Ash: The Lost History Part 96

"I'll wear my other one." He snicked a buckle home, expertly threaded the tail of the belt through itself in a knot, and let the blue leather strap, studded with bra.s.s mullets, hang down over the pleated white damask skirts of her demi-gown. "You ain't at Neuss now, girl."

The memory of kneeling before the Holy Roman Emperor is sharp in her mind's eye. Silver hair rippling to her knees; young, scarred, beautiful; a woman in full Milanese plate shining so brilliantly in the sun that it hurts the eye, leaves dazzles on the vision - and says, as clearly as a shout: This is what I earned as a mercenary captain, I'm good.

They're going to look at me now and think: she can't even afford plate armour. Well, s.h.i.t, I'm down to a helmet and gauntlets: that's it. Everything else - spare leg harness, borrowed cuira.s.s - is lost, damaged beyond repair, or out there with the f.u.c.king Faris . . .

Is this going to be enough?

Ash reached out and took the borrowed sallet, prodding the padding for a better fit. She lifted her chin as Rickard tied the fastenings of a clean, dry livery jacket, and buckled the sallet's strap.

"Looks like I'm going to the council. Angelotti, Anselm; with me. Geraint, I want a complete muster-roll of the whole company before I get back. Okay: let's move it!"

A cl.u.s.ter of men sorted themselves out into a remarkably clean, if now unspectacularly dressed, Angelotti; a Thomas Rochester, equally rapidly cleaned up and wearing other people's kit; and his lance of twelve as escort with Ash's banner. Ash strode at their head, out of the shadow of the doorway, into the open air. The courtyard scurried with pigs and a few remaining hens, chased by screaming children; clanged with the noise of the armoury sheds that lined the inside of the tower's perimeter wall.

A crack! made her whole body startle - the invisible impact of a rock, not far off. Animals and children simultaneously froze for a second. Pale sun struck her face: her chest suddenly constricted, her breath coming shallow.

"Hitting up at the north-west gate again," Anselm rumbled, glancing automatically and uselessly at the sky, and reaching up to buckle on his sallet.

Beside him, Rickard flinched. Ash reached out to shake his shoulder companionably.

Unexpectedly, she felt sweat cutting runnels in the dirt on her face. What's wrong with me now? This is just the usual s.h.i.t for a siege. She made herself start to walk down the stone steps, towards the men and horses in the courtyard.

There was a brief moment of the confusion that she has been used to for over a decade; armoured men mounting into the saddles of war-horses: trained, restless stallions. As the Burgundians mounted up, Rickard led forward a mouse-coloured dun stallion with black points and tail visible under the caparisons.

"Borrow Orgueil,"9 Anselm said. "I don't suppose you picked up any remounts on the way back from Carthage."

The dun's shining black eyes looked into Ash's face, dark nostrils flaring. Anselm's rough, sardonic tone demanded humour, or at least comradeship.

"Boss?"

"What?"

"Wrong time of the month for a stallion? We can find you a gelding."

"No. 'S okay, Roberto ..."

Momentarily - reaching up to put a firm hand against the beast's soft muzzle; feel warm horse-breath on her bare, cold skin - she is stopped dead: incapacitated with loss.

Six months ago, she owned destrier, palfrey and riding horse. All gone, now. Iron-grey G.o.dluc, wide-chested, bossy and protective. Lady's flaxen chestnut sweetness and greed. The Sod's dirty-water-grey colouring and foul temperament.

For one second her heart hurts, thinking of the golden foal that Lady might have had, and The Sod's viciousness (nipping at her leg when least expected; nuzzling at her chest equally unexpectedly), all lost in the rout from Basle. And G.o.dluc - I swear, she thought, eyes stinging, mouth twisting with black humour; I swear he thought of me as a horse; some misbehaving mare! -skewered and dead at Auxonne.

Easier to grieve for horses than men? she wonders, remembering the dead buried on rocky, inhospitable Malta.

"We'll get you another war-horse," Anselm said, appearing at a loss when she did not speak. "Shouldn't have to lay out more than a couple of pounds. There's been enough dead knights won't need 'em any more."

"Jeez, Roberto, you're an ever-present trouble in time of help ..."

The Englishman snorted. She cast an eye around at the armoured knights on their war-horses, the bright richness of rounded steel plate. Her own blue-and-gold liveries on the mounted archers shone out brilliant in the grey morning; men with open-faced steel helmets and mailed sleeves mounting up - she guessed - on some of the riding horses the garrison still maintained. Jutting bow-staves and her striped banner-pole pierced the air. A careful eye could have picked out rusted cuisses and poleyns, and boot-leather blackened and cracked by wet and cold.

