Ash: The Lost History
Chapter 120 : Back at the city wall, she had to stand aside for a procession of her men coming down,

Back at the city wall, she had to stand aside for a procession of her men coming down, two Greek Fire casualties with them; and Father Faversham treading the wet stone steps carefully in their wake.

He put his hood back from his bearded pale face, gazing down at her. "Captain, will Florian come back to the hospital soon? We need her!"

I didn't even think of that.

Every muscle in her body ached, the rain seeped in and made her silk arming doublet sodden, and a film of rust browned the Milanese white harness. She shook her head, giving a great whuf! of breath that blew the rain out of her face.

"I don't know, Father," she said. "Do what you can."

Treading up the rain-slick flint steps to the Byward Tower again, she thought, That isn't the only reason I've got to talk to Florian! s.h.i.+t, what's happening here?

Towards Nones, a runner brought her back from patrolling that corner of the city that includes the north-west gate and two towers of the northern wall. She stopped briefly with bowed head in the rain as one of the Burgundian priests led prayers for the feast of St Gregory.3 Entering the Byward Tower, she was momentarily free of the spatter of rain on armour. She climbed up the stout wooden steps to the top floor, emerging out into the water-blasted air, where Anselm and his sub-captains stood at the crenellations, in draggled Lion liveries turned from yellow and blue to black by the rain.

"It's easing off!" Anselm bellowed, over the noise of the wind.

"You say!"

Walking forward, she did feel the drenching hiss of the rain lessen. She stood beside Anselm and looked out from the tower. Across the empty air, she realised she was seeing several hundred yards more of broken earth, to the rain-shrouded movable wooden barriers protecting the Visigoth saps.

"What the f.u.c.k is that?" she demanded.

Visibility s.h.i.+fted. She became aware of the shrouded grey lumps of Visigoth barrack-tents, five hundred yards north of the city walls; and the glimmer of grey brilliance beyond that marked the Suzon river, emerging from the concealing rain.

Beyond Dijon's moat, beyond the no-man's-land of ravaged ground between the city and the enemy, something was new. Ash squinted. In front of the Visigoth tents and defences - wet, raw, obviously newly turned - great banks of earthworks surrounded the north side of Dijon.

"f.u.c.king h.e.l.l ..." she breathed.

"f.u.c.k," Anselm said, equally blankly. "Trenches?"

Men moved, as the rain lessened. Emerging from trenches, mud-soaked and exhausted, hundreds of Visigoth serfs were collecting in the open s.p.a.ces of the enemy camp. Even at this distance, she could see some men holding others up.

She could just make out that they were kneeling, to be blessed.

Brightly visible, animal-headed banners and eagles bobbed between the canvas walls. Arian priests with their imaginifers4 were walking in the muddy lanes between the tents, in procession - the sound of cornicens5 shrilled out.

As she watched, armed men came piling out of wet, sagging canvas shelters, to also stand and wait for a blessing. More than one procession! Ash realised; her eye caught by another imaginifer down towards the western bridge.]

The incessant noise of rain thinned, died. Ash stared out through her steaming breath at a light-grey sky, and high, moving cloud. At the expanse of river, river-valley, and enemy camp; sodden under the afternoon sky.

"Frigging h.e.l.l..."

Her gaze came back to the earthworks. Beside her, Anselm's sergeant snarled to keep order among the escort. Anselm gripped two merlons and leaned out between them. She turned and stared to the east, trying to take in as much of the camp outside the city as she could see.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h," Robert said flatly, at her ear.

Over on the west bank of the Suzon, men were taking covers off siege-machines; she could see crews winding the winches. Golem-crewed Visigoth trebuchets hurled rocks in high arcs - she could not see where they were landing; south, probably; stone splinters shrapnelling the streets. It was not what she looked at.

Dozens of palisade-sheltered trenches zigzagged out to the east, and to the west. She stared out at great mazes of diggings, sh.o.r.ed up in the wet; rank upon rank of them, stretching along as far as she could see.

Ash leaned herself out, to see as far as possible either side.

"Even if they dug for the last forty-eight hours-!" Anselm broke off. "It's impossible!"

"Disposable serf labour. They don't care how many hundreds they kill." Ash slammed her palm against the stone. "Jonvelle heard digging! It wasn't saps. It was this. Golem-diggers, Robert! If they used everything-"

She sees again the marble and bra.s.s of the messenger-golems in the Faris's tent: their impa.s.sive stone faces, their tireless stone hands.

"-who knows how many golems they've got! That's how they did this!"

There is no break in the walls of thrown-up earth, no interrupted part of the trench-system that now zigzags from the Suzon clear across these acres upon acres of land north of the city wall, maybe clear to the Ouche river in the east. And they have chained boats across the river at this bridge, too.

