Ash: A Secret History (212 page)

“I don’t forgive you,” she said, with her lips barely moving.

“Nor I, you.” And at her shock: “An experiment half a century in the making, and you go and—”

“Spoil it?” Irony, or bitter black humour, just outweigh her outrage.

“Modify it.” There is still the weighing quality in his glance when he looks at her. “To prove, perhaps, only that an area of ignorance exists.”

“And … inside that area?”

“Further study.”

For a second she thinks of the house in Carthage – not of the examination and medical rooms, but the cell, and her own voice howling loud enough to drown the echoes of those same howls.

“Haven’t you studied
enough?
”

“No.” Familiar arrogance in his expression – not only for her, now, but for a young man suddenly at his side, walking up past a group of advisers that (she sees) contains both the doctor Annibale Valzacchi and his brother Gianpaulo: Agnus Dei.

“Sisnandus,” Leofric said mildly, under the plainsong of the funeral masses.

Ash recognises him now as one of the faces around the table on the cloth of gold. A thin young man, battle-hardened, with Leofric’s mouth; nothing else to mark him as the ex-commander of House Leofric except the livery.

“House Leofric’s and House Lebrija’s messengers have left for the capital,” he reported.

Be polite: this is one Leofric’s grooming for power, or he wouldn’t have had Sisnandus take over when he was feigning madness.

Assuming Sisnandus realises it was put on.

Ash could not tell from his surprisingly active expression whether he resented his lord-
amir
’s return to health and his own consequent demotion from commanding House Leofric, or whether being deputised to control the House while Leofric handles the duties of King-Caliph contents him.

Politics: all politics.
She caught the eye of a man directly behind Sisnandus, in his escort. The man looked away. Guillaume Arnisout: too ashamed to approach her after his failure to follow her back into Dijon.
And I shall talk to him too, in the next day or so.

“An alliance for the Spring campaign.” Leofric breathed warm whiteness on to the air, his gaze on the golems now loading the dead into the ground. “I might persuade the French to it. And might you bring the Turks in, as similar temporary allies? The treaty awaits only the Duchess’s signature.”

The morning of the third day of January dawned clear, very cold; the winter earth iron-hard enough that a horse should not be risked at anything more than a walk.

“Do you need to take so many of the fit men to ride out and bring Duchess Floria back?” Olivier de la Marche questioned.

Ash, on a borrowed Visigoth mare, grinned down at him from her war saddle. “Yup,” she said cheerfully.

“You are taking the better part of three hundred men. To meet Bajezet’s five hundred mounted Janissaries.”

Ash glanced back at the hundred and ten men under the Lion Azure standard, and Lacombe’s Burgundians. “We don’t know that Bajezet’s Turks won’t turn round and ride straight back to Mehmet. I’m paranoid. Peace has broken out – but I’m still paranoid. Look at it out there. No food. Dark, over the border. Breakdown of law. It’s going to be years before this country’s quiet. How would you feel if I lost her to some roaming gang of bandits?”

The big Burgundian nodded. “I grant you that.”

Over these four days, dozens of men and women from nearby burned villages and towns have trickled in to Dijon; as the news spreads out across the countryside. Some from caves in the limestone rocks, some from the wildwood; all hungry, far from all honest.

He added, “And I grant you, the men that bore the weight of the battle for our Duchess should have the honour of seeing her home to us.”

Any day now, I can be done with this ‘Lioness’ crap. Just as soon as we start planning a southern campaign.

“But
-
her?” De la Marche looked at the Faris, where the Visigoth woman rode between two of Giovanni Petro’s men.

“I prefer to have her where I can see her. She used to command this lot, remember? Okay, it’s over, but we don’t take chances.”

Not that I haven’t taken steps to encourage her co-operation.

On the edge of the crowd of citizens around the open north-east gate, she caught sight of a man in priest’s robes: Fernando del Guiz. His escort of Lion billmen flanked him in a business-like manner. He lifted a hand in blessing – although whether to his current or past wife was not apparent.

Ash glanced away, up at the sky. “There aren’t many hours of light. We won’t get to them before tomorrow, at the earliest –
if
we find ’em that easy! Expect me in three, maybe four days. Messire Olivier, since the Visigoths are being so generous with their food and drink and firewood – do you think we could have a celebration?”

