Ash: The Lost History Part 14

"Oh, b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l. . ." Her face flamed. She put her hands over her cheeks, and her fingertips felt that even her ears were hot. She said hurriedly, "Never mind that."

Without taking his arm away from his face, he groped and pulled a blanket half over his body. She could feel the skin of her face heating. She locked her hands about her own ankles, to keep from reaching out to touch the hard velvet of his skin.

Fernando's breathing shifted to a snore. His heavy sweating body slumped further down in the bed, deeply and instantly asleep.

After a while she wrapped her hand around the saint's medallion at her throat, and held it. Her thumb caressed the image of St George on one side, the ash-rune on the other.

Her body screamed at her.

She did not sleep.

Yes, I am probably going to have to have him killed.

It's no different from killing on the field of battle. I don't even like him. I just want to f.u.c.k him.

More hours later than a marked candle could count, she saw summer light around the edges of the tapestry curtain. Dawn began to lighten the Rhine river valley, and the cavalcade of ships moving upstream.

"So what are you going to do?" She said it quietly and rhetorically to herself.

She lay, naked, face-down on the pallet, reaching out for her belt where it lay on her piled doublet and hose. The sheath of her knife came easily to her hand. Her thumb stroked the rounded hilt of the b.o.l.l.o.c.k dagger, slipped down to press it an inch or so out of the scabbard. A grey metal blade, with harsh silver lines on the much-sharpened edge.

He's asleep.

He didn't even bring a page in with him, never mind a squire or a guard.

There's no one to shout an alarm, never mind defend him!

Something about this sheer depth of ignorance, his inability to even conceive that a woman might kill a feudal knight - Green Christ, hasn't he ever thought he might be knifed by a wh.o.r.e? - and his forgetfulness in merely falling asleep, as if this were any night between a married pair: something in that touched her, despite him.

She rolled over, drawing the dagger. Her thumb tested the edge. It proved keen enough to slice the first layers of dermis, at a touch, without penetrating to the red meat below.

What I ought to think is Died of arrogance, and kill him. If only because I might not get another chance.

I wouldn't get away with it; naked and covered in blood, it's going to be kind of obvious who did it- No. That isn't it.

I know d.a.m.n well that once it was done, a fait accompli as G.o.dfrey would call it, then my lads would tip the body over the side, shrug, and say, "Must've had a boating accident, my lord," to anybody who asked; up to and including the Emperor. Once it's done, it's done; and they'd back me.

It's doing it. That's the objection I have.

Christ and His pity know why, but I don't want to kill this man.

"I don't even know you," she whispered.

Fernando del Guiz slept on, his face in repose unprotected, vulnerable.

Not confrontation: compromise. Compromise. Christ, but don't I spend half my life finding compromises so that eight hundred people can work together? No reason to leave my brains behind just because I'm in bed.

So: We are a split company: the others are in Cologne: if I kill Frederick there'll be someone who objects - there's always someone who objects to anything -and if it were van Mander, for example, there's another split: his lances maybe following him, not me. Because he likes del Guiz: he likes having a man, and a n.o.ble man, and a real live knight for a boss. Van Mander doesn't much like women, even if they are as good on the field of battle as I am.

This can wait. This can wait until we've dumped the amba.s.sadors in Genoa and got back to Cologne.

Genoa. s.h.i.t.

"Why did you do that?" She spoke in a whisper, lying down beside him, the electric velvet of his skin brushing hers. He shifted, rolling over, presenting her with a freckled back.

"Are you another one like Joscelyn - nothing I do will ever be enough, because I'm a woman? Because the one thing I can't be is a man? Or is it because I can't be a n.o.ble woman? One of your own kind?"

His soft breathing filled the tented cabin.

He rolled back again, restless, his body pressing up against hers. She lay still, half under the warm, damp, muscular bulk of him. With her free hand, she reached up to brush fine tendrils of hair out of his eyes.

I can't remember what his face looked like then. I can only see in my mind what he looks like now.

The thought startled her: her eyes flicked open.

"I killed my first two men when I was eight," she whispered, not disturbing his sleep. "When did you kill yours? What fields have you fought?"

I can't kill a man while he's sleeping.

Not out of- The word eluded her. G.o.dfrey or Anselm might have said pique, but both men were on other barges in the river-convoy; had found things to do that would take them as far from the command barge as possible, this first night after her wedding.

I need to think this through. Talk it through with them.

And I can't split the company. Whatever we do will have to wait until we get back to the Germanies.

Ash's hand, without her volition, stroked the sweat-damp strands of hair back from his brow.

Fernando del Guiz shifted in his sleep. The narrow bed necessarily threw their bodies together on the piled pallia.s.ses; skin against skin; warm, electric. Ash, without much thinking about it, leaned down and put her mouth to the back of his neck, her lips to his soft moist skin, breathing in the scent and feel of the finest hair at his nape. Vertebrae made hard lumps between his freckle-spotted shoulders.