"Robert." Her voice was dry; she swallowed. "Robert, send a runner to Angelotti, and to de la Marche's ingeniatores. Ask how far these earthworks and trenches extend. I want to know if they do cover the east and the south, the way it looks like they do."

Anselm leaned back from staring westwards, at the earthworks defending the siege-engine camp. "No breaks that I can see. Christus! They must have worked through the nights-"

Ash sees it, as if she has been there: the bent backs of serfs, digging wet dirt, illuminated by Greek Fire torches. And the stone golems that man the trebuchets and the flame-throwers and carry messages, all of them set to digging; stone hands invulnerable to pain, unmindful of any need to rest.

Surrounding the entire city.

The horns of the cornicens shrilled through the wet air, and she heard the voice of a cantador chanting.

"They've got patrols going into all those defences." Robert Anselm lifted a plate-covered arm, pointing. "b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l. Looks like most of a legion."

"f.u.c.king Green Christ!"

Even at Neuss, there were men who could slip the siege lines in either direction; gather information, desert, spread treachery and rumour, raid the besiegers' supplies, attempt a.s.sa.s.sination. There always are. Always.

This isn't a normal siege.

Nothing about this has ever been normal!

"We're going to have h.e.l.l's own job getting anybody past that," Ash said. "Never mind sallying out for any kind of attack."

She turned away from the battlements.

"I'm going back to the palace. You, you and you: with me. Roberto - we have to speak to Florian."

Chapter Three.As the rain eased off, a chain of men-at-arms pa.s.sed rock-damaged beams and rafters up the steps from the city below, jamming the makes.h.i.+ft wooden struts in wherever h.o.a.rdings could be reinforced. Antonio Angelotti, apparently oblivious to the stone splinters now spraying off the outside walls, and the thud and boom of Visigoth cannon-fire, lifted his hand in greeting, standing back from his crews running cannon up the steps to the parapet.

"I wish I were an amir's ingeniator again, madonna!" He wiped dripping yellow-and-blue dyed plumes away from his archer's sallet, out of his eyes, smiling at her. "Have you seen what they've done out there? The skill-"

"f.u.c.k your professional appreciation!"

The broad excitement in his smile did not alter as another chunk of limestone slammed into the wall ten feet below the battlements, shaking the parapet under their feet.

"Make us up more mangonels and arbalests!"6 Ash raised her voice over the noise of the men. "Get d.i.c.kon - no - whoever's taken over as master smith-"

"Jean Bertran."

"-Bertran. I want bolts and rock-chuckers. I don't want us to run out of powder before we have to."

"I'll see to it, madonna."

"You're coming with me." She squinted a glance at the clearing afternoon sky; judged how fast the temperature fell now that the sky was clearing. "Rochester, take over here - unless it's a Visigoth attack, I don't want to hear about it! You keep Jussey under control, Tom."

"Yes, boss!"

A continuous shattering bombardment began to split and crack the air -great jagged rocks the size of a horse's carca.s.s; iron shot that fissured the merlons of the battlements. Ash braced herself and walked down the dripping steps from the wall to street-level, Robert Anselm, Angelotti, and her banner-bearer behind her. She hesitated for a moment before mounting up, gaze sweeping the demolished open s.p.a.ce immediately behind the walls.

"Feels more dangerous than the f.u.c.king battlements!"

Angelotti inclined his head, while settling his sallet more firmly on his damp yellow ringlets. "Their gunners have got the elevation for this area."

"Oh, joy . . ."

She touched a spur to the bay, which skittered sideways on the wet cobbles before she hauled its head around, and pointed it towards the distant, intact roof-lines of the city. Giovanni Petro and ten archers - all drawn from men who had not been to Carthage - fell in around her, bow-strings under their hats in this wet, hands close to falchions and bucklers, wincing away from the sky as they strode though the rubble. The leashed mastiffs Brifault and Bonniau whined, almost under the bay's hooves.

Robert Anselm rode in silence over the sopping ground. He might have been another anonymous armoured man, one of de la Marche's remaining Burgundians, but for his livery. She could read nothing of what she could see of his expression. Angelotti glanced up continually as he rode, letting his scrawny mount put her hooves where she might - calculating the ability of enemy gunners? The sky began to turn white, wet, clear; with a tinge of yellow on the south-west horizon. Perhaps two hours of light left now, before autumn's early sunset.

Florian. The Faris. G.o.dfrey. John Price. s.h.i.+t: why don't I know what's happening with anybody!

Inquiries have brought her no information, either, about a white-haired hackb.u.t.ter of middle age, in borrowed Lion Azure livery. If Guillaume Arnisout came into Dijon in yesterday's mad rush, he's keeping quiet about it.

What did I expect? Loyalty? He knew me when I was a child-wh.o.r.e. That isn't enough to bring anybody over to this side of these walls!