“Captain-General, Pucelle, truly,” Olivier de la Marche said, and he laughed. “If only to prove the truth of what I have always said: employ a mercenary and he will eat you out of hearth and home.”

Ash rode out over the eastern bridge, passing below the Visigoth gunners camped up on the rough heights. She waved, touched a spur to the mare, and rocked in the creaking saddle, moving up the column.

Cold snatched the air from her mouth. She acknowledged, in a cloud of white breath, the new lance-leaders as she passed: Ludmilla with Pieter Tyrrell and Jan-Jacob Clovet riding with her, instead of Katherine Hammell; Vitteleschi marching at the head of Price’s billmen; and Euen Huw’s third-in-command, Tobias, leading his lance. Thomas Rochester rode led by his sergeant, Elias; bandages over his blind right eye, and a covering of forge-black steel over the still-weeping hole in his face. Other lance-leaders – Ned Mowlett, Henri van Veen – looked newly serious, newly senior.

The faces change. The company goes on.

With scouts out before and behind and to the flanks, Ash’s force rode out of Dijon, into the deserted hamlets and strip-fields, through outflung spurs of the ancient wildwood, into the wasteland.

“Do we know which way Bajezet went?” she asked Robert Anselm. “I wouldn’t like to try getting across the Alps, they’re too fucked to even think of crossing!”

“He said they’d ride north, through the Duchy,” Anselm rumbled. “Then east; Franche-Comté, over the border to Longeau in Haute-Marne, then northwest through Lorraine. Depending on how they could live off the land. He said if they had no word the war was over, he’d ride towards Strasbourg, then cut across to the east, and hope to run into the Turks coming west across the Danube.”

“How far do the messengers say they got?”

“Over the border. Into the dark. They’re on their way back from the east.” Anselm grinned. “And if neither of us is lost, we might even be on the same road!”

Towards the end of the day, flakes of snow began to fall from a yellowing sky.

“Make it as hard as you like,” she murmured under her breath as she rode, with the icy wind finding gaps between bevor and visor and numbing her face.

‘
HARD
,
YES
,
COLD
—’

‘
WINTER-COLD
,
WORLD-COLD
—’

‘—
UNTIL WINTER COVERS YOU
,
COVERS ALL THE WORLD
!’

She heard a note of panic in their voices.

Ash thought, but did not say aloud,
We’ve won. You can turn Christendom into a frozen wasteland, but we’ve won. Leofric’s Caliph. We sign this treaty, and we leave for the south – we’re coming for you.

She rode east and north, among the clink of bridles in the bitter snowy air, smiling.

The following day, after much frustrated wandering in snow-bound featureless countryside, Janissary outriders encountered Lion Azure scouts a mile outside what Ash found – as they were escorted into it – to be a burned and deserted village. Diminishing smoke still rose from the ruins of the manor house and church. Snow covered the hill-slopes, that had been covered in vines.

With visibility closing in, she rode with Anselm and Angelotti and the Burgundian Lacombe, over a frozen stream by a shattered stone bridge. Perhaps two of the eleven wattle-and-daub houses still stood, thatch weighed down under snow; and the Janissaries led them into a surprisingly neat military camp of tents around the intact buildings and a mill.

Two men came out of the high, half-timbered building. A man in armour, with a Blue Boar standard; another man taking off his helmet to disclose sandy hair and a lined face, that split into a broad grin as he saw her liveries.

“She’s safe,” he called up.

Ash dismounted, gave her helmet to Rickard, and went forward to meet John de Vere, Earl of Oxford. She said, “It’s peace.”

“Your rider told us.” His faded blue eyes narrowed. “And a bad field, before it?”

“I’m beginning to think there are no good fields,” she said, and at his acknowledging nod, added, “Florian?”

“You will find ‘brother Dickon’ by the mill’s hearth,” John de Vere murmured, grinning. “God’s teeth, madam! An Earl of England is not to be shoved aside like a peasant! What’s the matter with the woman? You’d swear she’d never seen a Duchess of Burgundy before!”

The snow ceased in the night. The next morning, the fifth day of January, they rode south-west, in column, as soon as there was light.

Riding knee by knee with Florian, she told the cloaked surgeon-Duchess, “Gelimer’s dead,” and let herself be drawn, skilfully, into what details of fighting and death of friends Florian might want to know. She found herself answering questions about the wounded: how Visigoth doctors had treated Katherine Hammell, Thomas Rochester, others.