With a great sigh he rolled over, put his arms around her waist, and drew her to his hot body. She pressed against him, breast and belly and thighs, and his c.o.c.k hardened and jutted up between them. Still with his eyes shut, one of his narrow strong hands stroked her between the thighs, fingers dipping into her wet warm cleft, stroking her. The early light hazing the cabin illuminated his fair lashes, fine on his cheeks; so young, she thought, and then, aah!

One tilt of his hips put his swollen c.o.c.k up inside her. He rested, still holding her close in his arms, and within minutes began rocking his body, pushing her up to a mild, unexpected, but completely pleasurable o.r.g.a.s.m.

His head dipped, face coming to rest against her shoulder. She felt the brush of his lashes against her skin. Eyes still closed, half-asleep; he slid his hands over her shoulders, down her arms, around her back. A warm, valuing touch. Erotic, and kind.

He is the first man my age to touch me kindly, she realised; and as Ash opened her eyes, taken equally by surprise to find herself smiling at him, he thrust harder and deeper and came, and sank back from his peak into deeper sleep.

"What?" she leaned down, hearing him mumble.

He said it again, slipping down into an exhausted sleep, too unconscious to be reached again.

What she thought she heard was, "They have married me to the lion's whelp."

There were tears of humiliation, bright and wet, standing on his lashes. Ash, waking again an hour later, found herself in an empty bed. Fifteen days later - fifteen nights of empty beds - on the feast-day of St Swithun,2 they arrived within five miles of Genoa.

Chapter Two.Ash thumbed up the visor of her sallet, in the dew-wet early morning. The sun was not a finger's breadth above the horizon. Some coolness was still in the air. Around her, men walked and rode, wagons creaked; a wind blew her the noise of a shepherd on a distant hillside, singing as he surely would not if the country was not peaceable.

Robert Anselm rode up, past the wagons and hors.e.m.e.n, from the rear of the column; his open-faced sallet lodged in the crook of his arm. The southern sun had reddened his bald scalp. One of the men walking with a bill over his shoulder whistled like a blackbird, and shifted into the opening bars of Curly Locks, Curly Locks, wilt thou be mine? as Anselm trotted past, only apparently oblivious. Ash felt a smile tug at her mouth: the first for over a fortnight.

"Okay?"

"I found four of these a.s.sholes dead-drunk in the steward's wagon this morning. They didn't even get out to sleep it off somewhere else in the camp!" Anselm squinted against the morning sun, riding knee to knee with her. "I've got the provosts disciplining them now."

"And the thefts?"

"Complaints, again. Three different lances: Euen Huw, Thomas Rochester, Geraint ab Morgan before we left Cologne-"

"If Geraint had more complaints about this before we left Cologne, why didn't he take action?"

Ash looked keenly at her second-in-command.

"How's Geraint Morgan working out?"

The big man shrugged.

"Geraint's not keen on discipline himself."

"Did we know that when we took him on?" Ash frowned at the thickening dawn mist. "Euen Huw vouched for him ..."

"I know he got slung out of King Henry's household after Tewkesbury. Drunk in charge of a unit of archers - on the field. Went back into the family wool business, couldn't settle, ended up a contract soldier."

"We didn't hire him just because he's an old Lancastrian, Roberto! He has to pull his weight, same as everyone else."

"Geraint's no Lancastrian. He fought with the Earl of Salisbury at Ludlow - for the Yorkists, in fifty-nine," Anselm added, apparently none too confident of his captain's intricate knowledge of rosbif dynastic struggles.

"Green Christ, he started young!"

"He's not the only one . . ."

"Yeah, yeah." Ash shifted her weight, bringing her horse back towards Roberto's flea-bitten grey. "Geraint's a violent, lascivious, drunken son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h-"

"He's an archer," Anselm said, as if it were self-evident.

"-and worst of all, he's a mate of Euen Huw," Ash continued. Her twinkle died. "He's s.h.i.t-hot on the field. But he gets a grip, or he goes. d.a.m.n. Well, at least I've left him in joint command with Angelott... Come on then, Robert. What about this thief?"

Robert Anselm squinted up at the obscuring sky, then back at her. "I've got him, Captain. It's Luke Saddler."

Ash recalled to her mind his face: a boy not yet fourteen, mostly seen around the camp flushed with ale, wet-nosed and avoided by the other pages; Philibert had had tales to tell of twisted arms, hands touching cods. "I know him. Aston's page. What's he taking?"

"Purses, daggers; someone's saddle, for Christ's pity's sake," Anselm remarked. "He tried to sell that. He's in and out of the quartermaster's all the time, Brant says; but it's mostly the lads' personal kit."

