Ash: The Lost History
Chapter 108 : "Cold everywhere, now . . .""Yeah. f.u.c.king rag-'ead c.u.n.t. Wh

"Cold everywhere, now . . ."

"Yeah. f.u.c.king rag-'ead c.u.n.t. Why'd she have to bring her lousy weather with her?"

Ash let the discussion ramble, apparently studying the map; studying instead the maps of faces, chiaroscuro in the firelight.

"We're here for the moment," she said flatly, at last. "We'll keep the Burgundians up to date with this. For one thing, our contract obliges us to do it."

The Wild Machines can't think I'll keep quiet - can they?

"And for another - who's going to know that we told?" Ash grinned briefly at her men. "At best, it'll be just one of a whole set of confused rumours - won't it?"

"Oh yes, boss." Euen Huw looked pious. "You can rely on us."

Morgan grunted, "We got a rep for breaking contracts after Basle, does it matter now?"

"Yes."

His gaze slid away from hers. More importantly, she let her flat gaze take in the faces of the men near him - Campin, Raimon, Savaric - to see if he had any support.

"f.u.c.k it, they think we're oath-breakers already," Morgan grumbled.

"I won't argue with you there. But we're not. We're professionals."

The Welshman said, "Screw the Burgundians! Who cares?"

"He's got a point, madonna," Angelotti said. She looked at him in surprise. He said, "Screw the Burgundians. Why is it our responsibility to kill the Faris?"

Not a flicker of her expression, or his, either thanked him for putting the question where it could be answered, or acknowledged that that had happened.

"We need a debrief on all this info," Ash said, as a page brought her a joint-stool, and she took her place behind the trestle table. "We're going to go through this in detail, now. I want to know if anybody's fought against any of these legions before; what you know about them; what the commanders are like, anything. I want to know if anybody's got any suggestions, ideas. But first I'll give you the answer to your question."

Geraint ab Morgan pushed forward to the table's edge. "Which is?" he demanded.

Ash looked up at him calmly.

"Which is - screw the Burgundians, all right - we might as well be behind these walls, trying to work out a way to kill my sister. Because where do you suggest we go, Geraint? When the Wild Machines kill the world, it won't help us to be in England, four hundred miles away from Dijon - not one little bit."

Chapter Six.The toing and froing of interminable messages at last over, Ash discovered the long November night to be almost past: Lauds sung three hours ago by Dijon's striking town clock, and the office of Prime about to begin. Sleeplessness gritted in her eyes.

Striding through Dijon's cold streets, she berated herself: Come on girl, think! I may not have long. Is there anything else?

Under her breath, she whispered: "Current position of Gothic forces overall commander?"

In her head, the machina rei militaris, in G.o.dfrey's voice, said - Dijon siege camp, north-west quadrant, four hours past midnight; no further reports.

Still, nothing drowned out that interior voice.

Why not? Is it the Faris - the Wild Machines don't want to scare her? Or is this something else?

De la Marche's clerk hurried at her side, between squat masonry houses with deep shadowed doorways, in the filth of the winding streets, as light faintly sifted down from the pre-sunrise grey east. There were men and women, their children bundled at their sides, sleeping tucked against walls, and against iron-bound oak doors. Horses and pack mules neighed, tethered outside stables turned over to refugees.

"We have everything," the clerk gasped. His stoppered ink bottle bounced at his belt; his woollen cloak was blackened with earlier attempts to stop and write. His face was white with lack of sleep. "Captain - I shall report to the Duke's Deputy - their forces' positions-"

"Tell him I don't expect to be able to do this again. Not now they know their communications are compromised."

A church bell rang a few streets away. All of them - Ash, the clerk, her escort - simultaneously halted and listened. Ash gave a sigh of relief. The normal call to ma.s.s: no slow, funereal bells.

"G.o.d preserve the Duke," the clerk murmured.

"Report back to de la Marche," Ash ordered. She started off again, boot soles slipping on the frozen filth underfoot. The leaning buildings closed out all but the slightest dawn light. Thomas Rochester thrust to the front of his lance with a pitch-torch. Serfs and villeins come into the city for refuge half-woke, moved out of the way; one or two recognised the banner, and Ash heard a "hero of Carthage!" float across the cold air.

Rochester said, "You sure this is a good idea, boss?"

"Piece of p.i.s.s," Ash said, between the grunts that trotting through Dijon's streets in unaccustomed full armour forced out of her. "The Duke's on his last legs, we're going into the enemy camp under a supposed truce, and they have every reason I can think of to kill us out of hand - yeah, sure, Thomas: this is a brilliant idea!"

