Ash: The Lost History Part 107

The voice of G.o.dfrey, in her head, is not weary - has, in fact, the tireless ability that the machina rei militaris has always had, to speak when any human soul would be dropping from exhaustion.

Her own voice is rasping, after bellowing on the walls of Dijon. After so much rapid dictation, her throat croaks. "'. . . Report made this feast day of St Benignus."13 - Yes. "Here, boss."

She took a wooden cup of (admittedly sour) wine from Rickard, and drained it. "Thanks."

"The others are on their way up, boss." He turned to serve Rochester.

Ash stretched her arms, under asymmetric steel plates, feeling the sensation of each leather strap pulling against cloth and the flesh beneath - all of it grown unfamiliar in the s.p.a.ce of three months. Her armour sh.e.l.ls snug around her body, clattering at her thighs. Weight is nothing, but she finds herself almost forgetting how to breathe, sheathed so close in metal.

The warmth is welcome.

"G.o.dfrey - the Wild Machines?"

- Nothing.

s.h.i.t. Oh, f.u.c.k, maybe from their point of view, it doesn't matter what I know? No: that can't be right!

Digorie Paston straightened up from his writing, flicking a sideways glance at her from cherry-rimmed eyes. He held himself upright on the joint stool, ready to read, and said nothing. He licked his lips.

"Okay, that'll do it for now." Ash placed her palms flat on the trestle table, and leaned her weight on her arms.

As she stood, momentarily weary, the rest of the lance-leaders and sergeants shoved through the stone doorway into the tower's upper floor. Their voices rose over the noise of the wind banging at the wooden shutters, and the desultory crash of bombardment from the darkness outside.

"s.h.i.t. Another night when I ain't gonna get more than two hours' sleep!"

"You're young." Robert Anselm grinned at her, demonic in the smoky light of the tapers. "You can do it. Think of us poor old men. Right, Raimon?"

The white-haired siege engineer acknowledged that, briefly; walking in beside d.i.c.kon Stour's apprentice - promoted to chief armourer, now - and behind him Euen Huw and Geraint ab Morgan in close talk, and Ludmilla Rostovnaya, with black-singed hair still not cropped off, but her body and shoulder bound up bulky in linen rags and grease and moving painfully.

"You been talking to your old machine, boss?" Ludmilla asked huskily. "Thought you didn't want it knowing where you are?"

"Bit late to worry about that, now ..." Ash grinned ruefully at her. "The rag-heads have already told Carthage I'm right here."

Forty or so men and women came in, enough to make the bleak stone-walled upper chamber seem crowded. They brought welcome body-heat. Ash paced around the trestle table where Digorie Paston and Richard Faversham sat among piles of paper.

"Okay, what we got here is some . . . intelligence, on Visigoth troop deployment in Christendom. I have to say, it ain't gonna cheer us up any. As we thought, they've got things sewn up tight - with some interesting exceptions," she added thoughtfully, leaning between the clerks to spread out the spider-scrawled map of Christendom, as the men-at-arms crowded at her shoulder.

"For example - I can see how we got in from Ma.r.s.eilles the way we just did . . . When they first landed, the Faris put three legions directly into Ma.r.s.eilles - but they ended up fighting their way up to Lyons, and then Auxonne. I reckon the Legio XXIX Cartenna must be that garrison we were avoiding on the coast. . . They took heavy casualties. She's got the remnants of the Legio VIII Tingis and the X Sabratha in Avignon and Lyons, but apart from that, almost n.o.body holding down the Langue d'Oc."

"Then that's why we could eat," Henri Brant offered, "there wasn't half the number of enemy supply parties out that I expected to see."

"We were f.u.c.king lucky."

"Oh yeah, boss," Pieter Tyrrell said alcoholically, his arm around Jan-Jacob Clovet's shoulder - it must, Ash realised, have been pretty much the first time he'd seen his fellow crossbowman since he got back from Carthage. He looked up from puzzling over the maps. "Got us here. Real lucky!"

"You ain't got no grat.i.tude, Tyrrell! If I'd taken us up here, where the Venetian captains wanted-" Ash tapped the eastern coast of Italy "-we'd be currently enjoying the hospitality of the two fresh legions that are sitting there watching the Dalmatian coast!"

Tyrrell grinned. Antonio Angelotti, putting wooden plates and an eating-knife down to trap the edges of his map of Christendom flat, murmured, "I make it fifteen Carthaginian legions in the first invasion, another ten for reinforcement of ports like Pescara, madonna - and five more in reserve. Say perhaps a hundred and eighty thousand troops."

In the silence that followed, Robert Anselm gave a low whistle.