"Crop his ears this time, Roberto."

Anselm looked a little grim.

Ash said, "You, me, Aston, the provosts - we can't stop him thieving. So ..."

She jerked a thumb back at the men riding and walking; hard men in dusty leather and linen, sweating in the early Italian morning, shouting comments to each other about anything they pa.s.sed, loud voices careless of rebuke.

"We have to act. Or else they'll do it for us. And probably b.u.g.g.e.r him into the bargain: he's a pretty kid."

Frustrated, she remembers Luke Saddler's sullen, shifty expression when she had had him into the command tent, to see if the full weight of the commander's displeasure might move him; he had smelled of Burgundian wine, that day, and giggled inanely.

p.r.i.c.ked by an inadequate feeling of having failed the boy, she snapped, "Why tell me, anyway? Luke Saddler's not my problem. Not now. He's my husband's problem."

"As if you cared two t.i.ts about that!"

Ash looked down rather pointedly at the front of her brigandine. It was not proving very much less hot to wear than plate. Robert Anselm grinned at her.

"As if you're going to let del Guiz worry about this mob ..." he added. "Girl, you're going demented, running around picking up after him."

Ash stared ahead through the morning sea-mist, thickening now on the road, just making out the figures of Joscelyn van Mander and Paul di Conti riding with Fernando. Unconsciously, she sighed. The morning smelled of sweet thyme, from where the cartwheels crushed it at the edges of the wide merchants' road.

Her husband Fernando del Guiz rode laughing among the young men and servants of his entourage, ahead of the wagons. A trumpeter rode with him, and a rider carrying the banner with the del Guiz arms. The Lion Azure company standard rode a few hundred yards back, between the two wagon lines, whitening with the dust he kicked up.

"Sweet Christ, it's going to be a long b.l.o.o.d.y trek back to Cologne!"

She shifted by unconscious habit with the movements of her mount, a riding horse she had long ago nicknamed The Sod. She smelled sea nearby; so did he, and moved skittishly. Genoa and the coast no more than four or five miles away now? We could arrive well before noon.

Sea-mist dampened down the dust kicked up by lines of plodding horses, and the twenty-five lances who rode in groups of six and seven between them.

Ash sat up in the saddle, pointing. "I don't recognise that man. There. Look."

Robert Anselm rode up beside her and looked where she looked, narrowing his eyes to bring the outer line of wagons into focus - wagons driven with shields still strapped to their sides, and hand-gunners and crossbowmen riding inside them on the stores.

"Yes, I do," she contradicted herself, before he could answer. "It's Agnes. Or one of his men, anyway. No, it's the Lamb himself."

"I'll bring him through." Anselm tapped his long spurs into his grey's flanks, and cantered across the lines of moving carts.

Even with the droplets of mist, it was too hot to wear a bevor. Ash rode in sallet and a blue velvet-covered brigandine, the gilt rivet-heads glinting, with her bra.s.s-hilted b.a.s.t.a.r.d sword strapped to her side. She eased her weight back, slowing, as Robert Anselm brought the newcomer back inside the moving camp.

She watched Fernando del Guiz. He didn't notice.

"h.e.l.lo, She-male!"

"h.e.l.lo, Agnes." Ash acknowledged her fellow mercenary commander. "Hot enough for you?"

The straggle-haired man made a gesture that took in the full suit of Milanese plate that he rode in, the armet helm he currently carried on the pommel of his saddle, and the black iron warhammer at his belt. "They've got Guild riots down at Ma.r.s.eilles, along the coast. And you know Genoa - strong walls, bolshie citizens, and a dozen factions always fighting to be Doge. I took out the head of the Farinetti in a skirmish last week. Personally!"

He tilted his hand in his Milanese gauntlet, as far as the plates would allow, and made an imaginary ill.u.s.trative thrust. His lean face was burned black from fighting in the Italian wars. Straggling black hair fell past his pauldrons. His white livery surcoat bore the device of a lamb, from whose head radiated golden beams, embroidered all over in black thread with 'Agnus Dei'.3 "We've been up at Neuss. I led a cavalry charge against Duke Charles of Burgundy." Ash shrugged, as if to say it was nothing, really. "But the Duke's still alive. That's war."

Lamb grinned, showing yellow broken teeth through his beard. In broad northern Italian, he remarked, "So now you're here. What is this - no scouts? No spies? Your guys didn't spot me until I was on top of you! Where the h.e.l.l are your aforeriders?"4 "I was told we don't need any." Ash made her tone ironic. "This is a peaceful countryside full of merchants and pilgrims, under the protection of the Emperor. Didn't you know?"

Lamb (she had forgotten his real name) squinted through the mist to the head of the column. "Who's the bimbo?"

"My current employer." Ash didn't look at Anselm as she spoke.