"Will we get in to see the doc?" Anselm pondered.

"Oh, yeah. You watch me."

The wreckage of homes and shops behind the gate is deserted - 'work-teams of citizens and Burgundian military have cleared paths through the burned and battered buildings, pulling them down completely where necessary. Making a maze of deserted ruins. There is no wall left standing higher than a man's height.

"I want some of the lads down here. Make this lot into barricades. If the rag-heads take the north-west gate, we might hold them if we've got something to anchor a line-fight on."

"Right." Anselm nodded.

She rode at a walk, not risking laming the gelding. If they get us, they get us. The slam and shatter of rock two hundred yards off made her flinch. Another dark object flashed through the air: high, close. She tensed, expecting a crash. No noise came.

Giovanni Petro's sharp face creased. "f.u.c.king h.e.l.l, boss!"

"Yeah. I know."

The escort straggled out in front and behind, automatically s.p.a.cing themselves. She nodded to herself. A cold wind blew in her face. Rain still ran off the wreckage of masonry and oak beams. s.h.i.+fting her weight to bring the pale gelding around the corner of a half-house, she saw four of the archers cl.u.s.tered around something - no, two things, she corrected herself - on the earth. Petro straightened up as she rode forward, hauling the mastiffs back by their studded collars.

"Must have been that trebuchet strike, boss," the Italian grunted brusquely. "No missile. A man's body; come down in two places. The head's over here."

Ash said steadily, "One of ours."

Or else you wouldn't be giving it a second look.

"I think it's John Price, boss."

Signalling Anselm and Angelotti to stay on their horses. Ash swung herself out of the war saddle and down. She side-stepped around the men picking up a severed torso and legs from shattered cobbles.

As she pa.s.sed the two crossbowmen, Guilhelm and Michael, their grip slipped. A ma.s.s of reddish-blue intestines plopped out of the body's cavity, into puddles. Fluid leaked away into the water.

Without looking at her, Guilhelm mumbled, "We ain't found his arms yet, boss. Might have come down someplace else."

"It's all right. Father Faversham will still give him Christian burial."

Beyond them, a woman in a hacked-off kittle and hose knelt in the mud, her steel war-hat tilted back, crying. Her face shone red and blubbered with weeping. As she looked up at Ash's approaching clatter, Ash recognised Margaret Schmidt.

Margaret Schmidt held a severed head between her hands. It was recognisable.

John Price.

"Look on the bright side," Ash said, more for Giovanni Petro's ears than those of the gunner. "At least he was dead before they shot him over the walls."

Petro gave a snort. "There's that. Okay, Schmidt - put the head in the blanket with the rest of him."

The young woman lifted her head. Her eyes filled again with tears. "No!"

"You f.u.c.king little c.u.n.t, don't you talk to me like-!"

"Okay." Ash signalled Petro, jerking her head. He moved reluctantly back to the work-detail s.h.i.+fting Price's body. She was aware of her mounted officers watching. She saw how the woman's fingers were pressing into the flesh of the severed head. Dried blood patched her skin and kirtle-front.

Not dead that long before they shot him over, then.

She called back to Anselm, "Need to check if he's been tortured." Could he have told them anything worth hearing? Then, more gently, turning back to Margaret Schmidt: "Put him down."

The woman's gaze went flat and cold. Anger, or fear, sharpened her features. "This is somebody's head, for Christ's sake!"

"I know what it is."

Full Milanese armour does not easily allow squatting. Ash went down on one knee beside the woman.

"Don't make an issue out of this. Don't make Petro have to hand you over to the provosts. Do it now."

"No-" Margaret Schmidt looked down into features beaten purple and b.l.o.o.d.y, but still recognisable as the Englishman John Price. She sounded on the verge of throwing up. "No, you don't understand. I'm holding somebody's head. I saw it come over us ... I thought it was a rock ..."

The last time Ash looked at John Price's face with any attention, a half-moon whitened it on the bluff above the Auxonne road. Weathered, drink-reddened, and full of a cheerful confidence. Nothing like this butcher's shop reject in the woman's hands.

Forcing a sardonic humour into her tone, Ash said, "If you don't like this, you'll like Geraint ab Morgan's disciplinary measures a lot less."

Tears ran over the rims of the young woman's eyes; seeped down into the dirt on her face. "What are we doing here? It's mad! All of you, walking around up there on the walls, just waiting for them to come again so you can fight -and now they've got us trapped in here-!" She met Ash's gaze. "You want to fight. I've seen it. You actually want to. I'm- this is somebody's head, this is a person!"

Ash slowly got to her feet. Behind her, Petro and the other archers had unwrapped somebody's bedroll; held it between four of them, now, with a burden dragging it down. The bottom of it was already stained and dripping.