Ash: A Secret History (9 page)

This was not hyperbole but a pure statement of fact. Ash, more sanguine, nodded. “You should talk to a priest. Talk to Godfrey. And talk to me, later. This evening. Where’s Florian?”

He appeared slightly reassured. “In the surgeon’s tent.”

Ash nodded. “Right. I want to talk to the lance-leaders, we were all over the place down there. Take company roll-call. Find me back at the command tent. Move it!”

Ash rode on through the young men in armour flinging themselves down from their war saddles, shouting at each other, shouting at her, their pages grabbing their war-horses’ reins, the babble of after-battle stories. She banged one hard on the backplate, said something obscene to another of her sub-captains, the Savoyard soldier Paul di Conti; grinned at their yells of approval, dismounted, and clattered up the slope, her steel tassets banging on the cuisses that covered her thighs, towards the surgeon’s tent.

“Philibert, get me fresh clothes!” she yelled at her bob-haired page-boy, who darted away towards her pavilion; “and send Rickard, I need to get unarmed.
Florian!
”

A boy threw down more rushes as Ash ducked in through the flap of the surgeon’s pavilion. The round tent smelled of old blood and vomit, and of spices and herbs from the curtained-off area that was the surgeon’s own quarters. Thick sawdust clotted the floor. The sunlight through the white canvas gleamed gold.

It was not crowded. It was all but empty.

“What? Oh, it’s you.” A tall man, of slight build, with blond badly cut hair flopping over his eyes, looked up and grinned from a dirty face. “Look at this. Shoulder popped right out of its socket. Fascinating.”

“How are you, Ned?” Ash ignored the surgeon Florian de Lacey for the moment in favour of the wounded man.

She has his name to hand: Edward Aston, an older knight, initially a refugee of the
rosbifs
’
⁷
royal wars, a confirmed mercenary now. The armour stripped off him and scattered on the straw was composite, bought new at different times and in different lands: Milanese breastplate, Gothic German arm defences. He sat with the wheat-coloured light on his balding head and fringe of white hair, doublet off his shoulders, bruises blacker by the minute, his features screwed up in intense pain and greater disgust. The joint of his shoulder looked completely wrong.

“Bloody warhammer, weren’t it? Bloody little Burgundian tyke come up behind me when I were finishing his mate. Hurt my horse, too.”

Ash ran over Sir Edward Aston’s English lance in her mind. He had raised for her service one crossbowman, one fairly well-equipped longbow archer, two competent men-at-arms, a bloody good sergeant and a drunken page. “Your sergeant, Wrattan, will look after your mount. I’ll put him in command of the rest of the lance. You rest up.”

“Get my share, though, won’t I?”

“Bloody right.” Ash watched as Florian de Lacey wrapped both hands around the older man’s wrist.

“Now say ‘Christus vincit, Christus regnit, Christus imperad’,” Florian directed.

“Christus vincit, Christus regnit, Christus imperad,” the man growled, his outdoor voice too loud in the confines of the tent. “Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus.”

“Hold on.” Florian planted a knee in Edward Aston’s ribs, yanked at full strength—

“
Fuck!
”

—and let go. “There. Back in its socket.”

“Why di’nt you tell me that was going to hurt, you stupid bugger?”

“You mean you didn’t know? Shut up and let me finish the charm.” The blond man frowned, thought for a second, and bent to murmur in the knight’s ear: “
Mala, magubula, mala, magubula!
”

The older knight grunted, and raised thick white eyebrows. He gave a sharp nod. Ash watched Florian’s long strong fingers firmly bind the shoulder into temporarily immobility.

“Don’t worry about it, Ned,” Ash said, “you’re not going to miss much fighting. It took Frederick-our-glorious-leader seventeen days to march the twenty-four miles from Cologne to here, he’s not exactly raring for glory.”

“Sooner have my pay for
not
fighting! I’m an old man. You’ll see me in my fucking grave yet.”

“Fucking won’t,” Ash said. “I’ll see you back on your horse. About—”

“About a week.” Florian wiped his hands down the front of his doublet, smearing the red wool, red lacing, and white linen undershirt with dirt. “That’s it, except an arm fracture, which I fixed up before you got here.” The tall master surgeon scowled. “Why don’t you bring me back any interesting injuries? And I don’t suppose you bothered to recover any dead bodies for anatomising?”

