Ash: The Lost History
Chapter 119 : His hands slammed into the wall either side of her, pinning her into the window embras

His hands slammed into the wall either side of her, pinning her into the window embrasure. She glanced down at the steel of his arms; then up into his face.

Spittle sprayed from his mouth, dotting the front of her livery tabard. "I wanted to come to Africa! I didn't want to stay in Dijon! Sweet Green Christ - What do you think happened, girl? I had John de f.u.c.king Vere saying, the Duke's sending half the company to Carthage, I need a man I can leave in command here-"

The men at the tower door stirred uneasily. He broke off, deliberately lowering his voice again.

"If you were anywhere, dead or alive, it had to be Carthage! Only I didn't have a f.u.c.king choice! I got ordered to stay here! And now I find out you were there, alive-"

Ash reached up and put her hands on his wrists, and gently tugged them down. The steel of his vambrace was slick with rain, cold against her one bare palm.

"I can see Oxford doing it that way. He'd need to take Angeli, for the guns. You'd been my second-in-command, you were in command, there wasn't anyone else he could leave behind with safety. Robert, I could have been dead. Or if not dead, then anywhere. You were right to stay here."

"I should have gone with him! I was sure you were dead. I was wrong!" Robert Anselm punched his fist hard into the flint lining of the window embrasure. He looked down at his scratched, dented gauntlet, and absently flexed his fingers. "If I'd pulled the company out with me, Dijon wouldn't be standing siege now, but I'm telling you, girl, I should have come to Carthage. For you."

"If you had," Ash said, measuring the thoughts out in her mind, "we might have taken House Leofric. With that many more men and guns. We might have destroyed the Stone Golem; we might have broken the only connection the Wild Machines have with the world - the only way they can do their miracle."

His eyes flicked towards her, small behind the incongruously long lashes.

"But then." Ash shrugged. "If you hadn't been here, Dijon might have fallen before you'd got as far as the coast - then the Duke would have been executed, and we'd know by now what it is the Wild Machines are going to use the Faris for. Because they'd have done it, three months ago!"

"And maybe not," Anselm rumbled.

"We're here, now. What does it matter what you didn't do? Robert, none of what you're telling me explains why you didn't come on the attack against the Faris today. None of it tells me why you've lost your bottle. And I need to know that, because I depend on you, and so do a lot of other people here."

She was frank, forcing herself to mention fear aloud. What she saw on his face as he turned his head away was not shame.

He muttered, "You went out expecting to be killed."

"Yes. If I had, but if I'd killed her-"

So quietly she almost missed it, Robert Anselm interrupted. "I couldn't ride out with you today. I couldn't see you get killed in front of me."

Ash stared at him.

"Not after three months," he said painfully. "I held ma.s.ses for you, girl. I grieved. I carried on without you. Then you came back. Then you ask me to ride out and watch you get killed. That's too much to ask."

The slash of rain against flint-embedded walls grew heavier. Streamlets of water dribbled down between the planks of the roof above, splattering them and the floorboards irrespectively.

I know what to say, Ash thought. Why can't I say it?

"So," he said harshly, "this is where you relieve me of my rank, ain't it? You know you can't trust me in combat any more. You think I'll be watching your back, not doing my job."

Some tension in her reached crisis. She snapped, "What do you want me to tell you, Robert? The same old stuff? 'We can all get killed, here and now, any time, better get used to it'? 'That's what we do for a living, war gets you killed'? I can sing that song! Six months ago, I'd have said it to you! Not now!"

Robert Anselm reached up and unbuckled his helmet, dipping his head to remove it. The helmet-lining and his body-heat had left his stubbled head slick with sweat. He breathed out, hard.

"And now?"

"It hurts," Ash said. She pressed her bare knuckle against the wall, grinding skin against stone, as if the physical pain could give her release. "You don't want to see me hacked up? I don't want to send you and Angeli and the others up on the walls. I brought these guys back through country like nothing on earth! I don't want them getting cut up raiding the Visigoths' camp, or whatever idea de la Marche is going to come up with when I see him. I want to hold us back, go sit in the tower, out of the bombardment - I'm starting to be afraid of people getting hurt."

There was a long pause. The rain grew louder.

Robert Anselm gave a small, suppressed snuffle. "Looks like we're both in the s.h.i.+t, then!"

As she stared at him, startled, he burst into a full guffaw.

"Jesus, Roberto-!"

The snuffle caught her by surprise. An emptiness in her chest made her choke, spurt out a giggle; laugh, finally, out loud. It would not be denied: a bubbling thing that made her sputter, wet-eyed, unable to get a coherent word out.

Shuddering to a rumbling halt, Robert Anselm reached across, putting his arm around her shoulders and shaking her.

"We're f.u.c.ked," he said cheerfully.

"It's nothing to laugh about!"

