Ash: A Secret History (24 page)

The fine whistle of an arrow split the air, followed by two hundred more. Ash watched a rider in Visigoth livery on the ridge throw up his arms and fall, crossbow-bolt flights feathered in under his heart.

A crowd of spearmen on the ridge ran back.

Anselm yelled, “
Keep the line!
”

Ash, out to one side, saw more Visigoths on horses, small recurved bows in their hands. She muttered, “About sixty men, they can shoot from horseback.”

‘
If they rally, charge them with knights. If they run, retreat.
’

“Uh huh,” she murmured thoughtfully to herself, and signalled the Lion Azure standard to pull back. She signalled the column to mount up. A half-mile at walking pace, with her eyes on the Visigoth cavalry archers – who didn’t follow.

“I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all…”

“Something’s odd.” Robert Anselm reined in beside her as the men-at-arms rode past, on rising ground. “I expected the bastards to come down on top of us.”

“They’re outnumbered. We’d cut them to pieces.”

“That never stopped Visigoth serf-troops before. They’re an undisciplined shower of shite.”

“Yeah. I know. But they’re not acting like it today.” Ash raised her hand and brought the sallet’s visor down a touch, shading her eyes with the metal peak. “Thank Christ he went – I swear I thought my lord husband was going to order us to charge straight into that lot.”

Far ahead, towards Genoa’s burning buildings, she saw standards. Not pennants, but Visigoth flags crowned with what might – the distance being deceptive – be gilded eagles.

A movement beneath the eagles caught her eye.

Seen on its own, it could have been a man. Seen with the Visigoth commanders on the distant moorland, it was plainly a head taller. The sun shone on its ochre and brass surfaces. She knows that silhouette.

Ash watched as the clay and brass golem begin to stride out to the south-east. It walked no faster than a man, but its ceaseless stride ate up the ground, never faltering over rocks or banks, until she lost it in the haze.

“Shit,” she said. “They’re sending them out as messengers. That means this isn’t the only beach-head.”

Anselm tapped her on the shoulder. She followed his pointing arm. Another golem strode off, this one heading north-west, along the coastline. As fast as a trotting man. Slower than a horse – but untiring, needing no food or rest, travelling as well at night as in the day. A hundred and twenty miles in twenty-four hours, and carrying, in stone hands, written orders.

“Nobody’s prepared!” Ash shifted in her war saddle. “They didn’t just fool
our
spy networks, Robert. The banks, the priests, the princes… God help us. They aren’t after the Turks. They never
were
after the Turks…”

“They’re after us,” Robert Anselm grunted, and wheeled to ride with the column. “It’s a fucking invasion.”

III

By the time they caught the hastily loaded baggage train on the low slopes of the foothills, the head of the column was already vanishing up into a cliff-topped valley. Ash rode between a hundred archers and a hundred men-at-arms. Wheel ruts churned the road and the low gorse, the last abandoned wagons marking where the pack animals had left the high road. Ash squinted through air that began to waver as the morning grew hot. Probably a river flowed down through the valley, in winter. Dry, now.

Robert Anselm, Euen Huw, Joscelyn van Mander, her pages and the steward Henri Brant clustered under her banner, as two hundred armed men rode by. Tack jingled.

Ash thumped her fist on her saddle. Her breath came short. “If they’re burning Genoa, they’re prepared to be at war with Savoy, France, the Italian cities, the Emperor … sweet Green Christ!”

Van Mander scowled. “It’s impossible!”

“It’s
happening.
Joscelyn, I want your lances up front as the vaward. Euen, take charge of the archers; Robert, you have the mounted men-at-arms. Henri, can the pack animals keep up?”

The steward, in ill-fitting padded armour now, nodded his head enthusiastically. “We can see what’s behind us. They’ll keep up!”

“Okay, let’s go.”

Not until she rode into the steep-sided valley, and its shelter, did she realise how the increasing breeze had drummed in her ears, out on the moor. The silence here now echoed with horses’ hooves, harness jangling, men muttering. Sun slanted through sparse pines on the valley floor. The promontories either side were thick with pine trees, broken deadfalls. And thick with undergrowth, at the cliff edges, where the trees didn’t rob briars of sustenance.

Her neck prickled. With complete clarity, Ash thought.
Shit, that’s why they didn’t attack; they’ve bounced us back into an ambush!
and opened her mouth to yell.