“They didn’t belong to me,” Ash said gravely, managing not to laugh at Florian’s expression.

The surgeon shrugged. “How am I ever going to study fatal combat injuries if you don’t bring me any?”

Ned Aston muttered something under his breath that might have, been ‘fucking ghoul!’

“We were lucky,” Ash stressed. “Florian, who’s the arm fracture?”

“Bartolomey St John. From van Mander’s Flemish lance. He’ll mend.”

“No permanent cripples? No one dead? No plague outbreak? Green Christ loves me!” Ash whooped. “Ned, I’ll send your sergeant up here for you.”

“I’ll manage. I’m not dead yet.” The big English knight glowered at Florian de Lacey in disgust as he left the surgeon’s tent, something of which the anatomist-surgeon remained apparently oblivious; and had done as long as Ash had known him.

Ash spoke to Florian, watching Ned Aston’s retreating back. “I haven’t heard you use that charm for a battle injury before.”

“No… I forgot the charm for bloodless injuries. That one was for
farcioun.
”

“‘Farcioun’?”

“It’s a disease of horses.”
⁸

“A disease of—!” Ash swallowed a very un-leaderlike snuffle of laughter. “Never mind. Florian, I want to get out of this kit and I want to talk to you.
Now.
”

Outside, the sun hit like a dazzling hammer. Heat stifled her, in her armour. Ash squinted towards her pavilion tent and the Lion Azure standard limp in the airless noon.

Florian de Lacey offered his leather water bottle. “What’s happened?”

Unusually for Florian, the costrel did indeed contain wine thoroughly drowned by water.
⁹
Ash doused her head, careless of spillage over steel plate. She gasped as the warm water hit. Then, swallowing greedily, she said between gulps, “Emperor. I’ve committed him. No more sitting around here – hinting to the Burgundians that Neuss is a free city – and Herman of Hesse is our friend – so would they please go home?
War.
”

“Committed? You can’t tell with Frederick.” Florian’s features, pale and fine-boned under the dirt, made a movement of disgust. “They’re saying you nearly got the Burgundian Duke. That right?”

“
Damn
near!”

“Frederick might approve of that.”

“And he might not. Politics, not war. Aw, shit, who
knows?
” Ash drank the last of the water. As she lowered the bottle, she saw her other page Rickard running towards her from the command tent.

“Boss!” The fourteen-year-old boy skidded to a halt on dry earth. “Message. The Emperor. He wants you at his tent. Now!”

“He say why?”

“That’s all the guy told me, boss!”

Ash stuffed her gauntlets into her inverted helmet and tucked the helmet under her arm. “Okay. Rickard, get my command lance together.
Fast.
Master surgeon, let’s go. No.” She halted, boot-heels skidding on glassy summer grass. “Florian.
You
go and change out of those clothes!”

The surgeon looked amused. “And I suppose I’m the only one?”

Ash surveyed her armour. The shining metal was brown now with drying blood. “I can’t get out of harness in time. Rickard, get me a bucket!”

A few minutes saw her armour sluiced down, head to foot; the warm water, even the dampness of her soaked arming doublet, welcome in the noonday heat. Ash wrung out her thick, yard-long mane of hair between her hands, flung it dripping over her shoulder, and set off at a fast stride for the centre of the camp, her squire running back to the Lion Azure camp with her messages.

“You’re either up for a knighting,” Robert Anselm growled, as she arrived, “or an almighty bollocking. Look at ’em!”

“They’re here to watch something, all right…”

An unusually large crowd waited outside the Emperor’s four-chambered striped pavilion tent. Ash glanced around as she joined them. Noblemen. Young men in the V-fronted laced doublets of high fashion, with particoloured hose; bareheaded and with long curls. All wore breastplates at the least. The older men sweated in pleated full-length formal gowns and rolled hats. This square of grass in the camp centre was clear of horses, cattle, women, bare-arsed babies playing, and drunken soldiers. No one dared infringe the area around the yellow and black double-eagle standard. It smelled, nonetheless, pleasantly of war-horse droppings and sun-dried rushes.

Her officers arrived.

The sun dried her from her armour through to her arming doublet. Enclosed in form-fitting metal, she found the padded clothing underneath drank up all her sweat; left her not so much hot as unable to get air into her lungs.
I
would
have had time to change. It’s always hurry-up-and-wait!