"Pair of f.u.c.king idiots," he added. His arm fell away as he straightened himself up, plate sliding over steel plate. His eyes still bright; his expression sobered. "Both of us should get out of this game. Don't think the rag-heads are going to give us the option, though."

"f.u.c.k, no . . ." She sucked at her knuckle, and a trickle of blood. "Robert, I can't do this if I'm afraid of people getting hurt."

He looked down at her, from where he stood on the flint steps. "Now we find out, don't we? Whether we're good at this when it's really hard? When you have to not care?"

Her nostrils are full of the smell of wet steel, his male sweat, sodden wool, the city's midden heaps far below. Rain spattered in, spraying her cheeks with a fine, freezing dew. As the wind gusted sharply, she and Anselm turned simultaneously towards the arrow-slit again.

"There's n.o.body in charge in here. They must know that! Why isn't she attacking now!"

She sent a stream of messengers to the ducal palace in the next hour, who came back one after another with word of not being able to get through to the new d.u.c.h.ess, to the Sieur de la Marche, to Chamberlain-Counsellor Ternant; with news of the palace being a chaotic horde of courtiers, undertakers, celebrants, priests and n.o.blemen; simultaneously torn between arranging a crowning and a funeral.

"Captain Jonvelle told me something!" Rickard added, panting, soaked to the skin in the cold wall-tower's room.

Ash considered asking why he had stopped to gossip with de la Marche's Burgundian captains; saw his bright face, and decided against it.

"Saps. The rag-heads are still mining. His men can hear them! They're still digging!"

"Hope they drown," Ash growled under her breath.

She spent her time pacing the crowded floors of the Byward Tower, among men armed and ready to go out if the walls were threatened; a lance here and there being sent out to watch, to listen, for anything that might be seen or heard in devastating rain.

Forty miles south, down that road - cold darkness, twenty-four hours a day. Given what surrounds Burgundy's borders . . . Is it any wonder we're getting s.h.i.+t weather here?

"Boss ..." Thomas Tydder, elbowed forward by his brother Simon, looked at her from under streaming dark hair. When he spoke, a drop of water hanging off the end of his nose wobbled. "Boss, is it true? Has Saint G.o.dfrey deserted us?"

Ash signalled Tydder's lance-leader to leave him be.

"Not deserted," she said firmly. "He speaks for us now in the Communion of Saints, you know that, don't you?"

Relieved and embarra.s.sed, the boy ducked his head in a nod.

Past him, Ash caught sight of Robert Anselm; Roberto's features utterly impa.s.sive. Automatically, she prodded at her soul, as a man may prod in his mouth for a tooth that has been drawn, and that has left only a tender, unfilled gap.

Stepping closer, Anselm murmured, "Is he right?"

The thunder of the falling rain has concealed her whisper, every time she speaks aloud to G.o.dfrey, to the Stone Golem, even - Christus! - to the Wild Machines themselves. Anselm knows, though.

"Still nothing I can understand," she said succinctly.

"Lion and Boar preserve us," Anselm rumbled. "Is that good or bad?"

"f.u.c.k knows, Robert!"

The frustration of waiting seared through her: she would have welcomed anything, even the antic.i.p.ated thump of siege-ladders and flood of Visigoth men over the city wall. She stomped towards the tower's open doorway.

The roar of fuse-flames and the shatter of clay pots echoed along the wall, and blue-and-yellow fire spread in a ripple across the stone surface of the parapet, and burned unhindered by the torrential rain. All the leather buckets of earth and sand that lined the walls grew sodden and too heavy to lift.

Ash signalled her men to leave it alone, and watched the gelatinous flaming mixture gradually washed over the flagstones and down the inside of the city walls. There's nothing much left to burn down there anyway: we won't have a city-fire.

Some forty minutes or so before she judged the last light might leave the iron-grey, pelting sky, two very solidly built Burgundian men-at-arms appeared in the tower doorway, with a slighter man between them.

"Boss!" Thomas Rochester, running along with them - ducking at every embrasure, stumbling into the dark shelter of the tower - bawled a report. "Euen's back!"

Heads turned in the tower room, and all along the rows of Lion men-at-arms settled in the brattices, and behind merlons, in the pouring rain; men crowding to see the small, wiry figure trot along the stone parapet in Burgundian custody.

"He's one of ours, Sergeant." Ash broke into a tremendous grin. "Son of a b.i.t.c.h ..."

The Burgundians saluted, a little cautiously, and made their way back out into the rain. Ash gave a laugh of sheer relief at the bedraggled Welshman dripping water, s.h.i.+vering in the icy wind, but with a grin brilliant enough to s.h.i.+ne through the growing twilight.

"Somebody get this idiot a cloak! Euen, in here!"

She waited as one of the baggage women handed Euen Huw a bowl of tepid soup.

"You're wet, Euen . . . really wet."

