian Duchy.

“Get
up
there!” she yelled.
Shit-all fucking command we’re doing!

Someone crashed into her from behind – one of Rochester’s men, or Rochester himself. She stumbled, braced; her heels skidded on frozen hard-packed earth; and slid off towards the side of the road, seeing the roof of a timber barracks over helmets and plumes –
legion plumes!
The whole mass of men with her in the middle of it kept pushing, pushing to the right, moving away from something to her left—