Thomas Rochester prodded Angelotti's map, and the rough sketches that Digorie Paston and Richard Faversham spread out beside it. "This their deployment? How old's this news, boss?"

"Beginning of this month. It's the most recent overall sit. rep.14 from the Faris back to Carthage. Some of her news is going to be out of date, given the problems travelling through the Dark - especially the legions in northern France and the Germanies . . . But what we've got-"

Ash stopped, took a breath; walked a pace or two forward and back, in the light from the blazing hearth-fire. A brush-haired younger page, at Rickard's direction, squatted there in case of embers falling on to the timber floor. His eyes reflected silver as she walked past him, the fit of greaves to her calf-muscles not quite right - too much walking, too little riding, in the last few weeks - and the fit of cuisses to thigh muscles a little clip for the same reason, but all in all (and this, also, she sees in the boy's eyes) beginning to move with her as if the metal plates are part of her body. Part of her self.

"What we've got" she said, turning to face them, "is what happened during the initial deployment of the invasion - and what happened in phase two: the re-supply and re-deployment of fresh troops. We know where we are now."

Simon Tydder, promoted sergeant, and with stubble on the angular bones of his face that are growing out of plump adolescence, squeaked, "We know where we are now, boss. In deep doo-doo . . ." and then blushed at his change of register.

"Too f.u.c.king right!" Ash slapped his shoulder in pa.s.sing. "But now we know it in detail!"

There was a strong smell of horse in the room, as is inevitable with knights. Despite lack of sleep, most of the faces watching her as men crowded around the trestle table, or leaned over the shoulders of the men in front, were aggressive, sharp, keyed-up. Ash blinked against the eye-stinging smell of mould on cold stonework, urine, and wood-smoke. She drew her b.o.l.l.o.c.k dagger and plonked it down on the centre of the map.

"There," she said. "That was their main thrust. In at Ma.r.s.eilles, and Genoa - where we were lucky enough to meet them-"

"Lucky, my f.u.c.king a.r.s.ehole!" John Price rumbled.

Antonio Angelotti murmured, "What you do with your a.r.s.ehole is entirely up to you ..."

Ash glared at the innocent expression of her master gunner. "Okay. The main force, under the Faris, made two landings: the one I mentioned at Ma.r.s.eilles, and seven additional legions at Genoa."

Ludmilla, moving stiffly, leaned past her sergeant, Katherine Hammell, and studied Paston's sketch. "Agnes was right, then, boss? Thirty thousand men?"

"Yup." Ash drew her finger across the map. "The Faris sent three of those legions to raze Milan, Florence, and Italy, while she took her own four legions over the Gotthard into Switzerland. As far as I can make out, she devastated the Swiss somewhere near Lake Lucerne, over several days, and then moved on into Basle. At that point, with the Germanies surrendered, she moved west, met up with the other legions marching north from Lyons, and advanced towards the southern border of Burgundy."

"f.u.c.k me, boss, don't tell me we were facing seven legions at Auxonne!"

"Oh, we were - but it looks like the scouts were pretty s.h.i.t-hot on the figures. The rag-heads took heavy casualties getting to Auxonne. By the time we were facing them, we did out-number them."

"Shoulda f.u.c.ked 'em," Katherine Hammell growled.

"Yeah, well, we didn't ..."

"f.u.c.king nancy Burgundians," John Price added.

"f.u.c.king war-golems! We've held this place, though!" one of the remaining Flemish lance-leaders said: Henri van Veen, his breath thick with wine. At his shoulder, his sergeants nodded enthusiastically.

"You should have seen us, boss!" Adriaen Campin blurted. The big Flemish sergeant glanced around, hit the table with his clenched fist. "You shoulda been here! It's been f.u.c.king hot, but they haven't shifted us yet!"

"We're not all like that motherf.u.c.ker van Mander," the lance-leader beside him said: Willem Verhaecht, another of the Flemings who had stayed with the Lion Azure. His pale face, in fire- and candlelight, was stubbled and scarred, black in places with small crusts of old blood.

"We're the Lion; he's not," Ash said brusquely. "Okay, as far as I can work it out from the Faris's casualty reports, the legions coming up from Ma.r.s.eilles took forty per cent casualties against the southern French lords, and the legions she brought up from Genoa lost fifty per cent of their men to the Swiss. Most of their legions are amalgamated now. Same goes for the Langue d'Oc. The legions over in France took casualties; most of the German ones didn't..."

"Fifty per cent?" Thomas Rochester blinked.

