Ash: The Lost History Part 4

"Form up!"

Ash's voice sounded m.u.f.fled in her own ears by the silver hair she wore braided up as an arming cap, padding the inside of her steel sallet1. Her voice was not as deep as Anselm's. It came resonant from her small, deep chest cavity; piercing; it sounds an octave above any noise of battle except cannon. Ash's men can always hear Ash.

Ash pushed her own bevor up and locked, protecting mouth and chin. For the moment, she left the visor of her sallet up so that she could see better. The hors.e.m.e.n jostled around her in a packed ma.s.s on the churned earth of the slope. Her men, in her company's livery: on geldings of mostly medium to good quality.

Down the slope infront of her, a vast makeshift town littered the river valley. Bright under noon sunlight, walled with wagons chained together, and crammed with pennon-flying pavilions and thirty thousand men, women and baggage animals inside it - the Burgundian army. Their camp big enough (confirmed rumour had it) to have two of its own markets ...

You could hardly see the little battered walled town of Neuss inside the enclosing army.

Neuss: a tenth the size of the attacking forces camped around it. The besieged town rested precariously within its gates - rubble, now - and behind its moats and the wide protecting Rhine river. Beyond the Rhine valley, pine-knotted German hills glowed grey-green in the June heat.

Ash tilted her visor down to shade her eyes from the sunlight. A group of about fifty riders moved on the open ground between the Burgundian camp that besieged Neuss and her own Imperial camp that (theoretically) was here to relieve the town. Even at this distance Ash could see the men's Burgundian livery: two red criss-cross slashes, the Cross of St Andrew.

Robert Anselm brought his bay around in a neat circle. His free hand gripped the company's standard: the azure Lion Pa.s.sant Guardant on a field or.2 "They could be trying to sucker us down, boss."

Deep in the pit of her stomach, expectation and fear churned. The big iron-grey gelding, G.o.dluc, shifted under her, responding. As always in chance ambushes, the suddenness, the sense of moments slipping away and a decision to be made- "No. Not a trick. They're overconfident. Fifty mounted men - that's someone out with just an escort. He thinks he's safe. They think we're not going to attack them, because we haven't struck a blow since us and Emperor-bleeding-Frederick got here three weeks ago." She hit the high front of the war saddle with the heel of her gauntleted hand, turned to Anselm, grinning. "Robert, tell me what you don't see."

"Fifty mounted men, most in full harness, don't see any infantry, no crossbowmen, don't see any hackb.u.t.ters, don't see any archers - don't see any archers!"

Ash couldn't stop grinning: she thought her teeth might be all that was visible under the shadow of her visor, and you could probably see them all the way across the occupied plain to Neuss. "Now you get it. When do we ever get to do the pure knightly cavalry-against-cavalry charge in real war?"

"-Without being shot out of the saddle." His brows, visible under his visor, furrowed. "You sure?"

"If we don't sit here with our thumbs up our a.r.s.es, we can catch them out on the field - they can't get back to their camp in time. Now let's shift!"

Anselm nodded decisive compliance.

She squinted up at the dark blue sky. Her armour, and the padded arming doublet and hose under it, burned as if she stood in front of an armourer's furnace. G.o.dluc's foam soaked his blue caparisons. The world smelled of horse, dung, oil on metal, and the downwind stench of Neuss where they had been eating rats and cats for six weeks now.

"I'm going to boil if I don't get out of this lot soon, so let's go!" She raised her plate-covered arm and jerked it down.

Robert Anselm's thick-necked horse dipped its hindquarters and then sprang forward. The company standard lifted, gripped high in Anselm's armoured gauntlet. Ash spurred G.o.dluc into the thicket of raised lances and through, ahead of her men, Anselm at her shoulder now, half a pace behind her trotting mount. She tapped the long spurs back again. G.o.dluc went from trot to canter. The jolting shook her teeth to her bones, and rattled the plates of her Milanese armour, and the wind whipped into her sallet and s.n.a.t.c.hed the breath out of her nostrils.

Percussive concussion shook the world. The hundreds of steel horseshoes striking hard earth threw up showers of clods. The noise went unheard, felt in her chest and bones rather than heard with her ears; and the line of riders - her line, her men; sweet Christ don't let me get this wrong! - gathered speed down the slope and out on to clear ground.