". . . Let's go."

They rode in the wake of the Burgundian officers, out into a crowded street where cold air moved against her face. Her escort formed up around her. Dust blew, filling the air; and old ashes skirled across the cobbles, spooking two of the geldings. Groups of people standing talking on the corner moved back out of the way of the armed men. She laid the rein over to avoid a man hauling a hand-cart of rubble away from a collapsed shop. In the s.p.a.ce of a hundred yards, she picked half a dozen constables out of the crowds.

Another heavy crack! and boom of something landing and exploding into fragments echoed through the morning air over Dijon. Orgueil fluffed a plume of breath into the chill air, and she felt him shift discontentedly under her. Another succession of sharp impacts sounded, to the north. The Burgundians rode on, with an unconsciously hunched posture - men used to shrinking, however pointlessly, away from what the sky might deliver to them.

"s.h.i.t, that's close!"

"Couple of streets. Sometimes they play silly b.u.g.g.e.rs like this all day." Robert Anselm shrugged. "Limestone. Reckon they're quarrying rocks all the way down the Auxonne road by now. It's just hara.s.sment." Riding up to her side, he jerked his thumb at a church further on down the street. Ash saw it was a blackened sh.e.l.l. "When they're serious, they use Greek Fire."

"s.h.i.t."

"Too f.u.c.king right!"

"I've been up on the walls. They must have upwards of three hundred petriers10 out there," Angelotti called, his voice thinning. Careful on the flagstones, he brought his brown gelding over closer on her other, side.

"Perhaps twenty-five trebuchets that I can see, madonna. They shelter their mangonels and ballistae with hides; difficult to count them. Perhaps another hundred engines - but truly bad weather will make at least their catapults unusable. But . . . they have golems."

Wryly, Ash said, "I thought they might."

Angelotti said, "But do we fight here, madonna?"

Our options are narrowing all the time- The Burgundian officers, picking up the pace, struck off diagonally down a narrower street; riding from the cover of one house to the next. Here there were fewer broken roofs and burned-out houses. Under the iron hooves of the horses, rubble strewing the cobbles made footing uncertain.

Deliberately not answering his question, Ash asked, "If you were their magister ingeniator 11 Angeli, what would you be doing right now?"

"I would look to undermine the north wall, or break one of those two gates." The Italian's oval-lidded eyes narrowed, looking past her to study Anselm's reaction. "To weaken morale first, I would have had men up on the bluff, to draw me a map of what could be seen in the city; then I would concentrate my barrage on public targets. Markets, where people congregate. Churches. Guild halls. The ducal palace."

"Got it in one!" Anselm snorted.

The churning in her stomach, and the tightness in her chest, both increased. A man desperately nailing boards across his remaining windows paused as she pa.s.sed, pulling off his hat, and then ducked into his doorway as another spray of rocks cracked and whined across the rooftops.

"Ah, f.u.c.k it!" Ash exclaimed. "Now I remember how much I hate b.l.o.o.d.y siege-engines. I like something I can get within axe-reach of!"

"No s.h.i.t? I'll tell Raimon the Carpenter that." Robert Anselm: sardonic. At her inquiring look, he added, "Had to make someone Enguynnur,12 with Tony here b.u.g.g.e.red off to Africa and likely dead."

Doubled-up commands aren't going to make anyone's life easy.. . .

"Christus Viridia.n.u.s!" Ash shook her head. "So much for 'safe inside Dijon'. We're sitting smack in the gold!13 Okay, brief me, before we get to this d.a.m.n council - what's been happening, Roberto?"

"Okay. Debrief." Robert Anselm wiped his hand across his nose. There was a slight awkwardness about the movement that she guessed meant a wound taken during a Visigoth a.s.sault; knew he would not mention it himself.

"They bottled us up here after Auxonne. We could see the sky on fire, every night - burning towns, off in the boonies. First off they set up their engines and guns, gave us a major artillery barrage. Those big trebuchets? They had 'em lobbing dead bodies in, dead horses, our own casualties from Auxonne. That was when they set up the flame-throwers opposite the three gates, 'bout fifteen to a gate, covering the walls and river. We blew up the south bridge; they started mining in from the north."

"Didn't miss a trick." She blinked at the backs of the men and horses she followed, as they rode into a larger public square, where a slide of bricks blocked half the road. I wish I couldn't picture everything he says.

What's wrong with me? This stuff never bothers me!

"Oh, they done their best to f.u.c.k us, all right," Anselm said grimly. "Been bombarding us from the end of August, soon as they found they couldn't take the city straight off. They couldn't get no bombards and siege-engines over on the east of the Ouche river, ground's too broken, so they stuck their artillery north and west of the city. Ploughed up as much of the place as we thought was in their range."

