Ash: The Lost History Part 153

26 December AD 1476-5 January ad 1477.

Lost Burgundy1.

Chapter One.

"And now," Ash said, "you need to order my execution."

Light leaked through the unshuttered windows into the ducal chambers - the feast of Stephen dawning late, to a blistering cold. Freezing damp infested the air, penetrating any bare skin; draughts blew in around the shutters and hangings.

"Are you sure you hear them?" Florian persisted.

'IT REQUIRES NOTHING BUT TIME NOW: OUR TIME FAST APPROACHES-'

"Yes, I'm sure!" Ash banged her sheepskin mittens together, hoping for feeling in her numb fingers.

"Have you told anyone else yet? That the end of the machina rei militaris means nothing?"

"No. I didn't want to spoil their party."

"Ah." Florian attempted a smile. "That's what it was. I thought it was a night attack by the Visigoths ..."

Her colour altered, and she leaned one arm up against the wall for support, the thin grey light of the dawn illuminating her. The velvet hem of her gown trailed across bare flagstones - no rushes, now. She did not wear the hart's-horn crown, but the carved Briar Cross hung at her breast, half-lost in her unpointed doublet and the yellow linen of her shirt. Over everything, she wore a great robe made from wolf-pelts, heavy enough to weigh down a man.

"You look rough," Ash said.

With the growing light, Ash saw that the wall against which the surgeon leaned was painted - richly, as becomes a royal Duke - with figures of men and women and tiny towns on hilltops. Each of the figures danced hand in hand with another: cardinal, carpenter, knight, merchant; peasant, tottering old man, pregnant girl, arid crowned king. Bony hand in their hands, white skeletons led them off, all equal, into death. Florian del Guiz leaned her forehead against the cold stone, oblivious, and rubbed at her stomach under her furs.

"I spent half the night in the garderobe." An obvious recollection of the slaughter that had made her drink went across the tall woman's features. "We have to send my brother back to Gelimer today. With an answer that won't have us attacked before evening. Now this ..."

Ash watched Florian pace down the chamber, further from the hearth around which - since it held the palace's remaining substantial fire - the d.u.c.h.ess was allowing her servants to huddle and sleep.

She forced her mind not to listen to the yammering triumphant whispers of the Wild Machines; followed.

"No-" Florian put up a hand. "No. Your execution would be as irrelevant as the Faris's." Her thin face relaxed into a smile. "Stupid woman. You spent time telling me why she shouldn't die. What about you? What's different?"

"Because it isn't her, it's me."

"Yes, I think I have realised that," the scarecrow-thin woman said ironically, and looked at Ash with warm eyes. "After an hour and a half of you going on at me."

"But-"

"Boss, shut up."

"It isn't her, it's me, and I don't need the Stone Golem-" Ash's voice changed.

"If I order your death, I've lost the Pucelle, 'the She-Lion of Burgundy', the Maid of Dijon-"

"Oh, f.u.c.king h.e.l.l!"

"Don't blame me for your public image," Florian snapped, with asperity. "As I was saying. We need you. You told me the Faris was irrelevant; because Burgundy's bloodline has to survive way beyond her death. Now it has to survive beyond yours! I'm sorry that destroying the machina rei militaris didn't make a difference." Her expression altered. "G.o.d knows, I'm sorry about G.o.dfrey. But. I need you in the field more than I need you dead."

"And this makes no difference?"

"I'm not going to order your death." Florian del Guiz looked away. "And don't get any stupid ideas about going out on to the field and getting the enemy to do it for you."

For all its high vaulted roof and pale stone, the ducal chamber pressed in on Ash with acute claustrophobia. She walked to the window and looked at the ice on the inside of it.

"You're running too great a risk," Ash said. "This city is on the verge of being overrun. If you're killed- You needed my sister for what she knows. There's a dozen commanders here as good as me!"

"But they're not the Pucelle. Ash, it doesn't matter what you think you are. Or if it's justified."

Florian came to stand beside her at the stone embrasure.

"You didn't come here expecting me to have you marched off and executed. You know I won't. You didn't come here for me to tell you to kill yourself." Her eyes slitted against the southern glare. "You came here for me to talk you out of it. For me to order you to live."

"I did not!"

"How long have I known you?" Florian said. "Five years, now? Come on, boss. Just because I love you doesn't mean I think you're bright. You want someone else to take responsibility for telling you to stay alive. And you think I'm dumb enough not to notice that."