"Came in through a water-gate, didn't I?" he said gravely, soup spilling down his unshaven chin. "Down by the mills. Swum the moat. Some Burgundian b.a.s.t.a.r.d nearly nailed me with an arrow, too. They keep a good watch down there."

"Information," Ash said.

Euen Huw sighed, leaning back against the flint-embedded wall, and relaxing with immeasurable relief. "When we were out on that hunt? I got as far as the rag-head camp, see, all ready to take out their boss, but no one was with me. Then they Carthaginian b.a.s.t.a.r.ds all come back in a h.e.l.l of a rush; I got separated from my lance, and it's taken me the rest of today to sneak back out of their camp."

Ash pictures the man with his betraying livery stuffed into a bundle, eating (and no doubt, drinking) with Visigoth freemen and slaves and mercenaries; paying close attention to camp-rumour and official statements.

"Jesu Christus! Okay. First thing. Are they deploying for an attack?"

"Can't tell, boss. I had to come out through the siege-engine park, didn't see what they was doing up the north end."

Ash frowned. "Is the Faris still alive?"

"Oh, she's alive, boss, she just fell over, that's all."

"'Fell over'?"

"A G.o.d-touched fit,2 boss. Foaming! They say she's back up again now, but a bit groggy."

Unaware that she was scowling, Ash thought, s.h.i.+t! If she'd died, all our problems would be solved-!

"Someone said she gave orders she was going back to Carthage, then she cancelled them," Euen added.

A hope that Ash was not aware of holding shrivelled up, in that second.

So much for her going back and persuading House Leofric to destroy the Stone Golem.

Ash did not say G.o.dfrey? The unnerving unintelligibility in her mind, constant now for five hours, built towards unbearable tension in her.

"Her officers hate it, though." Euen's black eyes twinkled. "By what I heard, every one of their qa'ids is hoping he's got enough support to make him commander in her place."

"Well, isn't that a nice little morale problem for them?" Her mock-sympathy was transparent enough for Euen Huw to chuckle. "That's why they haven't mounted any full a.s.saults?"

"Maybe it'll be down to 'starve us out' now, boss." The Welshman looked thoughtfully at the sc.r.a.ped-clean bottom of his bowl, and carefully placed his spoon in it. "Or blow up them walls. Tell you something, though, boss. I nearly didn't make it back here. Never mind dodging Mister Mander's boys, and our Agnes Dei - the rag-heads are reinforcing their perimeter-guards all round the city."

"They can't sew the whole place up. Too much ground to cover."

Euen Huw shrugged. "Jack Price might know more, boss. I saw him in with their spearmen. He back yet, is he?"

"Not yet." Ash s.h.i.+fted, noting Rickard at the tower door, and two or three lance-leaders with him; obvious questions on their faces. "Get your lads to make you comfortable, Euen. That was some trick you pulled." She let him turn away before she said, "Good to have you back . . ."

"Oh yes." The Welshman lifted his arms, encompa.s.sing all the pounding rain, fire-scarred stone, and demolished houses of the besieged city. With breath-taking sarcasm, he said, "Can't think of anywhere I'd rather be, boss."

"Yeah, well." She grinned back at him. "You never were too bright."

Slow darkness fell: the rain continued to pound.

There was no word from the ducal palace.

The Faris isn't attacking. Why?

What have the Wild Machines done to her?

She went back at last to the company's tower, where her pages snipped her points, unsh.e.l.ling her from her armour, and slept a black sleep without dreams of boars. Before dawn she was up and armoured again, blundering around in the candlelit darkness to the noise of thunder and sleeting rain, riding out with the next s.h.i.+ft of men-at-arms to the walls.

An hour or so after an indistinguishable dawn came - the rain growing brighter - she and an escort rode back through the streets of Dijon. Visibility was no better in this morning light: rain bounced back up off the cobbles, everything more than twenty yards off was a mist. Heading towards the ducal palace, they got lost.

Her nameless pale bay war-horse picked its hooves delicately up out of s.h.i.+t. The rain that flooded the streets flooded middens, too. Ash wrinkled her nostrils at the acrid stench, guiding the horse carefully on the thin film of liquid muck that spread over the cobbles.

Jan-Jacob Clovet lifted a soaking wet arm. "Down that way, boss! I recognise that tavern."

She grinned at the crossbowman who, having been with the part of the company that stayed in Dijon, had an intimate knowledge of its inns, taverns and ordinaries. "Lead on . . ."

She spent two hours not getting in to the ducal palace to see Floria del Guiz, or the Viscount-Mayor, or Olivier de la Marche; being asked to wait among crowds of civilian and military pet.i.tioners by embarra.s.sed Burgundian men-at-arms at whom she did not choose to shout, since they were obeying the orders of people much like herself.

But at least there are people here. They haven't stolen the arms, the plate, the linen, and the furniture, and legged it over to the Visigoths. Good sign?