He looked down, bringing his mount around a crater that gouged the flagstones. As they pa.s.sed it, Ash saw the sandstone walls of a church were pocked with holes.

"This lot started shifting their people down into the south-east quarter of the city," he added. "For safety. Well, about the beginning of October, the Goths let loose with everything they had - on the south-east quarter. Stone shot. Greek Fire. f.u.c.king golem war-machines - 'course they were in range. They just wanted to give the civilians a chance to pack up tight in one area . . . The Burgundians lost a lot of troops too. Since then, it's been 'guess the target area, and where in the city do you want to sleep tonight?'"

"The company's tower looks sound."

"They've put the fighting men in places that'll stand bombardment." He looked across at her. "Then the human-wave a.s.saults started on the walls. That's been hot. The rag-heads are losing men - and they don't need to. They've got two or three f.u.c.king big saps under way. Going for the north-west gate. Where you come in? Up there. You get down in the foundations of the gate-tower, and you can f.u.c.king hear them coming. They don't need to keep piling up the wall at us!"

"How long has this place got?"

Confronted with a direct question, Robert Anselm didn't answer. He looked at her with a slow smile. "By G.o.d, girl, you look different, but you don't sound it. Carthage 'asn't changed you that much."

"'Course not. Long way to go to get a haircut, that's all."

They exchanged glances.

Strong winds snapped the Lion Affronte, over her head. The group of men riding around her speeded their pace a little, unconsciously. She didn't counter it.

"How often do the Goths try and come over the walls?"

"Well, they ain't relying on hunger and disease to break this city. It's been f.u.c.king hot up at the north-west gate," Anselm admitted. He lifted a hand, scarred as a smith's or farmer's hands, to signal the banner-bearer to slow to a less panicky pace. "You spoke to their boss. The rag-heads want Dijon. Never mind Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent. I reckon they must want the Duke - if he don't die of his wounds, first. That means a.s.saults. It's been every few days. Some nights. f.u.c.king stupid siege tactics."

"Yeah. It is. But, looking out there, they must outnumber the Burgundians four or five to one ..."

Searing cold air cut her face. Overhead, ragged clouds ran south on a high wind. A white facade - a guild hall? - was visible now, over the heads of the Burgundian escort. She didn't recognise the area from the summer. The group of riders straggled to a halt. Looking ahead, Ash saw the leader of the Burgundians in fluent discussion with some civilian at the foot of the guild hall steps.

"Strong roof over our heads would be nice," she murmured, quietening Orgueil. "Till some b.u.g.g.e.r drops a ton of rock on it, I suppose . . ."

The banner-bearer murmured, "Looks like we're moving, boss."

What had delayed them had evidently been some debate about ceremony: as they dismounted and entered the Viscount-Mayor's hall, a herald's clarion rang out under its painted, vaulted roof.

The n.o.bles, merchants, and mayor of Dijon looked up from seats at a long, beech-wood table. The tapestried chamber filled with their voices. A flock of armed men and civilians sat, or stood. A few, Ash judged by the hennin headdresses lost in the crowd, must be female: merchant's wives, traders on their own accounts, minor n.o.bility. She took note of the liveries on the armed men with them. Not all Burgundian households.

"Frenchmen? Germans?" she murmured.

"n.o.ble refugees," Anselm said, with a wealth of cynicism.

"Who want to carry the war on against the Visigoths?"

"So they say."

In full armour, with Chamberlain-Counsellor Ternant beside him, Olivier de la Marche stood up from the chair of state. He looked, Ash thought, tired and dirty and not at all like the man who had commanded the Duke of Burgundy's army at Auxonne. She frowned.

"As the deputy of the Duke," Olivier de la Marche said without preamble, "I welcome the hero of Carthage into our company. Demoiselle-Captain Ash, we bid you and your men welcome. Welcome!

De la Marche bowed, formally, to her.

"The-" Ash kept her face expressionless with an effort. Hero of Carthage! She returned the bow; awkward; as ever, not knowing whether a curtsey would have been better. "Thank you, my lord."

Seats towards at the head of the table were rapidly vacated. She sat down, muttering under her breath to her officers, "'Hero' of Carthage? 'Hero'!"

Robert Anselm's grim face looked twenty years younger as he snuffled back a laugh. "Don't ask me. G.o.d only knows what rumours have been spread here!"

"Inaccurate ones, madonna!" Angelotti said softly.

Ash finally grinned. "So. A hero, by accident. Well - that makes up for the dozens of utterly splendid things I've done that n.o.body ever noticed!" She sobered. "Trouble with being a hero is, people expect things of you. I don't think I do 'hero', guys."

