Ash: The Lost History Part 20

And it is almost a mile and a half straight down.

Sheer rock, moss and ice, and a vastness of empty air so big and deep that it hurts the mind to look at it.

She finished quietly, "If you fell, you'd never touch the earth until you hit bottom."

"Straight down!" Daniel de Quesada echoed. His eyes flashed. "I found I was looking- The road below me, winding down bend upon bend upon bend. There is a lake at the bottom. It is no larger than the nail upon my finger."

Ash remembers the interminable straining fear of the descent, and how the lake, when they got down to it, was quite large, and nestled in foothills: they were not off the mountain even then.

"The fog cleared and I was looking down."

All the room was silent. After a minute, it became apparent to Ash that there was to be no more from him. De Quesada stared with unseeing eyes at the shifting shadows.

As Floria was handing the Visigoth over to one of her aides, Angelotti said, "I've known men blindfold themselves going over the alpine pa.s.ses, afraid of going mad.5 I didn't think I should meet one, madonna."

"I think you just have." Ash looked after de Quesada grimly. "Well, picking him up in the riots in the hope he'd be some use wasn't one of my better ideas. I'd hoped he'd negotiate with del Guiz when we got here."

"He's away with the fairies," Floria remarked. "If you want my medical opinion. Not the best qualification for a herald."

Ash snorted. "I don't care if he's nuts. I want answers. I don't like this darkness!"

"Who does?" Floria inquired rhetorically. She snorted. "You want to know how many of your men have developed acute attacks of coward's belly?"

"No. Why do you think I want to keep them busy with a siege? They're used to tunnelling petards and banging away with cannon, it rea.s.sures them . . . That's why the men-at-arms are going through this town street by street commandeering supplies - if they're going to loot the place, it might as well be organised looting."

This appeal to her cynicism made Floria chuckle, as Ash had known it would. There was so little difference between Floria and 'Florian', even down to the gallantry with which the tall woman offered now to pour wine for Ash herself.

"It's no different from night attacks," Ash added, refusing wine, "which are, G.o.d knows, a b.i.t.c.h, but possible. I want this castle opened up by treachery, not damaged by us having to storm it. Speaking of which-" the restlessness that came with her failure to interrogate de Quesada impelled her to action "- you come with me and look at this. Angelotti!"

They left the room, the gunner with them; Ash glancing back to see G.o.dfrey Maximillian, broad shoulders bowed, still at prayer. Outside - walking into a wall of darkness, pitch-black down in the streets - they silently stood for some minutes, waiting for night vision, before stumbling towards the bonfire-lights.

The town blacksmith's had been taken over by the company armourers, a perpetually black-handed group of men with straggling hair, hatless, in pourpoints6 and leather ap.r.o.ns and no shirts, sweating from the forge, half-deaf from the ceaseless ringing of hammers. They made way good-naturedly for Ash, her surgeon, and her escort of half a dozen men and dogs. No commander was ever more than means to an end for them, this she knew. The latest project was difficult, welcome because of that, welcome because unusual.

"A twelve-foot pair of bolt-cutters?" Floria surmised, studying vast steel handles.

"It's getting the blades right?" The company's head armourer, d.i.c.kon Stour, habitually ended on a note of query, even when not speaking his native English. "To withstand the pressure, and to cut iron?"

"And those are scaling ladders," Ash said. She pointed at stout wooden poles with steel hooks on the end, and a mess of spars attached. Hook it over a wall, tug ropes, and a ladder will unfold from the mess. "I'm going to send people in secretly with black wool over their armour, to cut the big bars on the postern gate from the inside. I would say, at night, but in this darkness-" A shrug and grin.

"Stealth knights ..."

"You're mad. They're mad. I want to talk to you!" Floria scowled at the noise from the anvils and pointed, silently, at the street. Ash shook hands, thumped shoulders, left with her escort. Angelotti stayed, discussing metallurgy.

Ash caught up with the surgeon a few yards away, staring up from the cobbled street that ran up the hill, to the shadowy machicolations and timber-works of the castle crowning the heights.

Floria walked fast, a few paces ahead of the men-at-arms and hounds. "Are you really going to try that?"

"We did it before. Two years back, in - where was it?" Ash thought. "Somewhere in southern France?"

"That is my brother in there." The woman's voice came masculine out of the dusk, a breathy drop into lower registers that never relaxed, whether the command escort could hear her or not. "Granted I haven't seen him since he was ten. Granted he was a brat. And now he's a s.h.i.t. But blood's blood. He is family."

"Family. Yeah. Tell me how much I care about family."

Floria began, "What-?"

"What? Will I give orders for him to be taken prisoner, not killed? Will I let him run, go off and raise men somewhere else to come back and fight me? Will I have him killed? What?"

"All of those."

"It seems unreal." Unreal, when I have had his body inside me, to believe that he could die with an arrow through the throat, a billhook slashing his gut; that someone with a b.o.l.l.o.c.k dagger and my express order could make him not be.

"d.a.m.n it, you can't go on ignoring this, girl! You f.u.c.ked him. You married him. He's your flesh in the sight of G.o.d."

