Ash: The Lost History
Chapter 161 : The ad hoc leader of Carracci's and Price's billmen shouldered hastily in be

The ad hoc leader of Carracci's and Price's billmen shouldered hastily in beside her, as escort.

"Vitteleschi," he panted. "In charge of these guys if you say so, boss."

"For now." Another spreading grin, that she can't resist: we did it, we did it! and her cheeks sting.

"Your face is red, boss," Vitteleschi said.

"Yeah?"

"Your skin." He drew a gauntlet-finger swiftly across his own cheekbones.

"Right . . ." Cooling sweat stings in the corners of her eyes, scalding her swollen lids.

Now she can see past the back rank, past an elaborate turf-roofed building -Gelimer's headquarters? - and out on to the bridge beyond.

"I want to see what Jonvelle's ..."

Bright red blood covers the ice.

Blood covers the thick frost on the sh.o.r.e. She squinted at lumps, lying on the trodden earth bank, casting man-size black shadows.

Out on the ice, men hauled dead men in, by an arm or a leg; picking up heads, leaving smears on the whiteness. Scattered corpses further downriver jutted with fietched shafts.

She counted the line on the bank. Twenty-two.

Among the dropped weapons, discarded bone skates lay.

Get into position; hold the bridge; stop Gelimer from running.

A Burgundian sergeant plodded forwards.

"Where's Jonvelle?" she asked.

"Dead." The man coughed, coughed again. "Dead, Demoiselle-Captain. Captain Berghes is dead. Captain Romont, too."

Men of note.

She turned her head, seeing men lying down on the northern side of the bridge, lying on the cold earth in awkward positions, arms flung out, legs hooked one over the other. Billmen; archers; men with only jacks and brigandines and helmets. She looked at their faces, bleeding from the mouth; the blood not running now. Fifty? Sixty?

A man sat on the ground in front of the still-warm bodies, bent over his stomach, moaning. Half a dozen Burgundian billmen walked back over the bridge towards her, supporting men and women who cried out with pain at every step; Jonvelle's banner-bearer still dragging his colours, his hastily bandaged right arm dripping, missing from the elbow down.

A severed hand almost tripped her as she stepped back.

"Vitteleschi."

"Boss."

"Send a runner over to Lord-Amir Leofric. Tell him our doctors are in the city. Tell him to send me his legionary medics."

"But-"

"Now, Vitteleschi." She turned back to the Burgundian sergeant. "Are you in command here?" And at his nod - s.h.i.+t, everyone of rank above sergeant dead ? -she said, "There won't be any c.r.a.p about not being treated by rag-head doctors, clear? Get anyone who's still alive bandaged up, or on hurdles; bring them down into the city as soon as you're ready. Go to the abbey hospices."

"Yes, Demoiselle-Captain." There was no emotion in his voice.

She turned to Vitteleschi. "Let's go."

The men parted, letting her back through; almost all drawn up to their unit pennants now. She walks among men in Burgundian livery, Lion livery; men talking in low tones, and over it all now the screaming and shrieks of wounded men, men lying out between them and the ranks of the Visigoth legions, crawling, or sprawled on their faces. One woman, helmet gone, vomited; blood spidering down over her forehead.

s.h.i.+t, is that Katherine Hammell? No: one of her archers, though- The Visigoth doctors and their a.s.sistants are already moving out of the opposing army. Some Frankish voices went up in protest. The legionary medics bend down by men, leaving some, calling hurdles for others.

They do not distinguish between their own men and hers.

"Send a runner into the town. Tell the monks to come out here and help see to these men. No, I don't know that it's safe! Tell them to get their f.u.c.king a.r.s.es out here! Get Blanche's women, too."

She looked for de la Marche's banner.

"Back to the city. The way we came in. Muster on the ground outside the walls."

She walked on past the Burgundians, Rickard with the standard, Elias with the spear, and Vitteleschi and his men behind her. Ranks parted in front of her. Thin ranks. She glanced back, saw few, very few; thought s.h.i.+t I don't believe it, we can't have lost that many! and found herself walking on to the edge of an area of blackness, even the crushed tents only charcoal frameworks, and men writhing on the baked earth.

"Get a f.u.c.king medic over here!"

One of Leofric's robed Visigoths strode past her, in a flurry of cloth, sandals cracking burnt tent-pegs and bones underfoot. The hood fell back, and she saw a woman doctor, pinch-faced; calling out to her a.s.sistants in medical Latin.

I know her.

"You." The Visigoth woman's voice sounded in front of her. She opened eyes she had not been aware of shutting; recognised the face, too, and the voice saying the gate of the womb is all but destroyed.

"I will give your slave here a salve for your eyes; they will swell, otherwise. You have missed the worst of the burn, but do not neglect-"

"f.u.c.k off." She pushed past the woman.