No rabbit holes, she prayed, and then: f.u.c.k me, that isn't one of their commanders' standards, it's the Duke's banner. Sweet Green Christ! That's Duke Charles of Burgundy himself there!

Summer sun struck brilliances from Burgundian knights in full harness, steel-silver plates from head to toe. The sun winked from the stars that were the tips of their light war lances. Her vision blotted green and orange.

No time for new tactics now. Anything we haven't practised, we can't do. This season's training will have to get us through it.

Ash glanced quickly right and left at the riders coming up nose and nose with her. Steel faces, not recognisable now as lance-leaders Euen Huw or Joscelyn van Mander or Thomas Rochester; anonymous hard-riding men, thickets of lances dropping down to attack position.

She brought her own lance down across G.o.dluc's thick arched neck. Her gauntlet-linen over her palm was ridged and wet with sweat where she gripped the wood. The ma.s.sive jolting of the horse shook her in the high-backed saddle, and the flapping of G.o.dluc's azure caparisons and the rattle of horse armour deafened her already m.u.f.fled hearing. She had the smell, almost the taste, of sweat-hot armour in her mouth; metallic as blood. Motion smoothed as she spurred G.o.dluc into full gallop.

She mumbled into the velvet lining of her bevor, "Fifty mounted men. Full harness. Eighty-one with me, medium armour."

'How are the enemy armed?'

"Lances, maces, swords. No missile weapons at all."

'Charge the enemy before the enemy is reinforced.'

"What the f.u.c.k," Ash shouted happily to the voice in her head, "do you think I'm doing? Haro! A Lion! A Lion!" She threw up her free arm and bellowed, "Charge!"

Robert Anselm, half a length to her rear, boomed back in answer, "A Lion!" and jammed the staff of the rippling cloth banner up above his head. Half her riders were pelting ahead of Ash now, almost out of formation; too late to think about that, too late to do anything but think let them learn to stick with the banner! She dropped the reins over the pommel, brought her free hand up in the automatic gesture over her sallet, slamming the visor fully down, reducing vision to a slot.

The Burgundian flag jerked wildly.

"They've seen us!"

Not clear, least of all to her now, at this speed and this restricted vision, but were they trying to cl.u.s.ter around one man? Move away? Gallop back breakneck towards their camp? Some mixture of all three?

In a split second four Burgundian horses wheeled and came up together and burst into a full gallop towards her.

Foam splattered back on her breastplate. Heat blinded her out of a dark blue sky. It was as real and as solid as bread to her - those four men galloping towards me on three-quarters of a ton of horse each, with curved metal plates strapped around them, carry poles with sharpened lance-heads as long as my hand, that will hit home with the concentrated momentum of horse and sixteen-stone rider. They will punch through flesh like paper.

She has a mental flash of the lance-tip punching through her scarred cheek, her brain, the back of her skull.

One Burgundian knight hefted his lance, gripping it with his steel gauntlet, couching it on the lance-rest on his breastplate. His head was polished metal, plumed with white ostrich feathers, slit by a bar of blackness - a visor through which not even eyes could be seen. His lance-point dipped straight towards her.

A grim exultation filled her. G.o.dluc responded to her shift of weight and swerved right. She dropped her lance down - down - down again, and took the grey stallion of the leading Burgundian knight squarely in under the jaw.

The shaft wrenched out of her hand. His horse reared, skidding forward on broken hind legs. The man went straight over his horse's a.r.s.e and under G.o.dluc's hooves. Trained as a war-horse, G.o.dluc did not even stumble. Ash slid the lanyard of her mace over her gauntlet to her wrist, swung up the 24-inch shaft, and crashed the small f.l.a.n.g.ed metal head square across the back of the second man's helmet. The metal creased. She felt it give. Something crashed into G.o.dluc's flank: she went careering across gra.s.s - hot gra.s.s, slippery in the heat, more than one horse missing its footing - and shifted her body-weight again to bring G.o.dluc up beside Robert Anselm. She reached over and hauled on his war-horse's reins, and pulled him up with her. "There!"

The confusion of colours, red and blue and yellow liveries and guidons,3 resolved itself into a ma.s.s of skirmishing men. First charge over, lances mostly abandoned, except there were the German guys from Anhelt's crew, skimming around the edge of the fray, lances jabbing as if they were boar-sticking - and Josse in the blue brigandine reaching over from his saddle with his hand on the backplate of a Burgundian knight, trying to punch his dagger down into the gap between plackart and backplate - and a man down, face-down on the dirt - and a spray of red straight up her breastplate, someone hit in a femoral artery, nothing to do with her own wild swing at someone's head - the leather lanyard breaking and her mace flying up in a perfect parabola into the sunlight.