A storm of eighty arrows blacked the air. A throng of shafts hit home, all in Joscelyn van Mander’s lead lance. For a second it was as if nothing had happened. The whirring whine died. Then, a man screamed, metal flashed; another thicket of shafts jutted from horses’ flanks, from men’s shoulders, from the visor of a sallet; seven horses screeched and reared and the head of the column became a chaos of men running, dismounted, trying to control fear-stricken horses.

Ash lost The Sod’s rein. The grey gelding bucked and sprang straight up, all four hooves off the ground, came down on age-hardened pine-tree roots – six black-fletched arrows sticking out of his neck and front quarters – and she felt the bone of his hind leg shatter.

She went sideways out of the saddle as he went down. One glimpse let her see men up high on the cliff-steep sides of the valley, shooting wicked small recurved bows, and the next mass arrow-flight shrieked down through the sparse trees and took Ned Aston’s rearward lance into rioting horses and falling men and sheer, bloody chaos.

She hit the foot of a tree with a metallic crunch, hard enough to compress the plates in her brigandine. A dismounting man hauled her up on to her feet – Pieter? – her personal banner gripped in his other hand.

Her grey horse screamed. She leapt back from his threshing smashed legs; stepped in, sword in hand – how? when? – and slashed open the big vein in his throat.

The whole length of the valley seethed with screaming, rioting horses. A bay mare broke past Aston, running towards the moorland.

An arrow took it down.

Every exit blocked.

She steadied herself, body clamped tight up to the sticky resinous trunk of a pine tree, visor slammed up, staring around in desperation. A dozen or more men down, rolling on the dirt; the rest wheeling their mounts, looking for cover – but there is no cover – riding towards the foot of the seventy-degree slope – but no way up it. Bodkin-headed arrows thunked into flesh, bristled from the hastily roped towering loads on the mules.

The way ahead – blocked. A huddle of men, van Mander down; six of his men trying to drag him under the lip of the dry river bed, as if six inches of earth could protect them from a hundred murderous, razor-sharp arrowheads—

Big Isobel, hauling on the reins of a mule, threw up her arms and sat down. A wooden shaft, as thick round as a man’s thumb, stuck through her cheek, and through her mouth, and out of the back of her skull. Vomit and blood spilled over her brown linen bodice. The metal arrow-head dripped.

Ash slammed her visor down. She risked a look up at the cliff edge. Light glinted from a helmet. An arm moved. The tops of bows were a moving thicket. One man stood up to shoot, and she could barely see his head and shoulders. How many up there: fifty? A hundred?

Coldly realistic, she thought: Girl, you’re not so special that you can’t die yet, shot to pieces in some stupid ambush in some nameless hills. We can’t shoot back, we can’t get up the sides, we’re fish in a barrel, we’re dead.

No, we’re not.

That simple: not even time to formulate a question for her saint’s voice. She grabbed the banner-bearer’s arm, her idea fully formed, plain, obvious and dirty.

“You, you and you; with me,
now!
”

She ran fast enough that she outdistanced her banner-bearer and two squires, thumping down behind the baggage mules as the Visigoth arrow-storm shrieked overhead.

“Get the torches out!” she screamed at Henri Brant. Her steward stared, gap-toothed mouth wide open. “The fucking pitch-
torches
, now! Get Pieter!”

She grabbed Pieter Tyrrell as Rickard ran back with him, all of them crouching crammed behind the squealing pack mules. Her banner-bearer gripped the pole in gauntleted hands, and ducked his head against arrows. The air stank of mule dung, and blood, and the fierce resin of the chine’s forested slopes.

“Pieter, take these—” she dug in her pack for flint and steel, could only jerk her chin at the bundles of torches with pitch-soaked heads, that Henri Brant slashed free from binding cords with his dagger. “Take these and take six men. Ride like hell
up
this valley, ahead of us – look like you’re running away. Climb the slope. Fire the trees on the cliff-top. Drag the torches on ropes behind your horses. As soon as there’s a fire, cut around north-west. If you don’t pick us up on the north road, wait for me at the Brenner. Got all that?”

“Fire? Christ, boss, a forest
fire?
”

“Yes. Go!”

Flint and steel sparked. The soft tinder in the box glowed, red and black.

“It’s done!” Pieter Tyrrell swung around, crouching, to yell out half a dozen names.

