Ash: The Lost History Part 16

The man Matthias, in a south German dialect, said, "Yes, Ferdie, fighting. You remember. Training, tournaments, wars? That sort of thing?"

Fernando said, "War."

The young German scowled, good-naturedly. "If you could be bothered. I train more than you do! You're so Boar-d.a.m.ned lazy-"

Ash cut across their languid conversation. "My lord husband, you have to see this. Come on!"

She mounted up, spun The Sod, and spurred him unmercifully, being rewarded by a kick-out (for temper's sake) and then a long, low, hard gallop up the slope, to arrive sweating and anxious, and peer down the long slope to Genoa.

She expected Fernando beside her in heartbeats: it seemed long minutes until he rode up, back- and breastplates strapped on to his body almost anyhow, and the white silk of his shirt-sleeves puffing out between the plates on his arms.

"Well? Where-" His voice died.

The foot of the slope was black with running men.

Otto, Matthias, Joscelyn van Mander, Ned Aston and Robert Anselm all arrived beside her in a flurry of manes and wet dust kicked up. They fell silent in the misty morning. Ahead, the smoke from Genoa smirched the sky.

In an identical bewildered tone to Fernando del Guiz, Joscelyn van Mander said, "Visigoths?"

Robert Anselm said, "They were either coming for us or the Turk. Turned out to be us."

"Listen." Ash's knuckles whitened on her reins. "A dozen mounted men riding on their own can move faster than this company. Lord husband, Fernando - ride back, tell the Emperor, he has to know about this now! Take de Quesada and Lebrija with you as hostages! You can do it in a few days if you ride post."

He stared down from his horse at the approaching banners. Behind him, the lance-leaders and men of the Lion Azure were a ma.s.s of steel helmets and dusty flags and the heads of polearms wavering in the heat. Fernando said, "Why not you, Captain!"

Poised above the dusty ruts, smelling of horse, wet with sweat, Ash felt a sensation as of putting her hand to a familiar sword grip: a sensation of control, not felt since they left Cologne a fortnight ago.

"You're a knight," she said, "not a peasant, not a mercenary. He'll listen to you."

Anselm managed a servile, "She's right, my lord." Roberto didn't meet Ash's eye, but she read what he was thinking with the clarity of long knowledge of the man. Don't let this boy get any ideas about death-or-glory charges against that lot!

"There are sixty quinqueremes . . ." Van Mander sounded stunned. "Thirty thousand men."

Fernando gazed down at Ash. Then, as if no one had spoken, as if it were his own decision, he shouted at her, "I'll take my Imperial cousin the news! You fight these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds for me. I order it."

Got him! she thought, exultant, and stared down Joscelyn van Mander, who had very plainly heard his order.

They wheeled their horses by unspoken consent, trotting back down the slope. Early humid heat brought a cream sweat to the horses' flanks. The sea-mist from the Mediterranean coast thinned still more. A harsh sunlight stung her eyes.

She beckoned G.o.dfrey Maximillian as he strode up, the two Visigoth men stumbling beside him. "Get them on horses. Chain their wrists. Go!"

Ash slapped her gloved hand against The Sod's satin neck. She couldn't stop grinning. The gelding whickered and mouthed at her, immense teeth clicking on the metal greaves covering her shins. "All right, you sod, so you like people - why the f.u.c.k can't you put up with other horses? One of these days you'll be stew. Stand still."

A hard object thunked between her shoulders, c.h.i.n.king the metal plates inside the brigandine. Ash swore. The already-spent arrow fell to the earth.

She brought the gelding around with her knees.

A line of light horses and riders in black livery were skylined at the top of the slope ahead. Mounted archers.

"Stop!" she yelled at Henri Brant, seeing the steward bawling at the drovers and men-at-arms to haul the big-wheeled vehicles around into wagon-fort formation. "You can forget that. That's a f.u.c.king army down there! Take what you can carry on packhorses. We'll leave the rest."

She spurred forward to where Anselm drew up a long line of mounted knights at the bottom of the slope, Jan-Jacob and Pieter out to either wing with mounted archers.

She kneed The Sod ferociously, wished that she was riding G.o.dluc -f.u.c.king Fernando, "Don't bring war-horses, we're riding in peace"! - and her b.a.s.t.a.r.d sword was in her right hand, she didn't remember drawing it; and her unprotected hands wore nothing but leather riding gloves: her stomach clenched with the sheer terror of their vulnerability to chopping-edged weapons. She spared one glance to see the dozen young German knights riding h.e.l.l for leather back down the road, lost in plumes of dust; then she galloped across the battle-line and out to the flank, and stared towards the sea..

