Ash: A Secret History (8 page)

The Burgundian flag jerked wildly.

“They’ve seen us!”

Not clear, least of all to her now, at this speed and this restricted vision, but were they trying to cluster around one man? Move away? Gallop back breakneck towards their camp? Some mixture of all three?

In a split second four Burgundian horses wheeled and came up together and burst into a full gallop towards her.

Foam splattered back on her breastplate. Heat blinded her out of a dark blue sky. It was as real and as solid as bread to her –
those four men galloping towards me on three-quarters of a ton of horse each, with curved metal plates strapped around them, carry poles with sharpened lance-heads as long as my hand, that will hit home with the concentrated momentum of horse and sixteen-stone rider. They will punch through flesh like paper.

She has a mental flash of the lance-tip punching through her scarred cheek, her brain, the back of her skull.

One Burgundian knight hefted his lance, gripping it with his steel gauntlet, couching it on the lance-rest on his breastplate. His head was polished metal, plumed with white ostrich feathers, slit by a bar of blackness – a visor through which not even eyes could be seen. His lance-point dipped straight towards her.

A grim exultation filled her. Godluc responded to her shift of weight and swerved right. She dropped her lance down – down – down again, and took the grey stallion of the leading Burgundian knight squarely in under the jaw.

The shaft wrenched out of her hand. His horse reared, skidding forward on broken hind legs. The man went straight over his horse’s arse and under Godluc’s hooves. Trained as a war-horse, Godluc did not even stumble. Ash slid the lanyard of her mace over her gauntlet to her wrist, swung up the 24-inch shaft, and crashed the small flanged metal head square across the back of the second man’s helmet. The metal creased. She felt it give. Something crashed into Godluc’s flank: she went careering across grass – hot grass, slippery in the heat, more than one horse missing its footing – and shifted her body-weight again to bring Godluc up beside Robert Anselm. She reached over and hauled on his war-horse’s reins, and pulled him up with her. “
There!
”

The confusion of colours, red and blue and yellow liveries and guidons,
⁴
resolved itself into a mass of skirmishing men. First charge over, lances mostly abandoned, except there were the German guys from Anhelt’s crew, skimming around the edge of the fray, lances jabbing as if they were boar-sticking – and Josse in the blue brigandine reaching over from his saddle with his hand on the
back
plate of a Burgundian knight, trying to punch his dagger down into the gap between plackart and backplate – and a man down, face-down on the dirt – and a spray of red straight up her breastplate, someone hit in a femoral artery, nothing to do with her own wild swing at someone’s head – the leather lanyard breaking and her mace flying up in a perfect parabola into the sunlight.

Ash grasped the leather-bound hilt of her sword and whipped it out of its sheath. In a continuation of the same movement she smashed it pommel-first into the face of an armoured man. The strike jarred her wrist. She brought her sword round and slammed it down on his right upper arm and elbow. The impact jarred and numbed the whole length of her arm.

He swung his mace up.

The sliding plates of his arm defences squealed where her blow had crushed metal, and stuck. Jammed.

He could not bring his arm up – or down—

She struck her blade in hard towards his vulnerable under-arm mail.

Three wildly plunging horses stampeded through the mass of heaving bodies, pushing them apart. She looked left, right, wildly around: the Lion banner
there
– soul’s damnation, if I’m not sticking with the unit banner, how can I expect them to? – and the Duke’s standard about twenty yards away, close to the edge of the fight.

She gasped, “Enemy command group – in reach—”

‘
Then neutralise their unit commander.
’

“A Lion! A Lion!” Ash stood up high in the stirrups, pointing with her sword. “Get the Duke! Get the Duke!”

Something crashed only glancingly off the back of her sallet, but it knocked her face-down on to Godluc’s neck. The war-horse wheeled around and reared up. Busy clinging on, Ash felt his hooves crush something. Screams dinned in her ears, and shouted commands in French and Flemish, and
again
the Lion banner slid off to the side, and she swore, and then saw the Ducal banner jerk and go down, and the knight in front of her threw his sword point-first at her face, and she ducked, and the ground was empty—

Thirty or so horses and men in Burgundian colours galloped, routing, across the packed earth towards their camp. Only minutes. Ash thought, dazed. It’s only been minutes, if that!