Wind from the ill-fitting edges of the window bit into her. The sheepskin huke belted over armour and gown barely warmed her, no more than the coif over her shorn head, under her hood. Ash said, "Maybe it's just as well I can't love you the way you want. You're too smart."

Florian threw her head back and guffawed loudly enough to make the servants around the hearth stare down the chamber at them.

"What?" Ash demanded. "What?"

"Oh, gallant!" Florian spluttered. "Chivalrous! Oh - f.u.c.k it. I'll take it as a compliment. I'm beginning to feel sorry for my brother."

Bewildered, Ash repeated, "What?"

"Never mind." Florian, eyes glowing, touched Ash's scarred cheek with fingers as cold as frost-bitten stone.

No sensuality was transmitted by that cold touch. What Ash felt answering it, in herself - what stopped her speaking, except for a confused mutter - was a wrenching non-physical desire for closeness. She realised suddenly, Agape.2 Agape, G.o.dfrey would call it: love of a companion. I want to give her trust.

I trusted G.o.dfrey, and look what happened to him.

"You'd better call people up here," Ash said, "and we'd better talk to them."

As Florian sent messengers, she scratched with mittened fingers at the ice on the inside of the gla.s.s, clearing a patch on the ducal window and peering out. Lemon-yellow, actinic: the sun just cleared the horizon, casting blue-white shadows on the peaked roofs of Dijon below. The valley beyond the walls lay thick with frost.

Long shadows fell away from the sunrise, into the west. Every turf hut, tent, and legion eagle put a blue-black silhouette across the frost. Out on the white brittle ground, men of the III Caralis were beginning to move around: foot units marching sluggishly towards the siege trenches, a squad of cavalry galloping across towards the eastern river and the bridge behind Visigoth lines.

Is that a deployment? Or are they just hara.s.sing us?

You could not see, from here, what lay in the dead ground between Dijon's north gate and the Visigoth siege-lines.

But I doubt they've cleared up yesterday's bodies. Why would they? Far worse for our morale to leave them there to look at.

With no particular hurry, the red granite facades of golem-machinery creaked towards the walls.

"Not an a.s.sault yet," Ash guessed. "He's just trying to provoke you into complaining they're breaking the truce."

Ash snapped her fingers for a page. A boy brought a white ash bowl, steaming with the mulled cider presented, by Dijon's vintners, in lieu of the wine they no longer had. When he had served the surgeon-d.u.c.h.ess, Ash took a bowl, welcoming the heat of it. She turned back to the window, nodding towards the distant encampment.

"We've got their commander. There's not much we don't know about them, at the moment," Ash said dispa.s.sionately. "Like, we know they can afford to gallop their cavalry. The Faris tells me they've got fodder to spare. Not that I'd do it on that ground, myself - must be rock-hard." She paused.

"If I were Gelimer, and my army commander had gone over to the enemy, I'd be running around now like a bull with its tail on fire, trying to remove any weaknesses in my deployment before I attacked. So we've got a window of opportunity, before he can."

"Christ," Florian said behind her. "I have six thousand civilians in this city alone. I don't know what's happening in the rest of the country. I'm their d.u.c.h.ess. I'm supposed to protect them."

Ash looked away from the window. Florian was not drinking, only cupping her cold hands around the bowl. The scent of spices made her stomach growl, and Ash lifted her own bowl, and drank. She felt the warmth of it flood her body.

She wanted to put her arm around Florian's shoulders. Instead, Ash lifted her bowl in salute, giving her a grin that was an embrace.

"I know exactly what we do next," Ash said. "We surrender."

The wind took her breath away; so cold that her teeth hurt behind firmly closed lips. A north wind. Her eyes leaked water that froze on her scarred cheeks. Ash moved down off the north wall, into the faint shelter afforded by the walls of the Byward Tower.

"You're right." Florian spoke in clipped words. "No one's going - to overhear us. Not out there."

"The Wild Machines might hear me . . ." Ash's lips skinned back from her teeth in a grin. "But who are they going to tell? "

"Bad place - for a war council."

"Best place."

"Boss, you're a loony!"

"Yes - your Grace!" Ash steadied her sword against her armoured hip. "f.u.c.k me backwards, it's cold!"

The pale stonework of the Byward Tower jutted above her head, perspective diminishing into an eggsh.e.l.l-blue sky. A few dead vines clung to the masonry, and a swallow's nest or two, under the machicolations. Jonvelle's men guarded the door, bills in their hands, the red Burgundian cross on their jacks. They stood watching their d.u.c.h.ess and their Captain-General, outside in the cold, as if the two women had taken leave of any senses they might ever have possessed.

