Ash: A Secret History (64 page)

She met the eyes of Floria del Guiz and said with utter certainty, “You’re jealous.”

“You think I want a baby.”

“Yes! And you never will have.” Conscious of saying the unforgivable, powered more by fear than rage, Ash plunged on in razor-edged sarcasm: “What are you going to do, get Margaret Schmidt pregnant? A niece or nephew is as close as you’ll get.”

“That’s true.”

“Uh.” Ash, expecting her rage, was confused. “I’m sorry I said it, but it
is
true, isn’t it?”

“Jealous.” Floria looked at Ash with an expression that might have been sardonic humour, or relief, or betrayal; or all three. “Because I won’t cut a baby out of your belly. Woman, I don’t want to see you bleed to death or die of childbed fever; but for Christ’s sake
have
the thing! You won’t die. You’re strong as a bloody peasant, you can probably drop it one day and get back on your war-horse the next. Don’t you understand that getting rid of it is
dangerous?
”

“A battlefield isn’t
safe!
” Ash remarked with asperity. “Look, I’d as soon not go to a city doctor, I don’t trust them, money-grubbing bastards, and besides, there isn’t time to get one now. I don’t want to use the remedies they use on the wagons unless I have to. And I trust you because you’ve patched me up every time someone’s hacked a chunk out of me!”

“Holy Saint Magdalen! Are you completely stupid? You – might – die.”

“Am I supposed to be impressed? I train for that every day. I’m fighting tomorrow!”

Floria del Guiz opened her mouth and shut it again.

Unhappy, Ash said, “I don’t want to give you an order.”

“An order?” Floria’s face, in profile, dripped a clear drop from her eye, that still ran from Ash’s blow. She didn’t look at Ash. “And what are you going to do if I
don’t
perform an abortion? Throw me out of the company? But you’ll have to do that anyway.”

“Christ, Florian, no!”

Her hand came up and grabbed Ash’s arm. “It isn’t ‘Florian’, it’s ‘Floria’, I’m a
woman.
I love other women!”

“I know that,” Ash said, hastily. “Look, I—”

“You don’t know it!” Floria let go of Ash’s arm. She stood for a moment with her head lowered, and then turned her face to Ash. “You don’t have the slightest idea, don’t tell me you do. What am I supposed to do when people go mad around me, because I’ve lain with a woman? What? I can’t
fight
them. I couldn’t hurt them even if I did! I
have
to pretend I’m something I’m not. What if someone decides to burn me because I’m a woman-lover and I practise medicine?”

Ash shifted uncomfortably.

Floria del Guiz held out her hands, palm up.

In the cool air and lantern light, Ash saw familiar white marks on the surgeon’s fingers.

Floria said, “These are burn scars. Old burns. I got them trying to drag – trying to drag something out of a fire, after it was much too late, because I wanted just something, a relic, a memory, if I couldn’t have her alive, with me, with me.” Floria pushed her hands across her face, sweat and tears dampening her hair. “Some man
pissed
on you once and you think you know about this? Don’t you tell me you know what it’s like, you thug, because you
don’t
know! You’ve never been defenceless in your life!”

The empty air echoed to her shout. Outside the tent, the guards stirred. Ash walked to the tent-flap, to give quiet orders.

Floria del Guiz spat, “So now you’re having a baby. So welcome to being a woman!”

“Christ, Floria,” Ash protested.

She didn’t let Ash finish. “Maybe you shouldn’t have been so damn eager to fuck my brother!”

Ash could only look at her. Between amazement and the shock of feeling kicked in the gut, she couldn’t put her thoughts in order to find an answer, couldn’t say anything at all.

“I’d do anything for you! I always have. But I won’t do this!” Floria’s voice scaled up an octave. “Don’t just sit there!
Say something!
”

Ash stared in panicked silence; tried to speak; then dropped her gaze from the woman’s fierce face and stared down at the rush-strewn forest-earth.

Clear and decisive, the thought came into her head:
I should tell Fernando.

But if it’s a son, he’ll take it away from me.

And I can’t have it, anyway.

More than one woman’s ridden into battle with a belly on her.

Yes, and more than one woman’s got a fever after the birth and died, and the surgeons no use to her at all.