Dark banners with cl.u.s.ters of men under them scrambled across the rocky slopes towards her. The sun winked off their weapons. A couple of thousand spear, at least.

She galloped back to the Lion Azure standard, finding Rickard also there, with her personal banner. Coming up with Robert Anselm, she called, "There's trees, two miles back! Henri, everyone on wagons is to cut their horses' traces, load up what they can, and ride. When you get to the bend about a mile back, leave the road and ride for the hills. We'll cover your backs."

Ash whirled The Sod on the spot, on his hind hooves, and rode out in front of the line. She faced them: about a hundred men in armour on horseback, another hundred out to the wings, with bows. "I always said you b.a.s.t.a.r.ds would do anything for wine, women and song - and that's your wine, headed for the woods back there! In a minute, we're going to follow it. First, we're going to give this lot of southern b.a.s.t.a.r.ds enough of a hard time that they won't dare come after us. We've done it before, and now we'll do it again!"

Rough voices bawled, "Ash!"

"Archers up on the ridge, there - move it! Remember, we don't go back until the standard goes back. And then we go back steady! And if they're stupid enough to follow us into the forests, they deserve everything they get. Okay, here they come!"

Euen Huw bawled, "Nock! Loose!"

The fine whistle of an arrow split the air, followed by two hundred more. Ash watched a rider in Visigoth livery on the ridge throw up his arms and fall, crossbow-bolt flights feathered in under his heart.

A crowd of spearmen on the ridge ran back.

Anselm yelled, "Keep the line!"

Ash, out to one side, saw more Visigoths on horses, small recurved bows in their hands. She muttered, "About sixty men, they can shoot from horseback."

'If they rally, charge them with knights. If they run, retreat.'

"Uh huh," she murmured thoughtfully to herself, and signalled the Lion Azure standard to pull back. She signalled the column to mount up. A half-mile at walking pace, with her eyes on the Visigoth cavalry archers - who didn't follow.

"I don't like that. I don't like that at all ..."

"Something's odd." Robert Anselm reined in beside her as the men-at-arms rode past, on rising ground. "I expected the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds to come down on top of us."

"They're outnumbered. We'd cut them to pieces."

"That never stopped Visigoth serf-troops before. They're an undisciplined shower of s.h.i.te."

"Yeah. I know. But they're not acting like it today." Ash raised her hand and brought the sallet's visor down a touch, shading her eyes with the metal peak. "Thank Christ he went -I swear I thought my lord husband was going to order us to charge straight into that lot."

Far ahead, towards Genoa's burning buildings, she saw standards. Not pennants, but Visigoth flags crowned with what might - the distance being deceptive - be gilded eagles.

A movement beneath the eagles caught her eye.

Seen on its own, it could have been a man. Seen with the Visigoth commanders on the distant moorland, it was plainly a head taller. The sun shone on its ochre and bra.s.s surfaces. She knows that silhouette.

Ash watched as the clay and bra.s.s golem begin to stride out to the south-east. It walked no faster than a man, but its ceaseless stride ate up the ground, never faltering over rocks or banks, until she lost it in the haze.

"s.h.i.t," she said. "They're sending them out as messengers. That means this isn't the only beach-head."

Anselm tapped her on the shoulder. She followed his pointing arm. Another golem strode off, this one heading north-west, along the coastline. As fast as a trotting man. Slower than a horse - but untiring, needing no food or rest, travelling as well at night as in the day. A hundred and twenty miles in twenty-four hours, and carrying, in stone hands, written orders.

"n.o.body's prepared!" Ash shifted in her war saddle. "They didn't just fool our spy networks, Robert. The banks, the priests, the princes . . . G.o.d help us. They aren't after the Turks. They never were after the Turks . . ."

"They're after us," Robert Anselm grunted, and wheeled to ride with the column. "It's a f.u.c.king invasion."

Chapter Three.By the time they caught the hastily loaded baggage train on the low slopes of the foothills, the head of the column was already vanishing up into a cliff-topped valley. Ash rode between a hundred archers and a hundred men-at-arms. Wheel ruts churned the road and the low gorse, the last abandoned wagons marking where the pack animals had left the high road. Ash squinted through air that began to waver as the morning grew hot. Probably a river flowed down through the valley, in winter. Dry, now.