Ash grasped the leather-bound hilt of her sword and whipped it out of its sheath. In a continuation of the same movement she smashed it pommel-first into the face of an armoured man. The strike jarred her wrist. She brought her sword round and slammed it down on his right upper arm and elbow. The impact jarred and numbed the whole length of her arm.

He swung his mace up.

The sliding plates of his arm defences squealed where her blow had crushed metal, and stuck. Jammed.

He could not bring his arm up - or down- She struck her blade in hard towards his vulnerable under-arm mail.

Three wildly plunging horses stampeded through the ma.s.s of heaving bodies, pushing them apart. She looked left, right, wildly around: the Lion banner there - soul's d.a.m.nation, if I'm not sticking with the unit banner, how can I expect them to? - and the Duke's standard about twenty yards away, close to the edge of the fight.

She gasped, "Enemy command group - in reach-"

'Then neutralise their unit commander.'

"A Lion! A Lion!" Ash stood up high in the stirrups, pointing with her sword. "Get the Duke! Get the Duke!"

Something crashed only glancingly off the back of her sallet, but it knocked her face-down on to G.o.dluc's neck. The war-horse wheeled around and reared up. Busy clinging on, Ash felt his hooves crush something. Screams dinned in her ears, and shouted commands in French and Flemish, and again the Lion banner slid off to the side, and she swore, and then saw the Ducal banner jerk and go down, and the knight in front of her threw his sword point-first at her face, and she ducked, and the ground was empty- Thirty or so horses and men in Burgundian colours galloped, routing, across the packed earth towards their camp. Only minutes. Ash thought, dazed. It's only been minutes, if that!

The little running figures at the Burgundian camp-line resolved themselves into infantry, in the liveries of Philippe de Poitiers and Ferry de Cuisance -archers from Picardy and Hainault.

"Archers - veteran - five hundred-"

'If you do not have sufficient missile troops, withdraw.'

"No chance now. f.u.c.k it!" She jerked up her arm, caught Robert Anselm's eye, and threw her whole weight into the gesture of back! "Withdraw!"

Two of Euen Huw's lance - a disreputable bunch of b.a.s.t.a.r.ds at the best of times - were swinging down from their horses to strip the still-living wounded. Ash saw Euen Huw himself slam a b.o.l.l.o.c.k dagger straight down into the visor of an unhorsed knight. Blood sprayed.

"You want to be crossbow meat?" She swung half down from the saddle and pulled the Welshman up. "b.u.g.g.e.r off back - now!"

The stabbed man was not dead, he thrashed and screamed, and blood jetted up from his visor. Ash hauled herself up into her saddle, rode over him on her way to Robert Anselm's side, and screamed, "Ride back to camp - go!"

The Lion banner withdrew.

A man in a blue livery jacket with a blue lion on it dragged himself up from under his dead horse. Thomas Rochester, an English knight. Ash sat still in the saddle for one minute, holding G.o.dluc by pressure of her knees, until the man reached her and she pulled him up behind her.

The open ground in front of Neuss was scattered now with riderless horses that abandoned their panic and slowed and stopped.

The man behind her on her horse yelled, "Boss, 'ware archers, let's get out of here!"

Ash picked a careful way across the ground covered by the skirmish. She leaned down, searching among the unhorsed men to see if any of the dead and wounded were hers - or were the Duke - and none were either.

"Boss!" Thomas Rochester protested.

The first Picardian longbowman pa.s.sed a bush she had privately decided was four hundred yards away.

"Boss!"

Thomas must be rattled. He doesn't even want me to stop and capture a stray horse, to replace his. There's money out there on four hooves.

And archers.

"Okay . . ." Ash turned and rode back, fording the almost-dry stream of the Erft, and moving on up the slope. She forced herself to ride at walking pace towards the wattle barriers of the Imperial camp's nearest gate. She thumped G.o.dluc's armoured neck. "Just as well we fed you up for the practise exercise."

The gelding threw up his head. There was blood at the corners of his mouth, and blood on his hooves.

Men wearing the Blue Lion and carrying bows came crowding out of the Imperial camp - which was a wagon-walled mirror of the Burgundian camp, down on the river plain. Ash rode in through the sentinelled gap between their wagons.