Equally clearly, a realisation came to her: I won’t have it
because
it’s his.

Floria’s voice snarled, “
Ash!
”

Ash ignored her.

Very cautiously, she began to consider the thought of carrying the baby to term.

It isn’t that long out of my life. Months. Bad timing, though, if we’re facing war … well, women have fought wars like this before. They’d still follow me. I’d make damn sure of it.

The strength of her fear of her body changing out of her control, the sheer enormity of that physical reality, left her amazed.
But when it’s done? Born?
Conscious that she was, to some degree, indulging herself in a pretty dream, Ash imagined a son or a daughter.

At least then I’ll have blood kin. Someone who looks like me.

With that, a chill quite literally moved the hairs on the back of her neck.

You’ve already got someone who looks like you.
Exactly
like you.

And who knows what I’d give birth to? Some deformed village idiot? Christ and all the saints, no! I can’t give birth to a monster.

It must already be more than forty days… I’ve got to get rid of it now, before it quickens.

Before it gets a soul.

The woman’s voice abruptly broke her concentration:

“I’m off. What am I supposed to do? Wait for you for ever? Sit around here until those assholes out there make up their minds whether a dyke doctor is just fine and dandy?
Keep
your damn company.”

Floria turned and walked away, to the tent-flap; not slowing as she went out.

“
And
your baby! It’s your problem, Ash. Solve it. You don’t need me. Ash doesn’t need anybody! I’ll be with the Duke’s Surgeon-General on the field tomorrow – where I can do what I trained for.”

Before dawn, with the woods scarcely light enough to move without stumbling, Ash went out with the other commanders to walk the ground for the battle.

Air moved against her face. Condensation gathered on the inside of her helmet’s visor, smelling of rust and armouries. Her boots skidded on the wet leaves. She almost barged into the Earl of Oxford, standing back a little from the main group of the Duke of Burgundy and his officers on the Dijon-Auxonne road. A growing paleness on her left showed her John de Vere’s silhouette.

Ash asked quietly, “Is the Visigoth army still in position? What’s the Duke planning?”

“They are. The Duke will fight this field outside Auxonne,” Oxford murmured succinctly. He added, “Their campfires are where the scouts reported, near enough. A half-mile south, on the main road. You and I, madam, are to take the left of the line, with his other mercenaries.”

“He doesn’t trust us, does he? Or he’d put us on the right, where the fighting’s heaviest.”
¹³
Ash slid her hand down to adjust the buckle of her cuisse: even with an extra hole bored in the strap, the borrowed leg armour did not fit her very well. “Will he at least let us try a flying wedge attack? We could take out the Faris.”

“The Duke says not: she will have battle doubles
¹⁴
on the field.”

The silhouettes of shoulders moved against the light. Here the road and river swung suddenly away east, on her left hand, away from the shallow slope blocking the river valley to the south. Men moved off the road, on to rough pasture, striding up the hill in front of them. The sky was barely brighter than the earth. Ash realised de Vere’s brothers were with him; peered over her shoulder for Anselm – present – and a bleary-eyed Angelotti.

“Okay,” Ash said steadily to Oxford, as they stumbled into the cold morning, “so we might have to take her out several times! Let me put a snatch-squad together, my lord. Go round the flanks with about a hundred of us, we could be in and out and away. It’s been done.”

“The Duke requests that I bring your company to the field, under his banner,” Oxford said, voice bleak. “We do as we’re commanded. And hope that by this evening it is no longer necessary to think about raiding Carthage.”

The ground lifted under her feet. Dew blackened the leather of her boots, and the lower part of her scabbard. The air remained chill, but clear: no more rain.

“My lord, my sources—” Godfrey’s contacts now reporting direct to her “—say they’re still bringing up supplies, in the dark. We might have caught them on the hop,” Ash said. “Some of their wagons are being pulled by their messenger-golems. Maybe they’re desperate!”

“God send they are overstretched,” de Vere said, grimly for a man with a force that outnumbers his enemy.

Boots skidding in mud, Ash topped the hill, her breathing harsh in her own ears; and peered out across the dimness.

A spur of hill here jutted into the river valley. They stood on its shallow western knoll, with the ancient wildwood hard up on her right hand. No way to move troops through it. Scouts reported not walking the ground so much as scrambling ten feet above it on clotted deadfalls.