The little running figures at the Burgundian camp-line resolved themselves into infantry, in the liveries of Philippe de Poitiers and Ferry de Cuisance – archers from Picardy and Hainault.

“Archers – veteran – five hundred—”

‘
If you do not have sufficient missile troops, withdraw.
’

“No chance now. Fuck it!” She jerked up her arm, caught Robert Anselm’s eye, and threw her whole weight into the gesture of
back!
“Withdraw!”

Two of Euen Huw’s lance – a disreputable bunch of bastards at the best of times – were swinging down from their horses to strip the still-living wounded. Ash saw Euen Huw himself slam a bollock dagger straight down into the visor of an unhorsed knight. Blood sprayed.

“You want to be crossbow meat?” She swung half down from the saddle and pulled the Welshman up. “Bugger off back –
now!
”

The stabbed man was not dead, he thrashed and screamed, and blood jetted up from his visor. Ash hauled herself up into her saddle, rode over him on her way to Robert Anselm’s side, and screamed, “Ride back to camp – go!”

The Lion banner withdrew.

A man in a blue livery jacket with a blue lion on it dragged himself up from under his dead horse. Thomas Rochester, an English knight. Ash sat still in the saddle for one minute, holding Godluc by pressure of her knees, until the man reached her and she pulled him up behind her.

The open ground in front of Neuss was scattered now with riderless horses that abandoned their panic and slowed and stopped.

The man behind her on her horse yelled, “Boss, ’ware archers, let’s get out of here!”

Ash picked a careful way across the ground covered by the skirmish. She leaned down, searching among the unhorsed men to see if any of the dead and wounded were hers – or were the Duke – and none were either.

“Boss!” Thomas Rochester protested.

The first Picardian longbowman passed a bush she had privately decided was four hundred yards away.

“
Boss!
”

Thomas must be rattled. He doesn’t even want me to stop and capture a stray horse, to replace his. There’s money out there on four hooves.

And archers.

“Okay…” Ash turned and rode back, fording the almost-dry stream of the Erft, and moving on up the slope. She forced herself to ride at walking pace towards the wattle barriers of the Imperial camp’s nearest gate. She thumped Godluc’s armoured neck. “Just as well we fed you up for the practise exercise.”

The gelding threw up his head. There was blood at the corners of his mouth, and blood on his hooves.

Men wearing the Blue Lion and carrying bows came crowding out of the Imperial camp – which was a wagon-walled mirror of the Burgundian camp, down on the river plain. Ash rode in through the sentinelled gap between their wagons.

“There you go, Thomas.” She reined in for the man to slide down, looking back at him. “Lose another horse and you can walk back next time…”

Thomas of Rochester grinned. “Sure, boss!”

Figures running, men from her sector of the camp, crowding up to her and Robert Anselm, yelling questions and warnings.

“The damn Burgundians are hardly going to follow us in here. Hang on.” The sun blasted down. Ash nudged Godluc a step aside from the crowd, and wrenched her gauntlet buckles open, and then grabbed for her helmet.

She had to lean her head way back to get at the strap and buckle under the chin-piece of her bevor. She yanked the buckle open. The sallet almost fell backward off her head, but she caught it, and put it down over the pommel of the saddle, and then sprang the pin on her bevor and concertina’d the laminations down.

Air. Cool air. Her throat rasped dry and raw. She straightened up in the saddle again.

His Most Gracious Imperial Majesty Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor, faced her from the war saddle of his favourite grey stallion.

Ash glanced around. A full knightly entourage rode with the Emperor. All bright liveries, and ostrich plumes on their helmets. Not so much as a scratch on the steel. Far too late to join any skirmish. She caught sight of one man at the back – by the look of him, from the Eternal Twilight,
⁵
in mail hauberk; his eyes bandaged with thin strips of dark muslin – nonetheless wearing a mildly cynical smile.

Sweat stuck her braided-up silver hair to her forehead and cheeks. Her skin felt wet and red as fire. Calm-eyed, she rode towards the Emperor, away from her shouting men. “Majesty.”

Frederick’s dry little voice whispered, “What are you doing on this side of my camp, Captain?”

“Manoeuvres, Your Imperial Majesty.”

“In front of the Burgundian camp?”