"I'd say by the time she was at Auxonne, she had not much more than fifteen thousand men, total. They took another twenty-five per cent casualties there -some of them from us." Ash shook her head. "She doesn't care how many men she loses . . . That legion and a half outside here, now, is the Legio XIV Utica in s.h.i.t-hot shape, and the remnants of the XX Solunto and XXI Selinunte in with the tag-end of the VI Leptis Parva. Nearly seven thousand men. Price, tell your lads they got it absolutely right."

Most of the men-at-arms grinned. John Price merely grunted a small acknowledgement.

"Other than that . . . there's the French deployment, and the Legio XVII Lixus garrisoning Sicily, holding the naval base, and keeping the entire west of the Mediterranean Carthaginian. She won't move them. That was the situation towards the middle of August. She brought the second wave in shortly after King Louis and Emperor Frederick surrendered. One extra legion into middle Italy, so that Abbot m.u.t.h.ari could get his b.u.m on the Empty Chair - the XVI Elissa."

"Them? Hardcore nutters, boss," Giovanni Petro offered. "I met them before, in Alexandria."

Ash nodded acknowledgement. "Two more legions into North Italy, around Venice, and Pescara, watching the Turk and the Turkish fleet. Another two to reinforce Basle and Innsbruck: that's the Cantons nailed down, I guess. And two more to keep order in the Holy Roman Empire - one's stationed in Aachen, with Daniel de Quesada, but the other's been given orders to march to Vienna: it should be there by now. And then three more legions were sent in to reinforce the Faris."

"s.h.i.t. Three? " Robert Anselm queried.

Ash scrabbled among the papers, settled at last for Rickard reading one of the lists to her, sotto voce. "-the V Alalia, IX Himera, and XXIII Rusucurru.

She ordered them to divert around Dijon, fight their way up through Lorraine, and take Flanders. They're up in the Antwerp-Ghent area; those are the ones we hope Margaret of Burgundy's army is knocking seven kinds of s.h.i.te out of."

Antonio Angelotti kissed his St Barbara medal. "G.o.d send us such grace. I wonder how many cannon they have?"

"Rickard's got an artillery list here somewhere ..." Ash straightened up from the map. "Their overall losses in the first wave of the invasion amount to almost seven legions. Out of thirty, in total. That's under twenty-five per cent, that is," she echoed the even tone of the machina rei militaris, "acceptable. It's getting her people killed trying to break Dijon in a hurry that's her problem ..."

"Look at this." Angelotti, scanning the papers as quickly as Father Faversham or Father Paston, put his finger down blindly on the map, and then moved it to Carthage. "Gelimer's got two more legions in Carthage, but he won't plan to move them with the Turkish fleet still untouched, even if they do hold Sicily and the western Med."

Ash moved aside as Robert Anselm leaned in over the table, unselfconsciously scratched red flea-bites, and then traced with his blunt, dirt-ingrained finger the coast of North Africa.

"Egypt. That's the spike up Gelimer's a.r.s.e," he grunted. "Look at that! He's got three whole legions in Egypt - fresh - and he can't move them. Not if he don't want the Turks across the Sinai faster than you can say Great Mother! But he f.u.c.king needs them in Europe, because if this is right, he's spread way thin . . . He can't even reinforce southern France."

Angelotti remarked, "Don't get excited. Right now, the Faris thinks she can keep three legions fighting up in Flanders. She can always move those men south to here. Throw three legions against this city and it'll fall over pretty quick."

"Maybe. She'd have to stop using the French and Saxon ports to feed them. Try re-supplying with river boats."

"Depends if the Rhine or the Danube's frozen . . ."

"That's another reason they can't let go of Egypt; with Iberia going under the Dark, they need to get corn from somewhere ..."

Ash, grimly interrupting, said, "There isn't a peep out of King Louis - or his n.o.bles, which is far more remarkable. And even the Electors are holding to the Emperor's surrender in the Germanies. I think it's what happened at Venice, and Florence, and Milan - and to the Swiss. They don't dare move - and they don't know the Visigoths are running at full stretch and then some."

A glance went between Anselm, Angelotti, and Rochester.

Geraint ab Morgan threw down the piece of paper he had been attempting to decipher, with a look of disgust at Richard Faversham. "Too many f.u.c.king clerks in this! - no offence, Father. Boss, how do you know that what your demon-voice says about all this is true? How do we know they ain't got a few more legions tucked away?"

Other faces turned to hers, at that - Geraint's old sergeants, now Ludmilla's: Savaric and Folquet, Bieiris, Guillelma and Alienor. John Price; John Burren. Henry Wrattan broke off a low-voiced conversation with Giovanni Petro.

"It isn't a demon-voice," Ash said, "it's Father G.o.dfrey now."