This should bring us north of their camp – wonder if the heralds have gone down yet? Well, at least we found each other…! Could have wandered around this wilderness for
days.

The temptation to murmur, to that interior part of herself that hears a voice,
Battle commander, Visigoth army, probable location? is
almost irresistible.

Could the
machina rei militaris
answer that one? Would it lie? Would she know I’ve asked—?

No point wondering. Act as if she would. It’s the only safe thing to do.

They set off down the slope in front. She clattered in the Duke of Burgundy’s wake, aware that most other commanders would ride the ground, but that Duke Charles wants to know what this hill is like for men on foot, and men with gun-carriages. She was mildly impressed; cheered. Rapid, low-voiced conferences went on ahead of her. She squinted into the weak light of dawn.

Her strides ate up ground, going downhill, and her calves ached. At the foot of the long slope, she noted that the ground was squashy – thickets and reeds blocked the dawn, that side: marshes, maybe? On this edge of the river?

The pre-dawn greyness did not grow any brighter.

A skyline of hills and thick forest, ahead. A faint bell split the darkness, maybe from the abbey in Auxonne. She had the thought,
Are the other side out walking the territory, right now? If we met
—
!

The officers and Duke’s men moved off, Cola de Monforte saying something quietly. She heard only
perfect choke-point.
Walking back around the eastern end of the spur, they met the road beside the river. Movement became easier with the ground sure underfoot. Ash glanced up at the steeper eastern end of the spur, overhanging the Dijon road.

If we set up on the ridge, that’s going to be the left of the line; that’s where we’ll be. If they try to move past on the road, we’ll hit their unprotected backs. If they try and flank us up that cliff— well, I don’t know about the rest of the Burgundian army, but we’re going to be fine!

Except that what they’ll do is prep for combat, and come straight up that southern slope at us…

The voice of Duke Charles of Burgundy said, “My lords, we shall return to camp. It is clear in my mind. We will fight as soon this saint’s-day morning as we may. Sidonius favour us!”

A decision!
Ash applauded wryly, in her own mind.

“Guys,” she said.

“Boss?” Robert Anselm came instantly to her side in the morning darkness; Antonio Angelotti and Geraint ab Morgan treading on his heels.

The Earl of Oxford gave a stream of rapid orders; Dickon, George and Tom de Vere moved off about his business; he turned and said something to Viscount Beaumont, who laughed. An electricity spread throughout the group of men: knowing, now, that today will see a chance of being killed or of winning honour, money, survival.

“God pardon me if I have ever offended thee,” Ash said formally, and reached up and embraced Robert Anselm. He gripped her, stepped back in the dew-soaked turf at the edge of the road, and said:

“As I hope to be forgiven, so I forgive thee, in God’s name. We’re going in, aren’t we?”

Ash gripped Angelotti’s forearm, whacked Geraint across the shoulders. Her eyes were bright.

“We’re going in. Okay. This is where the Lion Azure does what it’s paid to. Get them into battle array.”

She speeded up, finishing the circuit, walking back towards the northern tree-line and the camp faster than was safe in the dim dawn, and caught up with the Earl of Oxford. She pointed to the Duke of Burgundy:

“If he won’t let us take out the Faris… My lord Earl, I want to consult with you about the tactics of this battle. I have an idea.”

George de Vere, behind her now, sardonic, said, “The four most terrifying words in the language, a woman saying
I have an idea.
”

“Oh, no.” Ash smiled sweetly at him, in the dim light. “There are two words much more frightening – boss saying,
I’m bored.
You ask Fl— ask my surgeon.”

John de Vere seemed to be smiling, under his raised visor

“We’ve got numbers,” she said. “I don’t think the Turks will come in on our side: they’re observers. We’ve got guns. We ought to win it – but the Visigoths beat the Swiss and no one survived the field to tell us how they did it. Just rumours: ‘They fight like Devils from the sulphurous Pits’…”

“And?” the Earl of Oxford prompted.

“My lord,” she said steadily, “look at that sky. There’ll be little or no sun today. When we fight this field, we’ll be fighting under the shadow of their darkness. Cold, dim – a winter battle.”