“Needed to practise advancing and retreating with the standard, Your Imperial Majesty.”

Frederick blinked. “When you just happened to see the Duke’s escort.”

“Thought it was a sally against Neuss, Your Imperial Majesty.”

“And you attacked.”

“Paid to, Your Imperial Majesty. We are your mercenaries, after all.”

One of the entourage – the southern mail-clad foreigner – stifled a noise. There was a pointed silence until he muttered, “Sorry, Your Imperial Majesty. Wind.”

“Yes…”

Ash blinked her indeterminately coloured eyes at the little fair-haired man. The Emperor Frederick was not visibly in armour, although his velvet doublet probably concealed mail under it. She said mildly, “Didn’t we ride here from Cologne to protect Neuss, Your Imperial Majesty?”

Frederick abruptly wheeled his gelding, and galloped back into the centre of the Imperial German camp with his knights.

“Shit,” Ash said aloud. “I might have done it this time.”

Robert Anselm, helmet at hip, rode up beside her. “Done what, boss?”

Ash glanced sideways at the crop-headed man; twice her age, experienced, and capable. She reached up and pulled her hairpin, and let her heavy braid fall down, unwinding over pauldrons and breastplate as far as the tassets that hung to mid-thigh, and only then noticed that her arms were dripping red to the elbow-couters, and that her silver hair was sopping up the blood.

“Either got myself into deep shit,” she said, “or got where I want to be. You know what I want us to get, this year.”

“Land,” Anselm murmured. “Not a mercenary’s reward of money. You want him to give us land and estates.”

“I want in.” Ash sighed. “I’m tired of winning castles and revenues for other people. I’m tired of never having anything at the end of a season except enough money to see us through the winter.”

His tanned, creased face smiled. “It isn’t every company can do that.”

“I know. But I’m good.” Ash chuckled, deliberately immodest, getting less of an answering grin from him than she expected. She sobered. “Robert, I want somewhere permanent we can go back to, I want to
own
land. That’s what all this is about – you get land by fighting, or inheritance, or gift, but you get land and you establish yourself. Like the Sforza in Milan.” She smiled cynically. “Give it enough time and money, and Jack Peasant becomes Sir John Wellborn.
I want in.
”

Robert shrugged. “Is Frederick going to do that? He could be mad as hell about this. I can’t tell with him.”

“Me either.” Heartbeat and breath quietened now, ceasing to thunder in her ears. She stripped one gauntlet off and wiped her face, glancing back at the dismounting knights of the Company of the Lion. “That’s a good lot of lads we’ve got there.”

“Haven’t I been raising troops for you for five years? Did you expect rubbish?”

It was a remark intended jokingly, Ash noted; but sweat poured down the older man’s face, and his eyes flinched away from hers as he spoke. She wondered,
Is he after a bigger share of our money?
and realised,
No, not Robert – so, what?

“That wasn’t war,” Ash added thoughtfully, pondering her captain. “That was a
tournament,
not a battle!”

One arm cradled his helmet; the Lion standard was socketed at his saddle. Anselm’s blunt fingers prodded under the mail standard at his throat. Its visible rim of leather was black with his sweat. “Maybe a tourney.
⁶
But they lost knights.”

“Six or seven,” Ash agreed.

“Did you hear—?” Robert Anselm swallowed. His eyes finally met hers. She was troubled to see his forehead white with sweat or nausea.

“Down there – I took one man in the face with my sword-hilt,” he said, and shrugged an explanation: “He had his visor up. Red livery, white harts rampant. I ripped half his face away, just with the cross of my sword. Blinded him. He didn’t fall, I saw one of his mates helping him ride off towards their camp. But when I hit him he shrieked. You could hear it, Ash, he knew, right then, he’d been ruined for life. He
knew.
”

Ash searched Robert Anselm’s features, familiar to her as her own. A big man, broad across the shoulders, armour bright in the sun, his shaved scalp red with heat and sweat. “Robert—”

“It isn’t the dead ones that bother me. It’s the ones who have to live with what I’ve done to them.” Anselm broke off, shaking his head. He shifted in his war-horse’s saddle. His smile was wan. “Green Christ! Listen to me. After-battle shakes. Don’t take any notice, girl. I’ve been doing this since before you were born.”