"That's a dumb thing to say. You don't believe in G.o.d." Ash could, in the torchlit streets, make out the sudden strain etching itself into the woman's face. "Florian, I'm not likely to go around denouncing you to the local bishop, am I! Soldiers either believe completely, or not at all, and I've got both sorts in the company."

The tall woman continued walking down the cobblestones beside her, all her balance in her shoulders: gangling and masculine. She made an irritated motion that might have been a shrug or a flinch as Angelotti's siege cannon crashed out smoke and flame, two streets away. "You're married!."

"Time enough to decide what to do about Fernando when I've got him and his garrison out of that castle." Ash shook her head as if she could clear it, somehow; clear the oppressive, unnatural darkness out of her skull.

She called the commander of the escort to her as she reached the commandeered town house again, ordering a brazier and food for his men in the street; and then clumped back up the stairs, Floria at her shoulder, only to walk into what seemed an entire company of people crammed between narrow white walls, helmet-plumes rubbing the candle-stained ceiling, voices raised.

"Quiet!"

That got silence.

She gazed around.

Joscelyn van Mander, his red-cheeked intense face framed by the brilliance of his steel sallet; two of his men; then Robert Anselm; G.o.dfrey rising from his knees and disrupted prayer; Daniel de Quesada in his badly fitting European clothes - and a new man in white tunic and trousers and riveted mail hauberk, no weapons.

A Visigoth, with leather rank badges laced to his mail shoulders. Qa'id, she dredged up out of her memory of campaigns in Iberia: an officer set over a thousand. Roughly the equivalent of her own command.

"Well?" she said, reclaiming her place behind the table, and sitting. Rickard appeared and poured heavily watered wine for her. She dropped without thought into the dialect she had learned around Tunisian soldiers; something as automatic to her as calling a hackb.u.t.ter an arquebusier in the French king's lands, or a poleaxe derAxst here and l'azza to Angelotti. "What's your business, Qa'id?"

"Captain." The Visigoth soldier touched his fingers to his forehead. "I met my countryman de Quesada and your escort, on the road. He decided to return here with me, to speak to you. I bring news to you."

The Visigoth soldier was small, fair-skinned, hardly taller than Rickard; with the palest blue eyes, and something about him that was undeniably familiar. Ash said, "Is your family name Lebrija?"

He seemed startled. "Yes."

"Continue. What news?"

"There will be other messengers, of your own people-"

Ash's gaze flicked to Anselm, who nodded, confirming: "Yes. I met them. I was on my way here when Joscelyn came in."

"You may have the honour of telling me," Ash told the Visigoth qa'id mildly, hating to hear news unprepared; hating not to have the few minutes' warning she would have had if Robert had been the one to tell her. Since Joscelyn van Mander seemed intensely worried, she switched back to German. "What's happened?"

"Frederick of Hapsburg has sued for terms."

There was a little silence, essentially undisturbed by Floria muttering "f.u.c.k," and Joscelyn van Mander's demand: "Captain, what does he mean?"

"I think he means that the territories of the Holy Roman Emperor have surrendered." Ash linked her hands in front of her. "Master Anselm, is that what our messengers say?"

"Frederick's surrendered. Everything from the Rhine to the sea is open to the Visigoth armies." In an equally level tone, Robert Anselm added, "And Venice has been burned to the waterline. Churches, houses, warehouses, ships, ca.n.a.l-bridges, St Mark's Basilica, the Doge's palace, everything. A million, million ducats up in smoke."

The silence became intense: mercenaries stunned at the waste of wealth, the two Visigoth men imbued with a silent confidence, being a.s.sociated with the power to make such destruction.

Frederick of Hapsburg will have heard about Venice, Ash thought, stunned, hearing in her mind the dry, covetous voice of the Holy Roman Emperor; he's decided not to risk the Germanies! And then, bringing her gaze snap into focus on the Visigoth soldier, brother or cousin of dead Asturio Lebrija, she realised, The Empire has surrendered and we're caught on the wrong side. Every mercenary's nightmare.

"I a.s.sume," she said, "that a relieving force from the Visigoth army is now on its way here to Fernando?"

Her vision of where they are flips a hundred and eighty degrees. It's no longer a matter of feeling herself safe behind town walls, soon to be safe behind the castle walls. Now the company's caught in between the approaching Visigoth men-at-arms in the countryside beyond the town, and Fernando del Guiz's knights and gunners up in the castle itself.

Daniel de Quesada spoke rustily. "Of course. Our allies must be helped."

"Of course," the brother or cousin of Lebrija echoed.

Quesada could not yet have told the qa'id of Lebrija's death, might not know anything, Ash thought, and resolved to keep silent where speech could very likely get her into trouble.

"I'll be interested to talk to your captain when he arrives," Ash stated. She watched her own officers out of peripheral vision, seeing them draw strength from her confidence.

"Our commander arrives here by tomorrow," the Visigoth soldier estimated. "We are most anxious to talk to you. The famous Ash. That's why our commander is coming here, now."

Sun gone out or not, Ash thought, I am not going to get the time I want to consider my decisions. Whether I like it or not, it's happening now.