“It’s peace,” Ash finished. “At least until they assassinate Leofric! That should give us a few months. Until spring.”

“It’ll take years. Recovering from this war.” Florian dug the folds of her cloak in around her thighs, attempting to shield her body from a wind that is colder now that the snow has stopped. “I can’t be their Duchess. Dispose of the
Ferae Natura Machinae,
and I’m done.”

The Visigoth mare wuffled, softly, at snow clogging her hooves. Ash reached forward to pat the sleek neck under the blue caparisons.

“You won’t stay in Burgundy?”

“I don’t have your sense of responsibility.”

“‘
Responsibility
’—?”

Florian nodded ahead, at Lacombe, and Marie’s men. “Once you’ve commanded them, you start to feel responsible.”

“Aw, what crap!”

“Sure,” Florian said. She might have been smiling. “Sure.”

Two miles down the track, in a valley where the ancient wildwood that covered the hills had been burned black and snow-blotched halfway up the slopes, Ash reined in at the sight of a scout coming back. A long-boned boy in a padded jack.

“Let that man through.”

Thomas Tydder shoved through to her, panting, to grip her stirrup. He gasped, “Troops up ahead. About a thousand, boss.”

Ash said crisply, “Whose banners?”

“Some of the rag-heads?” His young voice cracked, hesitant. “Mostly Germans. Main banner’s an eagle, boss. It’s the Holy Roman Emperor. It’s Frederick.”

“On his way home,” Robert Anselm remarked.

“Oh, yeah, I guess he’d have to come by this road…” Ash sat up high in her saddle, looking ahead, and back down the winding track. Snow-shrouded woods tightly flanked the road where they were. “We’ll ride on to where it widens out, pull off, and let him through.”

“Didn’t take him long to abandon the rag-heads, did it?” Robert Anselm rumbled.

“Rats fleeing from a ship, madonna.” Angelotti walked his own Visigoth mare up beside her. “He’ll be no favourite with
Amir
Leofric. He’ll be off home to settle politics in his own court.”

“Robert, go back and make sure Bajezet understands we’re giving him the road – I don’t want brawls starting.”

A hundred yards further on, Ash halted, waiting among her men; John de Vere’s household and the Janissary escort drawn up either side of the track that passed as a road.

“Boss!” Anselm galloped back, breath huffing out into the cold air. “We’ve got a problem. No scouts back. Nobody’s reported in for the last fifteen minutes.”

“Aw,
shit.
Okay, hit the panic button—” Standing up in her stirrups, Ash squinted back down the hoof-trodden snow to the point where the woods closed in tight against the road behind them. Two or three dark figures dropped down off the banks as she looked. “They’ve got outriders round behind us! Sound full alert!”

The trumpet snarked a long yowl across the snow-covered valley; she heard horses shifting behind her, units forming up, men calling orders, and Robert Anselm jerked a thumb, pointing ahead.

“They’re stopping. Sending a herald.”

Break and run? No: they’ve got the woods covered behind us. Straight on through? It’s the only way. But Florian!

Paralysed, she watched a herald ride forward from among the German troops. There was not enough wind in this rose-mist, frozen morning to stir the drooping wet banners. She recognised the man’s face vaguely –
wasn’t he at Frederick’s court, outside Neuss?
– but not the Visigoth
qa’id
officer riding with him.

“Give up the woman,” the herald demanded, without preamble.

“Which woman would that be?” Ash spoke without taking her eye off the other troops. Between a thousand and fifteen hundred men. Cavalry: European riders in heavy plate, and Visigoth cataphracts in overlapping scale-armour. The Visigoths, at least, had the look of veterans. She saw the eagles.

Those are men from the new legions, III Caralis and I Carthago, Gelimer’s legions-as-were.

With them, a black mass of serf-troops, and a solid block of German men-at-arms; not much in the way of archers—

“The woman calling herself Duchess of Burgundy,” the herald called, voice shrill. “Whom my master Frederick, Emperor of the Romans, Lord of the Germanies, will now take into his custody.”

“He
what?
” Ash yelped. “Who the fuck does he think he is!”

Exasperation and fear made her speak, but the Visigoth officer looked at her sharply. The
qa’id
brought his bay mare around with a shift of his weight. “He is
my
master Frederick – who was loyal vassal to King-Caliph Gelimer, late of glorious name; and who now takes upon himself the caliphate of the empire of the Visigoths.”