She has a moment of doubt: must she explain it all, examine rumours that have spread through the company in the last forty-eight hours, go back in her mind to the shattering collapse of Carthage? Two or three men cross themselves; most of the others touch Briar Crosses, or Saints' medals, to their lips.

"Yeah, well," Jan-Jacob Clovet grinned, showing yellow and black teeth. "Father G.o.dfrey always did manage a s.h.i.t-hot intelligence service. Don't suppose that's changed since he's dead."

There was a subdued chuckle in the room: Henri van Veen muttering something to Tyrrell, who punched his arm and cheerfully said, "Motherf.u.c.ker!"

John Price and Jean the Breton palmed and drank from a stoppered wineskin with practised ease.

Thomas Rochester held up a fistful of ill.u.s.trative paper. "Are we giving this information to the Burgundians, boss?"

"I'm getting Digorie to make a copy for the Sieur de la Marche. We haven't broken a condotta yet ..."

She waits, gaze flicking across lined, filthy faces, to see if anyone will say Always a first time.

"We've held that f.u.c.king north wall!" Campin muttered again. "I'm losing too many of my people to Greek Fire, boss. Mind you, so are the nancy-boy Burgundians ..."

"I know you reckon we can't get out of here with you, boss, but how would we manage, if we were still heading for England, then?" Euen Huw bent down over the table, his expression hidden as he studied the sketched map. "They ain't going to take those northern legions across the Channel while d.u.c.h.ess Margaret's still fighting. Say we didn't go north or east, suppose we went back west, and then into Louis's lands? Calais, maybe?"

"Under the Dark? When we still need to eat?" Ash put her finger on the map. "Even if we tried . . . initially, back in July, the Faris landed three legions here, at St Nazaire; they've moved up the Loire valley. The II Oea and the XVIII Rusicade are occupying Paris. We're not going to make Calais if they want to stop us ... As for the far west, the Legio IV Girba are sitting here, at Bayonne -either to be shipped up the west coast of the French king's territories, or to be moved back into Iberia if the unrest there gets worse - they didn't expect the Dark to cover half Iberia, it's paying merry h.e.l.l with their logistics. That's one she could bring east."

"Has she?"

"Jeez, Euen, how the f.u.c.k do I know! She reports back to Carthage every f.u.c.king day!" Ash took a breath. "G.o.dfrey's been taking me through her sit. reps, for the past three weeks. I don't think she's recalled the IV Girba to here."

She paused, shifting her body in her Milanese armour, still less than comfortable; re-training muscles and balance at a level below the conscious. Because it is only a few hours to morning.

"It isn't likely," Ash said, at last. "Not with those huge logistics problems. But... if she was stupid enough to send an order - and didn't report it through to Carthage - we wouldn't know."

"So if we go west, we'll meet legions." Overt, now, Geraint ab Morgan shouldered in beside Euen Huw and asked, "What if we went back down south, boss? To Ma.r.s.eilles? I know it was 'ell, but we might get a ship, get out of the Med, sail up the west coast of Iberia ..."

"Good G.o.d, no, Geraint - if you think I'm going to spend five hundred miles watching you puke over the side of a ship-!"

A gust of laughter. Simon Tydder, shouldering his way in beside Rickard, gave a guffaw that ended in a squeak, and started the snorts and chuckles off again.

"If we ain't thinking of breaking out for England, boss, what's this truce about?"

Ash gave him a rather old-fashioned look. "Defeating the enemy might be a start!"

"But, boss ..."

"They're not chucking rocks at us for fun, Tydder! We're signed on with Burgundy: that lot out there are the enemy. Look, these legions don't matter a toss. Except that the Faris is pretty d.a.m.n safe sitting in the middle of them . . ."

"Man, do we need back-up!" Adriaen Campin sighed.

"Maybe we could go ask the Turks for help." Florian, who had been silently checking Ludmilla's burns, Angelotti's bandages, and the a.s.sorted minor wounds of the other knights and sergeants, plonked a filthy hand down on the table. "What's it like in the east?"

Anselm consulted the annotated map. "Thin, if Father G.o.dfrey's right. She's trying to hold down the Germanies with a couple of legions."

"So maybe . . . ?"

"If we had some eggs, we could have some eggs and ham - if we had any ham."

Geraint ab Morgan snorted. "Never thought I'd say this, but England's looking better all the time ..."

Katherine Hammell, still moving stiffly from her wound at Carthage, looked across at Ludmilla Rostovnaya. "What about your lot, Lud? We could try the Rus lands. How would we do in St Petersburg? Any good wars?"

The commander of archers scowled. "All the time. Too f.u.c.king cold for me. Why d'you think I'm here?"