Robert Anselm, Euen Huw, Joscelyn van Mander, her pages and the steward Henri Brant cl.u.s.tered under her banner, as two hundred armed men rode by. Tack jingled.

Ash thumped her fist on her saddle. Her breath came short. "If they're burning Genoa, they're prepared to be at war with Savoy, France, the Italian cities, the Emperor . . . sweet Green Christ!"

Van Mander scowled. "It's impossible!"

"It's happening. Joscelyn, I want your lances up front as the vaward. Euen, take charge of the archers; Robert, you have the mounted men-at-arms. Henri, can the pack animals keep up?"

The steward, in ill-fitting padded armour now, nodded his head enthusiastically.

"We can see what's behind us. They'll keep up!"

"Okay, let's go."

Not until she rode into the steep-sided valley, and its shelter, did she realise how the increasing breeze had drummed in her ears, out on the moor. The silence here now echoed with horses' hooves, harness jangling, men muttering. Sun slanted through spa.r.s.e pines on the valley floor. The promontories either side were thick with pine trees, broken deadfalls. And thick with undergrowth, at the cliff edges, where the trees didn't rob briars of sustenance.

Her neck p.r.i.c.kled. With complete clarity, Ash thought. s.h.i.t, that's why they didn't attack; they've bounced us back into an ambush! and opened her mouth to yell.

A storm of eighty arrows blacked the air. A throng of shafts. .h.i.t home, all in Joscelyn van Mander's lead lance. For a second it was as if nothing had happened. The whirring whine died. Then, a man screamed, metal flashed; another thicket of shafts jutted from horses' flanks, from men's shoulders, from the visor of a sallet; seven horses screeched and reared and the head of the column became a chaos of men running, dismounted, trying to control fear-stricken horses.

Ash lost The Sod's rein. The grey gelding bucked and sprang straight up, all four hooves off the ground, came down on age-hardened pine-tree roots - six black-fletched arrows sticking out of his neck and front quarters - and she felt the bone of his hind leg shatter.

She went sideways out of the saddle as he went down. One glimpse let her see men up high on the cliff-steep sides of the valley, shooting wicked small recurved bows, and the next ma.s.s arrow-flight shrieked down through the spa.r.s.e trees and took Ned Aston's rearward lance into rioting horses and falling men and sheer, b.l.o.o.d.y chaos.

She hit the foot of a tree with a metallic crunch, hard enough to compress the plates in her brigandine. A dismounting man hauled her up on to her feet -Pieter? - her personal banner gripped in his other hand.

Her grey horse screamed. She leapt back from his threshing smashed legs; stepped in, sword in hand - how? when? - and slashed open the big vein in his throat.

The whole length of the valley seethed with screaming, rioting horses. A bay mare broke past Aston, running towards the moorland.

An arrow took it down.

Every exit blocked.

She steadied herself, body clamped tight up to the sticky resinous trunk of a pine tree, visor slammed up, staring around in desperation. A dozen or more men down, rolling on the dirt; the rest wheeling their mounts, looking for cover - but there is no cover - riding towards the foot of the seventy-degree slope -but no way up it. Bodkin-headed arrows thunked into flesh, bristled from the hastily roped towering loads on the mules.

The way ahead - blocked. A huddle of men, van Mander down; six of his men trying to drag him under the lip of the dry river bed, as if six inches of earth could protect them from a hundred murderous, razor-sharp arrowheads- Big Isobel, hauling on the reins of a mule, threw up her arms and sat down. A wooden shaft, as thick round as a man's thumb, stuck through her cheek, and through her mouth, and out of the back of her skull. Vomit and blood spilled over her brown linen bodice. The metal arrow-head dripped.

Ash slammed her visor down. She risked a look up at the cliff edge. Light glinted from a helmet. An arm moved. The tops of bows were a moving thicket. One man stood up to shoot, and she could barely see his head and shoulders. How many up there: fifty? A hundred?

Coldly realistic, she thought: Girl, you're not so special that you can't die yet, shot to pieces in some stupid ambush in some nameless hills. We can't shoot back, we can't get up the sides, we're fish in a barrel, we're dead.

No, we're not.

That simple: not even time to formulate a question for her saint's voice. She grabbed the banner-bearer's arm, her idea fully formed, plain, obvious and dirty.