"There you go, Thomas." She reined in for the man to slide down, looking back at him. "Lose another horse and you can walk back next time . . .-"

Thomas of Rochester grinned. "Sure, boss!"

Figures running, men from her sector of the camp, crowding up to her and Robert Anselm, yelling questions and warnings.

"The d.a.m.n Burgundians are hardly going to follow us in here. Hang on." The sun blasted down. Ash nudged G.o.dluc a step aside from the crowd, and wrenched her gauntlet buckles open, and then grabbed for her helmet.

She had to lean her head way back to get at the strap and buckle under the chin-piece of her bevor. She yanked the buckle open. The sallet almost fell backward off her head, but she caught it, and put it down over the pommel of the saddle, and then sprang the pin on her bevor and concertina'd the laminations down.

Air. Cool air. Her throat rasped dry and raw. She straightened up in the saddle again.

His Most Gracious Imperial Majesty Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor, faced her from the war saddle of his favourite grey stallion.

Ash glanced around. A full knightly entourage rode with the Emperor. All bright liveries, and ostrich plumes on their helmets. Not so much as a scratch on the steel. Far too late to join any skirmish. She caught sight of one man at the back - by the look of him, from the Eternal Twilight,4 in mail hauberk; his eyes bandaged with thin strips of dark muslin - nonetheless wearing a mildly cynical smile.

Sweat stuck her braided-up silver hair to her forehead and cheeks. Her skin felt wet and red as fire. Calm-eyed, she rode towards the Emperor, away from her shouting men. "Majesty."

Frederick's dry little voice whispered, "What are you doing on this side of my camp, Captain?"

"Manoeuvres, Your Imperial Majesty."

"In front of the Burgundian camp?"

"Needed to practise advancing and retreating with the standard, Your Imperial Majesty."

Frederick blinked. "When you just happened to see the Duke's escort."

"Thought it was a sally against Neuss, Your Imperial Majesty."

"And you attacked."

"Paid to, Your Imperial Majesty. We are your mercenaries, after all."

One of the entourage - the southern mail-clad foreigner - stifled a noise. There was a pointed silence until he muttered, "Sorry, Your Imperial Majesty. Wind."

"Yes ..."

Ash blinked her indeterminately coloured eyes at the little fair-haired man. The Emperor Frederick was not visibly in armour, although his velvet doublet probably concealed mail under it. She said mildly, "Didn't we ride here from Cologne to protect Neuss, Your Imperial Majesty?"

Frederick abruptly wheeled his gelding, and galloped back into the centre of the Imperial German camp with his knights.

"s.h.i.t," Ash said aloud. "I might have done it this time."

Robert Anselm, helmet at hip, rode up beside her. "Done what, boss?"

Ash glanced sideways at the crop-headed man; twice her age, experienced, and capable. She reached up and pulled her hairpin, and let her heavy braid fall down, unwinding over pauldrons and breastplate as far as the ta.s.sets that hung to mid-thigh, and only then noticed that her arms were dripping red to the elbow-couters, and that her silver hair was sopping up the blood.

"Either got myself into deep s.h.i.t," she said, "or got where I want to be. You know what I want us to get, this year."

"Land," Anselm murmured. "Not a mercenary's reward of money. You want him to give us land and estates."

"I want in." Ash sighed. "I'm tired of winning castles and revenues for other people. I'm tired of never having anything at the end of a season except enough money to see us through the winter."

His tanned, creased face smiled. "It isn't every company can do that."

"I know. But I'm good." Ash chuckled, deliberately immodest, getting less of an answering grin from him than she expected. She sobered. "Robert, I want somewhere permanent we can go back to, I want to own land. That's what all this is about - you get land by fighting, or inheritance, or gift, but you get land and you establish yourself. Like the Sforza in Milan." She smiled cynically. "Give it enough time and money, and Jack Peasant becomes Sir John Wellborn. I want in."

Robert shrugged. "Is Frederick going to do that? He could be mad as h.e.l.l about this. I can't tell with him."

"Me either." Heartbeat and breath quietened now, ceasing to thunder in her ears. She stripped one gauntlet off and wiped her face, glancing back at the dismounting knights of the Company of the Lion. "That's a good lot of lads we've got there."

"Haven't I been raising troops for you for five years? Did you expect rubbish?"