She stopped at a pile of men charred black, and a leg in blue hose. The body lay with head downhill, lower than its feet. The tail of a yellow-and-blue livery jacket showed, unburned. Vitteleschi gave a short order. Two billmen knelt, and turned the blackened body over. After a second, he said, "Captain Campin."

Under Adriaen Campin's body, his lance-leader was almost unburned. Willem Verhaecht's eyes were open in his florid face, not blinking at the sky's brightness. Something, most likely the hand of a golem, had punched into his body through his breastplate, and pulled one lung out on to the torn metal. She stared for ten breaths, and the red-black flesh did not twitch, did not beat.

Take teams: take out the golems: take out their Greek Fire weapons.

"Check and see if anyone's alive here."

The sunlight showed her tears pouring down Vitteleschi's lined, filthy face.

"s.h.i.+t, just do it," she said, her voice weak; and he nodded, still weeping, and bent over to pull away crisped arms and torsos, that fell apart in his hands like a roasted joint from the oven.

The Lion standard and the Burgundian standard came slowly down the slope behind her, ranks of men under them. Back down the slope: past the second swathe cut by Greek Fire, and here- A hand grabbed at her armoured knee. She looked down at the gauntlet against her poleyn, and into the face of a man recognisable only because he wore livery with a lion's head on it, his own face smashed, unrecognisable. Bubbles blew in the blood where his mouth had been. Sitting next to him, a billman held the stump of his right wrist with his left hand, his face gla.s.sy and white.

"Medics!" Vitteleschi bawled back over his shoulder. "Get the doctors down here!"

The standards came on. Men began to pick their way. The ground for ten yards was covered in foot-knights in her livery, some moving, some not, all b.l.o.o.d.y. She took one step aside and her sabaton kicked a man's arm, severed at the elbow.

A faint voice called for help. Her gaze still on the b.l.o.o.d.y, unrecognisable man - it's de Treville, it's Henri, I know his armour - she backed up, turned around, saw Thomas Rochester's crossbowman Ricau kneeling on the ground, with Thomas Rochester sitting up braced against him.

"Boss," the man Ricau said. "Help me with him, boss, I don't know what to do!"

"Rickard, get some of those f.u.c.king medics here-"

"Runner, boss - there aren't enough here yet-"

Stiff, she got down on one knee, in frozen earth now muddy with fluids and excrement. She put out her hand, and hesitated. Vitteleschi squatted beside her, a piece of bloodied cloth in his hand - torn-off livery - and reached out. Ricau took it, wiped gingerly at the man leaning back against him, and Rochester screamed. His sound pierced the semi-silence of the field; ended in something like and not like a sneeze, an explosion of blood.

"It's his eye!" Ricau wailed.

He had got his commander's sallet off. Two black oval holes streamed blood down Rochester's face and on to his mail standard, and down his breastplate. Nothing of his nose was left, only a fragment of cartilage. A shattered white splinter of bone jutted out of the red mess of his right eye - his own bone, she realised, from his shattered nose.

The men plodding back down the hill slowed, looking down at Rochester, casting numb or angry looks, trying not to breathe in the stench of s.h.i.+t that rose up from him.

"Get a grip." She licked at her lips. "Keep him still, and quiet. Put the cloth there, soak it up - let him breathe. Tom. Tom? Help's coming. We'll get you back. f.u.c.k-" she straightened and sprang up, "has anybody got any wine? Any water?"

Word went back through the crowd, men feeling at their belts; very few costrels; none, it seemed, with anything left- "Here!" Rickard turned away, yelling and waving the Lion banner at white-robed men picking their way across the earth from the ma.s.sed legions. "Over here!"

"s.h.i.+t!" She turned on her heel and walked on among Burgundian units, among broken tents now. She heard panting. Rickard and the banner caught her up. He said something. She kept going. There was an empty s.p.a.ce beside her, the men parting and going around Rickard where he knelt down. She stopped.

Two bodies lay together on the ground, among the stained canvas of a barrack-tent. This is where we broke through to the road: this is where the tent-teams did their stuff.

A small, squat body lay under his hands. Rickard rolled it over. The head flopped, neck boneless as a dead rabbit. A few strands of yellow hair stuck out under the helmet lining of the open-faced sallet. Blood had run out of eight or nine holes punched through the brigandine.

"Margaret Schmidt," another man's voice said, and she looked up to see Giovanni Petro, and the archer Paolo.

He shrugged at her implicit question. "'S all that's left of us."

White and glossy-skinned as the wounded, Rickard got back up on to his feet. The banner-staff leaned loosely back across his shoulder.

"That's Katherine Hammell," he said.

About to speak, she saw he meant not Margaret, but the other body, curled up on the mud in a foetal position. The woman groaned. An arrow stuck out of her mail s.h.i.+rt under her shoulder-blade. A sword stuck through her stomach, the point projecting out of her lower back. Her blood-soaked gauntlets clenched in her spilled intestines.