Ash jerked her head clumsily. Florian walked with her, back out on to the wall, behind the merlons. She squinted out at the Visigoth lines, five hundred yards away.

"No one can get - within yards of us," Ash said. "The siege-engines are shooting at the main gate. Not here. We'll see if they move. This is bare wall -no one can sneak up - without being seen. I want n.o.body to overhear us talk."

"About Burgundy's surrender," Florian said, breathing into her cupped mittened hands. Her tone was one of m.u.f.fled scepticism.

"You don't believe me."

"Ash." Florian raised her head. The wind had reddened her unhealthily yellow cheeks. Her nose ran clear drops. "I know you. I know exactly what you do - in a given situation. When we've been in - some utterly hopeless position -outnumbered - out-gunned - with no chance whatsoever - you attack."

"Oh, f.u.c.k. You do know me," Ash said, not displeased.

A clatter of armour, boots, and scabbards came from behind them. Ash turned. John de Vere and a dozen of his men were mounting the steps from Dijon's streets. As she watched, the English Earl ordered his men-at-arms to the Byward Tower, and ran out on to the wall without breaking step.

"Madam d.u.c.h.ess. My lord de la Marche will attend on you shortly." The Earl of Oxford clapped the palms of his gauntlets together. "He's much concerned. The river at the east of your city walls is iced over."

Florian, with a quick perception Ash appreciated, demanded, "Will it bear a man's weight?"

"Not yet. But it grows colder."

"Too f.u.c.king right it does," Ash winced.

Even with the visor up, there was little of de Vere's face to be seen within the opening of his armet. He had left his red, yellow and white livery with his men; stood as an anonymous knight in steel plate, faded blue eyes staring out at the surrounding river valley and the encamped legions. Ash, herself in armour, was as anonymous. She looked at Florian, cloaked and hooded, swathed in wolf-furs.

"We shouldn't risk her out here," she said to de Vere, as if the surgeon did not exist. "But it's possible the Visigoths have got spies into the city. I don't want servants or soldiers overhearing us. No one. Not a beggar; not a madman; nothing."

"Then you're safe enough, madam. Nothing in its right mind would be up on these walls today!"

"For the love of Christ!" Florian hugged her arms and her wolf-fur cloak around herself, teeth chattering. "Get this - over with. Quick!"

"Let's walk." Ash started down the walkway behind the battlements, in the shelter of the brattices, towards the White Tower. A shout from behind made her turn. The Burgundian guards stepped back to allow two more cloak-m.u.f.fled figures up on to the wall.

One - she recognised his old candle-wax-covered blue woollen cloak - was Robert Anselm. The other, his bearded face pale in the cold, proved to be Bajezet of the Janissaries. Impa.s.sive despite the cold, he bowed to the d.u.c.h.ess, murmuring something quietly courteous.

"Colonel," Florian gasped. She glared at Ash. "You want to wait for de la Marche - or can I get on with it now?"

"Wait." As they turned to walk along the wall, gasping, Ash fell in beside Robert Anselm, and nodded at the Janissary commander. "Roberto, ask him what shape his horses are in."

Anselm frowned momentarily, then addressed the Turkish commander.

The Turk came to a dead halt on the icy flagstones, waved his arms, and shouted an explosive negative. He continued to shout, red-faced.

"Plainly Turkish for 'not my f.u.c.king horses'!" Florian grinned and turned, putting her back to the wind, and began to walk backwards in front of Ash. "He thinks we want to eat them."

"I wish. Robert, tell him it's a serious question."

Bajezet ceased to shout. Explanations in halting Turkish took them to the end of the walkway, and the men guarding the White Tower. The brattices cut some of the force from the wind.

Beyond the White Tower, the wall was sh.o.r.ed up with forty-foot planks; half-burned h.o.a.rdings hanging off the battlements. Weak spot, Ash thought.

"He says his men's horses are not in good condition, because they're not being well fed." Robert Anselm, with no change of tone, added, "They could get fed. To us."

"Does he think he can gallop them?"

"No."

Ash nodded thoughtfully. "Well. We won't be out-running anyone on them, then ..."

Curious eyes watched them from both ends of the walls, now. Ash smiled to herself. If I was a grunt, and the city commanders were holding a private council of war up on the wall, I'd be looking at them ... I always used to think the bosses must be cooking up something remarkably stupid, when I watched something like this.

Now I just wish that someone else was taking the decisions.