Anselm punched her shoulder, briefly and very fast. "Girl, I don't think you have a choice!"

Thomas Rochester and the escort took up places behind them. Ash looked around, grateful for Angelotti's evidently blisteringly expensive demi-gown; seeing every reaction from contempt to awe on the faces down the table. She beamed, broadly, at the man across the table, with the Viscount-Mayor of Dijon's chain resting on his rich robes; a man bundled up in furs and velvets, who was glowering covertly at 'the hero of Carthage'.

"Yes, madonna," Angelotti said, before she could speak, "that is the man who would allow no merchant to give us credit, when we first arrived here from Basle and you were sick. The Viscount-Mayor, Richard Folio."

"Called us 'scruffy mercenaries', didn't he?" Ash beamed. "Which I doubt he repeated to John de Vere! Well, that's Rota Fortuna14 for you ..."

Ash looked around at the a.s.sembly of Burgundians and the foreign n.o.bles present, those who had precedence sitting at the long table, those who had not crowding the room to the walls behind them. An air of aggressive desperation, familiar to her from other sieges, hung about them. What friction there might be between lords, burghers, the Viscount-Mayor, and the people of Dijon itself, she decided she would not concern herself with at the moment.

"We bid you welcome," de la Marche concluded, seating himself.

She caught his eye, thought, Let's throw the cat in the fire, then! and spoke. "My lord, it's taken me and my men more than two months to get here from Carthage. My intelligence isn't current or good. I need to know, on behalf of my company - how strong is this city, and how much Burgundian territory is still holding out against the Visigoths?"

"Our lands?" de la Marche rumbled. "The Duchy, Franche-Comte, the north; Lorraine is not certain-"

A thin-faced n.o.ble hammered his hand on the table, turning to Olivier de la Marche. "You see! Our Duke should consider. I have lands in Charolais. Where is his loyalty to our King? If you would only seek King Louis' protection-"

"-or call on the feudal ties he has with the Empire-"

Ash barely realised the second voice was speaking in German when the two Burgundian knights, almost in unison, finished: "And sign a peace with the King-Caliph!"

Anselm muttered, "s.h.i.t, why not? Everywhere else in Christendom has!"

The hundred or so men and women in the hall began to shout, in at least four different languages.

"Silence!"

De la Marche's full-throated shout - you could hear that over cannon! Ash reflected - banged off the roof-beams and brought a shuffling quiet to the council hall.

"Jesus, what a dog-fight!" Ash muttered. She realised she had been heard, and felt her face heat. Fear - of the army outside, of a twin, of all the incestuous south; of all the lack of answers there or here - made her bad-tempered. She shrugged at de la Marche. "I'll be frank. I wondered what Cola de Monforte and his boys were doing out there with the Visigoths. I'm starting to see why. Burgundy's coming apart at the seams, isn't it?"

Unexpectedly, the chamberlain-counsellor who sat beside de la Marche, Philippe Ternant, chuckled. "No, Demoiselle-Captain, no more than usual! These are family quarrels. They grow heated, when our father the Duke is out of the room."

Ash, seeing Ternant's watery blue eyes and age-spotted hands, weighed up his probable experience of Burgundian politics. She said politely, "As you say, messire," and flicked a glance at Robert Anselm. I need to take decisions! I thought - if we got here - at least we'd have a breathing-s.p.a.ce- "What is Burgundy?" de la Marche demanded, his weather-beaten face turning towards Ash. "Demoiselle-Captain, what are we? Here in the south, we're two Burgundies: both the Duchy and the County. Then the conquered province, Lorraine. All the northern lands: Hainault, Holland, Flanders . . .15 What our Duke does not owe as a French fief to King Louis, he owes as an Imperial fief to the Emperor Frederick! Demoiselle, we speak French in the two Burgundies, Dutch and Flemish in Flanders, and Imperial German in Luxembourg! Only one thing holds us together - one man - Duke Charles. Without him, we would collapse again into a hundred quarrelling properties of other kingdoms."16 Philippe Ternant looked amused. "My lord, much as I bow to your military prowess, let me say that a single chancellor, chancery, and system of tax binds us equally-"

"And that would last how long, without Duke Charles?" Olivier de la Marche's hand came down flat on the wooden table, with a bang that startled all of the crowded room. "The Duke unifies us!"

A flicker of green cloth: Ash caught sight of an abbot, his face hidden from her in the crush of bodies further down the guild hall.

"We are the ancient German people of Burgundia," the abbot said, still invisible; "and we have been the Kingdom of Aries, when Christendom was divided into Neustria and Austrasia. We are older than the Valois Dukes."