"She's still alive. Get a doctor to her." And, seeing Rickard's expression, "Who knows?"

"We need a miracle!" he wailed.

A cynical smile almost burst out of her. For a second, she could have screamed, or burst into tears. "That, we can't manage . . ."

A fast pace took her through the marching men, down on to flat ground, out towards the golem-dug trenches encircling the city. She walked stiffly, in silence.

Fewer bodies here. She stumbled on, momentarily looking across to the gap in the walls, seeing Leofric's banner, and Anselm's and Folio's; and a handful of civilians coming out over the demolished wall- "Look out!" Rickard screamed.

Her foot came down on something soft. She staggered and caught her balance. The man under her feet shrieked and burst into sobs. Black-feathered arrows jutted out of him; alive enough to make a noise, she thought; and then, Euen-!

The wiry, dark man looked bulky in mail and livery jacket. Bloodstains blotted out the Lion. She knelt down, counted arrow in arm, arrow in face, two arrows in thigh and said, "Euen, hold on!"

"s.h.i.+t, boss!" Rickard groaned.

"If he can shout, he'll make it-" Her hand, patting him down, examining by touch, froze. She awkwardly peeled back his livery, and hauberk, and took her hand away thick with hot, red blood pouring out of his groin or belly, she couldn't see where. "Get somebody here."

Rickard sprinted.

She stayed pressing her whole weight against his wound until Visigoth medics arrived, saw him on to a hurdle, screaming at the men to get him to a hospital tent. She stood up, hands dripping, watching the last of her force moving past her and over the improvised bridges of the ditch.

The defences are manned again now: Visigoth soldiers in coats-of-plates and helmets gazing at her, over mail aventails. Soft, accented voices went up into the still air; and a n.a.z.ir snapped a command. She felt how many of the bows were surrept.i.tiously lifted, how many of them exchanged glances, thinking close enough to kill the c.u.n.t.

She reached out a hand to Rochester's sergeant, Elias, and took the heavy-laded spear from him. An unsteady oak door and two window-shutters groaned under her weight as she walked across the ditch. Rickard stumbled after her.

Yeah, we made it across the siege trenches.

Out of the walls, bridge the ditch, flatten the tents, find the roads through. And they must have found Gelimer by his banner. I knew he'd have to put it up, to command. I knew he'd break and run. And Jonvelle stopped him on the bridge. Some billman or foot-knight killed him. I knew they would.

I knew.

Who needs the Lion's voice?

She glanced back, seeing more Visigoth faces at the trenches. The Lion banner above her, she felt herself their focus; like a player on a pageant wagon, visible to thousands.

Men and women still limped off the field behind her, forming up in stunned silence into their muster-lines. Except that it is not a line, it's a ragged clump of men here, another there; nothing that even looks like a continuous line; and counting by eye she cannot make it come to more than five hundred men.

Stunned. As if this were a defeat, not a shocking, beyond-hope victory.

Behind the ones who can walk come the ones who can walk with help: Pieter Tyrrell with his arm over Jan-Jacob Clovet's shoulder, Saint-Seigne with two foot-knights carrying him sitting on crossed bill-shafts; an archer with eyes that are a mask of blood, being led. Two more blinded men behind her. A billman, blood squelching in his shoe; no fingers on one hand. A stumbling column of wounded men, mostly still carrying weapons c.o.c.ked back over their shoulders, coming towards her; so that she sees them as an apparently motionless ma.s.s, crusted blades bobbing gently up and down above their heads.

And then men face-down on hurdles, or with a man at ankles and armpits, gripping and hefting their dead-weight. People who lie still; blood trickling down. People who cry, shriek; appalled, frantic, desolate screams. Fifteen, twenty, forty; more than fifty; more than a hundred. Monks and Visigoth doctors trot between them, giving quick diagnoses; moving to those they can help.

The thump of a shod horse's hooves made itself felt through the ground. A Visigoth archer on a chestnut Barb wheeled, a few yards from her. "My lord Leofric has all ready for you."

The man sounded not just respectful, but frightened.

"Tell him ... I'll be there."

She stood long enough for the sergeants to bring her the count. Olivier de la Marche moved to her side, on the frozen earth, his great red-and-blue standard behind him; and a few of the centeniers - Lacombe; three more. Saint-Seigne. Carency. Marie. All there are left?

"Demoiselle-Captain?" De la Marche sounded numb.

"Three hundred and twelve Burgundians killed. Two hundred and eighty-seven wounded. There are-"

Rickard, Vitteleschi, and Giovanni Petro looked at her.

"There are ninety-two of us not killed or wounded. A hundred and eight dead."

The Italian captain of archers said, "s.h.i.+t." Rickard burst out crying.