Ash: A Secret History (52 page)

If the messenger-golems are true, what else is?

– Pierce

  Message: (Pierce Ratcliff)

Subject: Ash, documentation

Date:    16/11/00 at 12.08 p.m.

From:    Longman@

Pierce –

If ‘Angelotti’ and the rest of the manuscripts aren’t true, what else ISN’T?

– Anna

PART FIVE

17 August–21 August AD 1476

The Field of Battle

I

Dijon resounds to the thundering of watermills.

Afternoon’s white sunlight blazed on distant yellow mustard-flowers. Rows of trimmed green grape-vines hugged the ground between brown strips of earth. Peasants thronged the strip-fields. The town clock struck a quarter to five as Ash eased Godluc between a tailback of ox-wains, and on to the main bridge into Dijon.

Bertrand stuffed her German fingered gauntlets into her hand, and fell back breathless beside Rickard, in the dust lifted up by the horses. Ash rode away from members of the company who had gone off scouting and now clutched at her stirrups, breathlessly reporting back, to take her place between John de Vere and her own escort.

“My lord Oxford.” Ash raised her voice, and lifted up her head as they came in over the bridge to the town gate. Scents raised the hairs on the back of her neck: chaff, overheated stone, algae, horse-dung. She shoved her visor up, and bevor plate down, to get the benefit of the cool air over the river that served as a moat.

“I have the latest estimate of the Visigoth forces outside Auxonne,” the Earl said, “they number nearly twelve thousand.”

Ash nodded a confirmation. “They were twelve thousand when I was outside Basle. I don’t know the exact number of their two other main forces. The same size, or larger. One’s in Venetian territory, scaring the Turks from moving; the other one’s in Navarre. Neither can get here within a month, even with a forced march.”

A burning smell of hard-spinning mill-wheels filled the air, together with a faint golden haze. The mail shirts of the guards on the gate, and the linen pourpoints, hose, and kittles of the men and women bustling through it, were tinted with the finest chaff. The taste of it settled on her tongue.
Dijon is golden!
she thought; and tried to let the heat and smells relax the cold, hard fear in her gut.

“Here is our escort.” John de Vere reined in, letting his brother George go ahead to speak with the nine or ten fully armoured Burgundian knights waiting to take them to the palace.

De Vere’s weathered, pale-eyed face turned to her. “Has it occurred to you, madam Captain, that his Grace the Duke of Burgundy may offer you a contract with him, now. I cannot finance this raid on Carthage.”

“But we have a contract.” Ash spoke quietly, her voice just audible under the grinding of mill-wheels. “Are you telling me to find some pretext for breaking my word – which
I
didn’t give – to an exiled, attainted English Earl, because the reigning, extremely rich, Duke of Burgundy wants my company…?”

John de Vere looked down from his saddle. What she could see of his face, with his close-helm’s visor pinned up, was a mouth set in a firm line.

“Burgundy is wealthy,” he said flatly. “I
am
Lancaster. Or Lancaster’s only chance. But, madam, I am at the moment the leader of three brothers and forty-seven men, with enough money to feed them for six weeks. This, weighed against the employment of the Burgundian Duke, who could buy England if he chose…”

Ash, deadpan, said, “You’re right, my lord, I won’t consider Burgundy for a minute.”

“Madam Captain, as a captain of mercenaries, the most precious goods you have to sell are your reputation, and your word.”

Ash snorted. “Just don’t tell my lads. I’ve got to sell
them
on the idea of Carthage…”

Ahead, George de Vere and the Burgundian knights seemed to be exchanging deferential greetings and arguments about precedence of riding order, in about equal measure. Dijon’s cobbles felt heat-slick under Godluc’s hooves. She reached forward and put a reassuring hand on his neck, where his iron-grey dapples faded to silver. He threw up his head, whickering with what, Ash realised, was a desire to show off in front of the people of Dijon. Around her, the city’s whitewashed walls and blue slates roofs glittered.