Ash scuttled across the slope. A Visigoth crossbow bolt blew an explosion of splinters off a pine trunk, a yard ahead of her and the banner. She flung up an arm, cringing. Splinters thwicked across the velvet front of her brigandine. The soles of her riding boots skidded on the needle-covered slope. She slammed down beside Robert Anselm, behind a semi-fallen pine. “Have them ready to attack when I give the word.”

“That’s a fuck of a slope! We’ll be cut to pieces!”

Ash glanced around at sweating, swearing men-at-arms, mostly in brigandines and long riding boots over leg armour, and carrying polearms that suddenly seemed clumsy under the low, stark branches of dry pines. Their faces turned to her. She slitted her eyes and stared up the gorge-like slopes of the dry river chine. You couldn’t ride up this slope, or run up it: too steep. Weapon in one hand, the other to help scramble up. And so few trees for cover, so exposed, exhausted before you hit the men up there in cover—

“You’re going in under cover of bows and arquebuses. Those fuckers will be too busy to see you coming!” It was a lie, and she knew it. “Robert, watch me for the signal!”

Ash sheathed her sword. Its scabbard rattled against her legs as she flung herself again across empty ground. Someone shrieked up on the top of the valley. Puffs of dust went up from the earth, and she caught her foot on an arrow buried to the fletching, and stumbled behind the second line of braying pack mules to the archers.

She was grinning so hard it hurt.

“Okay!” Ash slid to a halt beside Euen Huw,
de facto
captain of archers. “Oil pots and rags. Try for fire-arrows.”

Henri Brant, unexpectedly still with her, yelled, “We don’t have proper fire-arrows here! We weren’t expecting a siege, so I didn’t bring any!”

She slammed her arm around the steward’s shoulders. “Don’t matter! Do your best. With luck, we won’t need it. Euen, how are we on ammunition?”

“Hackbutters are low. Bolts and arrows enough, though. Boss, we can’t stay here, we’re getting cut to pieces!”

A man in Blue Lion livery screamed and ran down the slope, arms flailing, towards the bottom of the valley. His boots skidded in the dry river course. A dozen arrows thunked into his legs. He hit dirt, rolled, took a bolt in the face, and lay thrashing and screeching.

“Keep shooting! Hard and fast as you can. Give those fuckers up there hell!” She grabbed Euen by the arm. “Hold on for five minutes. Be prepared to remount and
go
when I give the signal!”

Ash put her free hand on her bollock dagger, half intending to drop down to the dry river course and the dying man. A figure in padded armour and wearing a woollen hood shot past her. Ash, halfway back to the men-at-arms, her group dodging from tree to tree, suddenly thought
why the hood?
and realised she knew the long, loping run:
Fuck, that’s Florian!

She took one look over her shoulder, and saw the surgeon with the man’s arm over her shoulder. He –
she
– bodily dragged the man under fallen, dead pine branches. Arrows chipped and thunked into the wood.

Come on, Pieter! Two more minutes and I’m going to
have
to attack, we’re being slaughtered down here!

Acrid air rasped her throat.

The skyline above burst into flame.

Ash coughed. She wiped streaming eyes, and looked up at the cliff-top. One minute a wisp of black smoke, the air shimmering hard enough to make seeing anyone up on the cliff-top impossible. The next – red fire spouted from branches, from brush, from the deadfalls of old, dry pine branches. A resin-impregnated roar blasted the air.

She had an instant’s vision of a man with his recurved bow raised, a hundred black-fletched arrows whistling between the trees – one magnificent roll of smoke and super-heated air—

Red flames roared up, obliterating the tree-line at the top of the cliffs.

Up there on the cliff-top, from further back, came the terrified screeching of horses.

Her eyes streaming, she prayed,
Thank you, Christ, I don’t have to try to send people up that slope!

“Okay, let’s go!” Her voice was hard, loud, and shrill. It carried over the squeals of mules, the shrieks of mutilated men, the last two shots from an arquebus.

She seized the arm of the standard-bearer, pushing him and the twelve-foot Blue Lion flag on up the valley path ahead.

“Mount up! Ride!
GO!
”

The world was a chaos of men on horses, men running for horses, the thrum of arrows, a piercing long shrill scream that brought her gut up into her throat, the creaking whine of mules, and men she knows yelling orders: Robert Anselm with the men-at-arms mounted up and moving under the Lion standard, Euen Huw cursing the archers in Welsh and fluent Italian; the pack-beasts moving, Father Godfrey Maximillian hauling them, with one body slumped over the front of a framework packed eight foot high with bundles; Henri Brant with two arrows jutting out from his ribs under his right arm.