And then: Sun gone out or not, Last Days or not, it is nothing to do with me: if I stand by my company, we're strong enough to survive this. The metaphysics of it aren't my problem.

"Right," she said. "I'd better meet your commander and open negotiations."

Rickard presented Bertrand, a possible half-brother of Philibert, at thirteen busy growing into a body far too large for him, managing simultaneously to be fat and gangling. They put Ash into her armour and brought G.o.dluc in his best barding; the boys smear-eyed with lack of sleep, at an hour which might have been dawn, if this third day in Guizburg had had one.

"As far as I can tell, their commander's personal name is actually the name of her rank," G.o.dfrey Maximillian said. "Faris.7 It means Captain-General, General of all their forces, something like that."

"Her rank? A woman commander?" Ash remembered, then, Asturio Lebrija saying I have met women of war, and his sense of humour, which his cousin Sancho (G.o.dfrey reporting the name and fact) did not possess at all. "And she's here now? The boss of the whole d.a.m.n invasion force?"

"Just down the road from Innsbruck."

"s.h.i.t..."

G.o.dfrey went to the door, calling a man in from the main room of the commandeered house. "Carracci, the boss wants to hear it herself."

A man-at-arms with startling white-blond hair and high colour on his cheeks, who had stripped off all but a minimum of his shabby foot soldier's kit to travel fast, came in and made a courtesy. "I got right up to their command tent! It's a woman, boss. A woman leading their army; and you know how they've made her good? She's got one of those Brazen Head machines of theirs, it does her thinking for her in battles - they say she hears its voice! She hears it talk!"

"If it's a Brazen Head,8 of course she hears it talk!"

"No, boss. She doesn't have it with her. She hears it in her head, like G.o.d speaking to a priest."

Ash stared at the billman.

"She hears it like a saint's voice, it tells her how to fight. That's why a woman beat us." Carracci suddenly stopped talking, lifted a shoulder, and at last gave a hopeful grin. "Oops. Sorry, boss?"

She hears it like a saint's voice.

A pulse of coldness went through the pit of Ash's stomach. She was aware that she blinked, stared, said nothing; chill with an as yet unidentifiable shock. She wet her lips.

"b.l.o.o.d.y right you're sorry ..."

It was an automatic response. This billman, Carracci, had clearly not heard Ash hears saints' voices? as a company rumour: most - especially those who had been with her for years - would have done.

Does she hear a saint, this Faris? Does she? Or does she only think it's a useful rumour? Burned as a witch is no way to end . . .

"Thanks, Carracci," she added absently. "Join the escort. Tell them we're riding in five minutes."

As Carracci left, she turned back to G.o.dfrey. It's difficult to feel vulnerable, laced and tied into steel. She put the billman's words out of her mind. Her confidence came back with her stride across the small room, the trestle bare of waiting armour now, to the window, where she stood and looked out at Guizburg's fires.

"I think you're right, G.o.dfrey. They're going to offer us a contract."

"I've talked to travellers from a number of monasteries this side of the mountains. As I said, I can't get a real idea of their numbers, but there is at least one other Visigoth army fighting in Iberia."

Ash kept her back to him. "Voices. They say she hears voices. That's odd."

"As a rumour, it has its uses."

"Don't I know it!"

"Saints are one thing," G.o.dfrey said. "Claiming a miracle voice from an engine, that's another. She might be thought a demon. She might be a demon."

"Yes."

"Ash-"

"There isn't the time to worry about this, okay?" She turned and glared at G.o.dfrey. "Okay?"

He watched her, brown eyes calm. He did not nod.

Ash said, "We have to make our minds up fast, if the Visigoths do make us an offer. Fernando and his men are just waiting to find us caught between hammer and anvil. Then it'll be up with his castle drawbridge, and sally out and take us right in the back. Yippee," she said dourly, and then grinned over her armoured shoulder at the priest. "Won't he be sick if we're contracted to the same side? We're mercenaries, but he's an attainted traitor - I still reckon this castle's mine."

"Don't count your castles before they're stormed."

"Should that be a proverb, do you think?" She sobered. "We are between hammer and anvil. Let's hope they need us on their side more than they need to get rid of us. Otherwise I should have decided to move us out, not stay put. And it's going to be very short and very b.l.o.o.d.y up here."

The priest's broad hand came down on her left pauldron. "It's b.l.o.o.d.y where the Visigoths are fighting the Guilds, up near Lake Lucerne. Their commander will probably buy any fighting force they can get, especially one that's got local knowledge."

"And then put us in the front line to die, rather than their own men. I know how it goes." She moved cautiously, turning; armour can be considered a weapon in itself, if you are only wearing a brown pleated woollen robe and sandals. G.o.dfrey's hand slid away from the sharp metal plates. She met his brown-eyed gaze.

"It's remarkable what you can get used to. A week, ten days . . . The question no one wants to ask, of course, is - after the sun, what? What else can happen?" Ash knelt stiffly. "Bless me before I ride out. I'd like to be in good grace right now."

His deep, familiar voice sang a blessing.