"Oh. Good. Glad you said that, boss. Otherwise I might have started to worry."

"Just worry enough to stay alert," Ash said sardonically. "And ask yourself if they'd rather have the 'hero of Carthage' and the Faris's b.a.s.t.a.r.d sister alive or dead?"

The dark Englishman, at the head of the escort, gave her a completely careless grin. "You can hear what she says privately to her War-Machine? My money's on them using crossbows the second we're in range! I wouldn't take chances, boss. Why a.s.sume they're stupider than I am?"

"That would be almost impossible."

Thomas Rochester and the men behind him guffawed.

"She won't kill me. Yet." I hope. Not when I'm the only other person who hears the Wild Machines.

Of course, she may not give that the importance that I do.

Rochester was aware, she saw, of the likelihood of his own death; and no more bothered about it than he would have been before the field of battle. She thought, It is the hardest thing in the world, to give orders that will mean other people may die.

"The Faris wants to talk to me," Ash said. "So look on the bright side. They maybe won't kill us until she has."

"That's all right, boss," one of Rochester's sergeants said: a fair-haired English man-at-arms carrying her personal banner. "You can talk the hind leg off a donkey . . . !"

Her armour, tied, strapped and buckled about her, gave the usual feelings of invulnerability. She began to move with it as if it had never been gone. She had tied down her scabbard to her leg, with a leather thong, so that she could draw her sword single-handed if necessary: one of Rochester's lance carried her axe.

A thread of coldness tickled in her gut.

"Nice kit." She rapped the knuckles of her gauntlets against the sergeant's cuira.s.s. All twenty of Rochester's men had armoured up, borrowing what fitted from other men.

"Showing the rag-heads what we got," the sergeant grunted.

Walking between them, surrounded by men mostly taller, and all in armour, Ash felt a fallacious sense of complete security. She smiled to herself, and shook her head. "All this metalware, and what happens? Some little oik shoves a pointy stick up your backside. Never mind, lads. All wearing our mail braies,15 are we?"

"Don't plan to turn our backs on them!" Rochester snorted.

The atmosphere of expectancy was electric: an exhilaration born out of the certainty of risk. Ash found herself striding energetically forward across the narrow square leading to the northern sally gate. Black rats, and one stray dog, scuttled away into the dimness at the clatter of armour.

"G.o.dfrey, has she spoken to the Stone Golem again?"

This time the voice of G.o.dfrey Maximillian sounded quietly inside her head. - Once, only. She ignores Carthage: their words to the machina rei militaris grow frantic. She has asked only if you speak to it. . . where you are, what your men are doing; if there is to be an attack.

"What does it - do you - tell her?"

- Nothing but what I must, what I can know, from the words you speak to me. That you are on your way to her. For the rest, I know nothing of it; you have not told the machina your forces, nor asked for tactics.

"Yeah, and I'm keeping it that way."

She spoke quietly, aware that the men closest around her would be hearing what she said over the clatter of armour and scabbards. "The Wild Machines?"

- They are silent. Perhaps their will is to let her think they are a dream, an error, a story.

Ash's personal banner hung from its striped staff, a chill breeze not enough to stir the blue-and-gold cloth. The Burgundian troops at the sally-port recognised it, coming forward with their own torches.

"Madonna." Antonio Angelotti walked out of the gloom by the wall, noise announcing a cl.u.s.ter of grooms and beasts behind him in the dimness. "I've arranged horses."

Ash surveyed the riding horses; most ill-conditioned from the long siege, and with their ribs visible to count. "Well done, Angeli."

While Rochester confirmed pa.s.swords and signals, she remained silent, hands cupping the points of elbow corners, her eyes fixed on the eastern sky. Grey clouds lightened above the pitched roofs, and the merlons of the city wall above. One of the nearer buildings - a guild house - still smoked, blackened and burned out, from the alarm that had turned out most of the Burgundians in this quarter to fight the fire. The weather had warmed from frost to bitter-cold rain, in the night; now it began to freeze again.

"Thank Christ for bad weather!"

Angelotti nodded. "If this were summer, we would be burned out, and have pestilence besides."

"G.o.dfrey, is there any later report of where she is?"

- She has not told me where she is since Lauds. "This is a dumb thing to do, isn't it?"

- If this were merely a war, child, you would not do it. In eight years I have known you be reckless, bold, and adventurous; but I have not known you waste lives.