A broad, squarish, bearded man in his thirties strode up, brown robe flapping about his bare feet. “Sorry, Captain.”

“You’re late, Godfrey. You’re fired. I’m buying a better class of company clerk.”

“Of course. We grow on Trees, my child.” The company priest adjusted his cross. He was deep-chested, substantial; the skin around his eyes creased from far too many years spent under open skies. You would never have guessed from his deadpan expression how long Godfrey Maximillian had known her, or how well.

Ash caught his brown-eyed gaze, and tapped a bare fingernail on the helmet tucked under her arm. Metal clicked impatiently. “So what do your ‘contacts’ tell you – what’s Frederick thinking?”

The priest chuckled. “Tell me someone in the last thirty-two years who’s ever known that!”

“Okay, okay. Dumb question.” Ash planted her spurred and booted feet apart, surveying the Imperial nobles. A few of them greeted her. There was no movement from inside the tent.

Godfrey Maximillian added, “I understand there are six or seven fairly influential Imperial knights in there now, griping to him about Ash always thinking she can attack without orders.”

“If I hadn’t attacked, they’d be griping about contract soldiers who take the money but won’t risk their lives in a fight.” Ash added, under her breath, nodding to the only other contract commander outside the Emperor’s tent, the Italian Jacobo Rossano, “Who’d be a mercenary captain?”

“You would, madonna,” her Italian master gunner, Antonio Angelotti, said. His startlingly fair curls and clear-skinned face made Angelotti stand out in any crowd, and not just for his proficiency with cannon.

“That was a rhetorical question!” She glared at him. “You know what a mercenary company is, Angelotti?”

Her master gunner was interrupted by the arrival of an only-slightly cleaner and better dressed Florian de Lacey, on the heels of Ash’s remark.

“Mercenary company? Hmm.” Florian offered, “A troop of loyal but dim psychopaths with the ability to beat up every other thick psychopath in sight?”

Ash raised her brows at him. “Five years, and you still haven’t got the hang of being a soldier!”

The surgeon chuckled. “I doubt I ever will.”

“I’ll
tell
you what a mercenary company is.” Ash jabbed her finger at Florian. “A mercenary company is an immense machine that takes in bread, milk, meat and wine, tentage, cordage and cloth at one end, and gives out shit, dirty washing, horse manure, trashed property, drunken vomit and broken kit at the other end. The fact that they sometimes do some
fighting
is entirely incidental!”

She stopped for breath and to lower her voice. Her eyes gazed around the men there as she spoke, picking out liveries, identifying noble lords, potential friends, known enemies.

Still nothing from the Emperor’s tent.

“They’re a gaping maw that I have to shove provisions into, each day and every day; a company is always two meals from dissolution. And money. Let’s not forget money. And when they
do
fight, they produce wounded and sick men who have to be looked after.
And
they don’t do anything useful while they’re getting well! And when they
are
well, they’re an ill-disciplined rabble who beat up the local peasantry. Argghhhh!”

Florian offered his costrel again. “That’s what you get for paying eight hundred men to follow you.”

“They don’t follow me. They allow me to lead them. It’s not the same thing at all.”

In quite a different tone, Florian de Lacey said quietly, “They’ll be fine, Ash. Our esteemed Emperor won’t want to lose a sizeable mercenary contingent of his army.”

“I just hope you’re right.”

A voice not many feet behind her said, completely unselfconsciously, “No, my lord, Captain Ash isn’t here yet. I’ve seen her – a butch, mannish creature; bigger than a man, in fact. She had a waif of a girl with her, when I saw her in the north-west quarter of our camp – one of her ‘baggage train’ – whom she caressed, quite disgustingly! The girl was shrinking from her touch. That is your ‘woman-soldier’ commander for you.”

Ash opened her mouth to speak, registered Florian de Lacey’s raised eyebrows, and did not turn to correct the unknown knight. She moved a few steps away, towards one of the older Imperial captains in yellow and black livery.

Gottfried of Innsbruck inclined his head to Ash. “Good skirmish.”

“Hoped we might get reinforced from the town.” Ash shrugged. “But I guess Hermann of Hesse is not coming out to attack.”

The Imperial knight Gottfried talked with his eyes on the entrance to the Emperor’s pavilion. “Why should he? He’s held out eight months without our help, when I wouldn’t have given him eight days. Not a little free city, against the
Burgundians.
”