"You, you and you; with me, now!"

She ran fast enough that she outdistanced her banner-bearer and two squires, thumping down behind the baggage mules as the Visigoth arrow-storm shrieked overhead.

"Get the torches out!" she screamed at Henri Brant. Her steward stared, gap-toothed mouth wide open. "The f.u.c.king pitch-torches, now! Get Pieter!"

She grabbed Pieter Tyrrell as Rickard ran back with him, all of them crouching crammed behind the squealing pack mules. Her banner-bearer gripped the pole in gauntleted hands, and ducked his head against arrows. The air stank of mule dung, and blood, and the fierce resin of the chine's forested slopes.

"Pieter, take these-" she dug in her pack for flint and steel, could only jerk her chin at the bundles of torches with pitch-soaked heads, that Henri Brant slashed free from binding cords with his dagger. "Take these and take six men. Ride like h.e.l.l up this valley, ahead of us - look like you're running away. Climb the slope. Fire the trees on the cliff-top. Drag the torches on ropes behind your horses. As soon as there's a fire, cut around north-west. If you don't pick us up on the north road, wait for me at the Brenner. Got all that?"

"Fire? Christ, boss, a forest fire?"

"Yes. Go!"

Flint and steel sparked. The soft tinder in the box glowed, red and black.

"It's done!" Pieter Tyrrell swung around, crouching, to yell out half a dozen names.

Ash scuttled across the slope. A Visigoth crossbow bolt blew an explosion of splinters off a pine trunk, a yard ahead of her and the banner. She flung up an arm, cringing. Splinters thwicked across the velvet front of her brigandine. The soles of her riding boots skidded on the needle-covered slope. She slammed down beside Robert Anselm, behind a semi-fallen pine. "Have them ready to attack when I give the word."

"That's a f.u.c.k of a slope! We'll be cut to pieces!"

Ash glanced around at sweating, swearing men-at-arms, mostly in brigandines and long riding boots over leg armour, and carrying polearms that suddenly seemed clumsy under the low, stark branches of dry pines. Their faces turned to her. She slitted her eyes and stared up the gorge-like slopes of the dry river chine. You couldn't ride up this slope, or run up it: too steep. Weapon in one hand, the other to help scramble up. And so few trees for cover, so exposed, exhausted before you hit the men up there in cover- "You're going in under cover of bows and arquebuses. Those f.u.c.kers will be too busy to see you coming!" It was a lie, and she knew it. "Robert, watch me for the signal!"

Ash sheathed her sword. Its scabbard rattled against her legs as she flung herself again across empty ground. Someone shrieked up on the top of the valley. Puffs of dust went up from the earth, and she caught her foot on an arrow buried to the fietching, and stumbled behind the second line of braying pack mules to the archers.

She was grinning so hard it hurt.

"Okay!" Ash slid to a halt beside Euen Huw, de facto captain of archers. "Oil pots and rags. Try for fire-arrows."

Henri Brant, unexpectedly still with her, yelled, "We don't have proper fire-arrows here! We weren't expecting a siege, so I didn't bring any!"

She slammed her arm around the steward's shoulders. "Don't matter! Do your best. With luck, we won't need it. Euen, how are we on ammunition?"

"Hackb.u.t.ters are low. Bolts and arrows enough, though. Boss, we can't stay here, we're getting cut to pieces!"

A man in Blue Lion livery screamed and ran down the slope, arms flailing, towards the bottom of the valley. His boots skidded in the dry river course. A dozen arrows thunked into his legs. He hit dirt, rolled, took a bolt in the face, and lay thrashing and screeching.

"Keep shooting! Hard and fast as you can. Give those f.u.c.kers up there h.e.l.l!" She grabbed Euen by the arm. "Hold on for five minutes. Be prepared to remount and go when I give the signal!"

Ash put her free hand on her b.o.l.l.o.c.k dagger, half intending to drop down to the dry river course and the dying man. A figure in padded armour and wearing a woollen hood shot past her. Ash, halfway back to the men-at-arms, her group dodging from tree to tree, suddenly thought why the hood? and realised she knew the long, loping run: f.u.c.k, that's Florian!

She took one look over her shoulder, and saw the surgeon with the man's arm over her shoulder. He - she - bodily dragged the man under fallen, dead pine branches. Arrows chipped and thunked into the wood.