Another one of Rochester's men-at-arms glanced sideways at her, and she gave him a rea.s.suring grin. "Boss talking to her voices. That's all."

The young man-at-arms had a white face, under his visor, but he gave her a sharp, efficient nod. "Yes, boss. Boss, what have they got for us out there? What should we watch out for?"

f.u.c.k only knows! About ten thousand Visigoths, I should think . . .

"Those recurved bows. They don't look like much, but they're as fast as a longbow, even if they don't have the penetrating power. So. Bevors up, visors down."

"Yes, boss!"

"Now they feel safer," Angelotti observed in an undertone. "It isn't weapons, madonna. It's sheer numbers."

"I know."

The thread of disquiet in her belly turned into a distinct twinge.

"That's the problem with armour," she said musingly. "Strapped in. You can't take a s.h.i.+t in a hurry when you need to ..."

- Ah. Dysentery: the warrior's excuse. "G.o.dfrey!" Ash spluttered, amused and appalled.

- Child, are you forgetting? I've followed you around military camps for eight years. I minister to the baggage train. I know who does the laundry, after a battle. You can't hide anything from the washerwomen. Courage is brown.

"For a priest, G.o.dfrey, you're a deeply disgusting man!"

- If I were a man still, I would be at your side.

It jolted her, not out of the warm feeling of comrades.h.i.+p, but into a keener grief for him. She said, "I will come for you. First: this." She raised her voice. "Okay, let's do it!"

As the units of armed men pa.s.sed into the tunnel-like gate below one of Dijon's watch towers, Thomas Rochester's sergeant bent down and muttered in her ear, over the noise, "What does he say?"

"What does who say?"

The Englishman looked uncomfortable. "Him. Your voice. Saint G.o.dfrey. Do we have G.o.d's grace in this?"

"Yes," Ash replied, automatically and with complete conviction, while her mind murmured Saint G.o.dfrey! in something between appalled amus.e.m.e.nt and awe. I suppose it was inevitable . . .

"Troop movements, Visigoth camp, central north section?"

- No movement reported.

And that means f.u.c.k-all, Ash thought grimly, hearing her boots echo off the raw masonry walls of the sally-port; hearing, in her soul, an incursion of ancient, inhuman muttering. Right now, she's not talking to the Stone Golem either.

The Lion grooms brought the horses forward; Ash's new mount a pale gelding some yellow-tinged colour between chestnut and bay, points barely dark enough to be distinguished; Orgueil returned to Anselm. She mounted up. Angelotti reined his own scrawny white-socked chestnut in beside her, still favouring his wounded arm. Ash glimpsed the bulk of linen bandages under the straps of his vambrace and his arming doublet.

Ahead, Burgundian soldiers yanked iron bars down from the gates as quickly as possible, pa.s.sing her and her men through and out with indecent haste. The gates slammed behind them. She looked up, as they came into the open air, but her helmet and bevor prevented her turning her head enough to see the top of the wall, and the Burgundian archers and hackb.u.t.ters she hoped would be up there.

The high saddle kept her extremely upright, legs extended almost straight. She s.h.i.+fted her weight, moving forward in the grey light, anxious to traverse the uncertain sloping ground before the walls. One of the men-at-arms on foot beside her grunted, and efficiently kicked a caltrop out of the way.

A quick glance to the east showed her Dijon's city walls emerging from white mist, and, at their foot, a moat three-quarters choked with f.a.ggots of wood thrown down by a.s.saulting troops. Beyond the churned earth, trenches and ranks of mantlets covered the ground between her and the Visigoth main camp.

"Okay: move out..."

Once out of the gateway, Rochester's sergeant raised Ash's personal banner.

"As.h.!.+".

The shout came from the walls above: a deep roar of voices, that broke into "Hero of Carthage!" and "Demoiselle-Captain!', and ended in a ragged cheer, extremely loud in the early morning. She wheeled the gelding, leaning back in the saddle to look up.

Men chanted: "Scar-face! Scar-face!"

The battlements were lined with men. Every embrasure thick with them; men climbing on to merlons, adolescent youths hanging from the wooden brattices. She lifted her hand, the gauntlet dull with freezing cold dew. The cheerful noise went up again; raucous, bold, and disrespectful; the same noise that men make before - unwillingly trusting - they commit themselves to the line-fight.

"Kick the b.i.t.c.h's a.s.s!" a woman's contralto voice yelled.

"There you are, madonna," Antonio Angelotti, at Ash's side, said. "We have a doctor's advice!"