Ash spoke over the louder noise of grinding mills. “This place looks like something out of a Book of Hours, my lord.”

“Would that you and I did, madam!”

“Damn. I knew I was going to miss my armour…”

George de Vere turned in his saddle, beckoning the party forward. Ash rode beside the now smiling Earl of Oxford, into the centre of the group of Burgundian knights. They moved off, their horses making slow time through the cobbled streets despite the escort in Charles’s red-crossed livery; winding between throngs of apprentices outside workshops, women in tall headdresses buying from stalls in the market square, and ox-carts grinding their continual way to the mills. Ash pushed her visor up, grinning back at the cheerful waves and the comments called by the subjects of Duke Charles.

“Thomas!” she hissed.

Thomas Rochester dug his heel into his bay gelding, and rapidly rejoined the party. A young woman with bright eyes watched him go, from where she leaned out of an overhanging second-storey window.

“Put her down, boy.”

“Yes, boss!” A pause. “Any time off for R&R?”

“Not for you…” A touch to Godluc brought her back to the Earl of Oxford’s left flank.

“I think you would never break a
condotta,
madam. And yet you consider it, now.”

“No, I—”

“You do. Why?”

It was not the tone, or the man, to let her get away without an answer. Ash snarled in a whisper, glancing covertly at the Burgundian knights:

“Yes, I say we should raid Carthage, but that doesn’t mean I’m not afraid of it! If I remember right from Neuss, Charles of Burgundy could have upwards of twenty thousand trained men here; and supplies, and weapons, and guns, and, if I had a choice, I’d like
all
twenty thousand of them between me and the King-Caliph! Not just forty-seven men and your brothers! Is that a surprise?”

“Only a fool is not afraid, madam.”

The rhythmic pounding of mill-wheels drowned speech for a minute. Dijon sits between two rivers, the Suzon and the Ouche, in the arrow-head spit of land where they join. Ash rode along the river path. The walls here enclosed the river within the town. She watched the slats of watermill wheels rise up into the sun, dripping diamonds. The water under the wheels was black, thick as glass, and she could feel the pull of it from where she rode among the knights of the Duke’s court.

They rode past the nearer mill.

Speech impossible, Ash did nothing for a moment but study the streets they rode through. A cluster of men in shirts and rolled-down hose, fixing an ox-wain’s wheel, moved aside. They removed their straw hats, Ash saw, but neither rapidly nor fearfully; and one of the Burgundian riders reined in and spoke to their foreman.

Ash glimpsed an open space ahead, between diamond-paned-windowed buildings. The street opened out into a square – which she saw, as she rode into it, was a triangle. Rivers flowed past on the two sides, this land being at the very confluence of both. The high city walls gleamed, and the men on guard there leaned on their weapons and looked down with interest. They were well-armed, clean, with the kind of faces that have not suffered famine in the near past.

“You understand, your Grace,” Ash said, “that rumours are getting out – that I hear voices, that I
don’t
hear voices, that the Lion Azure are really still paid by the Visigoths, because I’m the Faris’s sister. That sort of thing.”

De Vere looked at her. “You have no wish to be abandoned as a bad risk?”

“Exactly.”

“Madam, the responsibilities of a contract work both ways.”

De Vere’s battle-hardened voice gave his words no particular emphasis, but Ash found herself painfully and fearfully abandoning a habitual cynicism. The sun dazzled her eyes. Ash felt her voice catch.

As steadily as she could, she said, “Their general, their Faris, she’s slave-born. She doesn’t make any secret of it. And I … look like her. Like two pups in a litter. What does that make me?”

“Courageous,” the Earl of Oxford said gently.

When he met her gaze, she looked straight ahead, with hard eyes.

He said, “Because your method of hiding from this is to put a plan to me, to attack the enemy in their strongest city. I could have reason to doubt your impartial judgement over that, if I chose to take it as such – but I do not doubt it. Your thoughts chime with mine. Let us hope the Duke agrees.”

“If he doesn’t,” Ash said, gazing at the richly apparelled knights in the escort, “there’s damn-all we can do about it. We’re broke. This is a very rich, very powerful man, with an army outside this city. Let’s face it, your grace, two orders and I’m his mercenary, not yours.”

Oxford’s voice snapped, “I have responsibility for my brothers and my affinity!
¹
And for someone I have taken under my protection!”

“That isn’t quite the way most people regard a
condotta
…” Ash reined back to where she could look at him. “But you do, don’t you?”

Watching him, she was confirmed in her opinion that people would follow John de Vere well beyond the bounds of reason. And only wonder why afterwards, when it would be far too late.

Ash took a deep breath, feeling unusually constricted by the brigandine she was wearing. Godluc snorted breath from wide nostrils. Ash automatically shifted her weight back, halting him, and looked for what had worried her mount.

Two yards ahead, a line of ducklings fluttered up from the river’s edge, and pattered across the cobbled space. Preceded by a mother duck, they fluttered, squawking, towards the mill on the far side of the triangle, and the other, swift-flowing river.

Twelve Burgundian knights, an English Earl, his noble brothers, a viscount, a female mercenary captain and her escort all reined in and waited until nine ducklings passed.

Ash shifted up from leaning over in the saddle, about to speak to John de Vere. She found herself looking up at the ducal palace of Dijon. Soaring white Gothic walls, buttresses, peaked towers, blue slate roofs; flying a hundred banners.

“Well, madam.” The Earl of Oxford smiled, slightly. “The court of Burgundy is like no other court in Christendom. Let’s see what the Duke makes of my
pucelle
and her voices.”

Dismounting, she was met by a sweating Godfrey Maximillian, on foot; who fell in with the rest of Thomas Rochester’s men, behind her banner.

Inside the palace, the size of the space enclosed by stone stunned her. Soaring thin pillars jutted up, between long thin pointed windows; all the stonework fresh, white, biscuit-coloured; and with the late afternoon sun on it, looking, she thought, like fretworked honey.

She shut her gaping mouth and stumbled in John de Vere’s wake, a clarion call ringing out and a herald shouting their names and degrees, loud enough to shake the banners hanging down each side of the hall; and a hundred faces turned, men of wealth and power, looking at her.

They were all dressed in blue.

She gazed rapidly at sapphire, aquamarine and royal blue silk, at indigo and powder-blue velvet, at the rolled chaperon hats as deep as the midnight sky, and the long robe of Margaret of York, the colour of the Mediterranean sea. Her feet took her in the Earl of Oxford’s wake, quite independently; and Godfrey bent his bearded head close, whispering rapidly in her ear:

“There are Visigoths here.”

“
What?
”

“A deputation. An embassy. No one is sure of their status.”

“Here? In
Dijon?
”

“Since noon, I hear.”

“Who?”

Godfrey’s amber eyes moved away to survey the crowd. “I could not buy names.”

Ash scowled. She ignored the dazzling profusion of jewelled badges on chaperon hats, gold and silver linked collars around noble necks, brass folly-belly sewn to younger knights’ doublets, tissue-thin linen veiling the noble women.

All, all in blue,
she suddenly realised. With a blue velvet brigandine she was moderately in the fashion, or at least, enough in it not to offend. She spared a glance for the four de Vere brothers and Beaumont, all of the noble English in full harness, a blaze of steel against the velvet and silk robes of the Burgundian court.

“Godfrey,
who’s
here? Don’t tell me you don’t know. You’ve got a damn network of informers out there! Who’s here?”

He deliberately dropped back a pace on the chequered tiles. Without causing confusion, and drawing attention to herself, there was no way she could continue to question him. She clenched her fist, for a second wanting nothing more than to hit him.

“Your Grace,” she said, without looking at the Englishman’s face, “did you know there’s a Visigoth delegation here?”