Ash: The Lost History Part 98

"Maybe he's dead, boss," Thomas Rochester suddenly ventured.

"What, the Duke?"

"No, the a.s.shole - your husband."

Just as Rochester said it, she recognised the vaulted chamber they were pa.s.sing through. Banners still hung from the walls, although the muted light made less of the stained gla.s.s's reflections on the flagstones.

The qa'id Sancho Lebrija is doubtless with the crusade, Agnes Dei's banner is outside these walls, but Fernando? G.o.d and the Green Christ know where Fernando is now - or if he's even alive.

This is where she last touched him - her warm fingers entwined with his. Where she struck him. In Carthage, later, he was as weak, as much of a p.a.w.n, as he was here. Until the last moments before the earth tremor - But he could afford to speak up for me: no one was going to care about a disgraced, turn-coat German knight!

"I choose to a.s.sume I'm a widow," she said grimly, and followed the page Jean and the chamberlain-counsellor Philippe Ternant as they began to climb the stairs of a tower.

The chamberlain-counsellor pa.s.sed them through great numbers of Burgundian guardsmen, into a high vaulted chamber packed with any number of people: squires, pages, men-at-arms, rich n.o.bles in gowns and chaperon hats, women in nuns' headdresses, an austringer with his hawk; a b.i.t.c.h and a litter of pups in the straw by the great hearth.

"It is the Duke's sick room," Philippe Ternant said to Ash, as he went on into the ma.s.s of people. "Wait here: he will call on your attendance when he desires it."

Thomas Rochester said, low-voiced, for her ear, "Don't reckon that 'siege council' is much more than a sop to keep the civilians quiet, boss."

"You think the real power's here?" Ash glanced around the crowded ducal chamber. "Possible."

There were enough men in full armour present, wearing liveries, for her to identify the notable military n.o.bles of Burgundy - all of them who had survived Auxonne, presumably - and all the major mercenary commanders with the exception of Cola de Monforte and his two sons.

"Monforte leaving could have been political, not strictly military," she murmured.

The dark Englishman's brow creased, under his visor; and then his face cleared. "Beginning to think we'd had it, boss, listening to that council. But if the captains are still here ..."

"Then they might still stand a chance of kicking a.s.s." Ash completed the English knight's train of thought. "Thomas, I know you'll stick close to my back here."

"Yes, boss." Thomas Rochester sounded cheerful at her confidence in him.

"Not that I expect to get nailed in the middle of the Duke's sick room . . ." Ash stepped back automatically as a Soeur-Viridia.n.u.s came past with a basin. Bandages with old blood and filth filled the copper pan.

"If it isn't my patient!" the big woman exclaimed.

The green robes and tight wimple of a soeur still made Ash's hackles rise. At the gruff greeting, she found herself startled into looking up into the broad white face of the Soeur-Maitresse of the convent of filles de penitence - up, and further up than Ash had realised while being nursed; the woman was tall as well as solidly big.

"Soeur Simeon!" Ash sketched a genuflection scarcely worth the term, but with a brilliant smile that more than made up for that. "I saw they trashed the convent - glad you made it into the city."

"How is your head?"

Moderately impressed at the woman's memory, Ash made a bow of rather more respect. "I'll live, Soeur. No thanks to the Visigoths, who tried to undo your good works. But I'll live."

"I am glad to hear it." The Soeur-Maitresse spoke without change of tone to someone beyond Ash: "More linen, and another priest: be quick."

Another nun dipped a curtsey. "Yes, Soeur-Maitresse!"

Ash, trying to see the little nun's face, was startled when Simeon said thoughtfully, "I shall wish to visit your quarters, Captain. I am missing one of my girls this morning. Your - surgeon, 'Florian' - may, I feel, be able to help me."

Little Margaret Schmidt, Ash thought. I'd put money on it. G.o.dammit.

"How long has your soeur been missing, Maitresse?"

"Since last night."

That's my Florian . . .

Her private smile faded. She was conscious of an uneasy relief. After what she said to me - it's safer if she's with someone else.

"I'll make enquiries." Ash met Thomas Rochester's blue eyes briefly. "We're contract soldiers, Soeur. If your soeur's signed up with the baggage train . . . well. There's an end of it. We look after our own."

She watched the English knight more than the Soeur-Maitresse, looking for the slightest flinch. If the idea of keeping the surgeon's woman lover away from a nunnery was disturbing Thomas Rochester, he didn't show it.

But if he knew Margaret Schmidt isn't the only woman here that Florian's attracted to?

"I'll see you later," Simeon cried, her tone too determined for Ash to make out whether that was threat or grim promise, before the big woman strode out through the crowd that parted in front of her.

"Can't we sign up that one, boss?" Thomas Rochester said whimsically. "Better have her than some bimbo the surgeon fancies! Stick the Soeur-Maitresse in the line-fight beside me - and I'll hide right behind her! Scare the s.h.i.t out of the rag-heads, she would."

The page, Jean, appearing at her elbow, hauled off his hat and gabbled, "The Duke summons you!"

Ash followed the boy through the crush, overhearing the many guildsmen and merchants present discussing civilian matters, keeping only enough attention on them to estimate morale. A large number of confident men in armour came past her from the far end of the chamber, their aides carrying maps; and Ash moved through them, and found herself confronting the Duke of Burgundy.

The walls here were pale stone, saints' icons set into niches with candles burning before them; and a great tester bed occupied this whole end of the chamber, between two windows blocked with clear leaded gla.s.s.

The Duke was not in the great bed.

He lay, on his left side, on a truckle-bed no more splendid than any she had seen in the field, apart from some carvings of saints on the wooden box-frame. Braziers surrounded the bed. Two priests stood back as Ash, the page, and her bodyguard approached; and Duke Charles waved them aside decisively.

"We will speak privately," he ordered. "Captain Ash, it is good to see you returned at last from Carthage."

"Yeah, I think so too, your Grace. I've been up and down Christendom like a dog at a fair."

No smile touched his face. She had forgotten he was not to be moved by a sense of humour, or by charm. Since it had been a reflex remark, made entirely to hide her shock at seeing him, she did not waste time regretting it; only stood silent, and tried not to let her thoughts appear on her face.

Bolsters kept the Duke propped up on his left side on the hard bed. Books and papers surrounded him, and a clerk knelt by his side, hastily returning what Ash saw to be maps of the city defences to order. A rich blue velvet gown covered Charles of Burgundy and the bed together; under it she could see that he was wearing a fine linen shirt.

His black hair stuck, sweat-tangled, to his skull. This end of the ducal chamber stank of the sick room. As he looked up to meet her gaze, Ash took in his sallow skin and prominent feverish eyes, the ridges of cheekbones that stood up now in his face, his cheeks sunken in. His left hand, closing around the cross hanging from his neck, was frighteningly thin.

She thought, quite coldly, Burgundy's f.u.c.ked.

As if he were not in pain - but by the sweat that continually rolled down his face, he must be - Duke Charles ordered, "Master priests, you may leave me; you also, Soeur. Guard, clear this end of the chamber."

The page Jean moved back with the rest. Ash glanced uncertainly towards Thomas Rochester. She noted that the Duke's bodyguard, a big man with archer's shoulders and a padded jack, did not move away from his station behind the Duke.

"Send your man away, Captain," Charles said.

Ash's question must have been apparent on her face. The Duke spared a brief glance for the archer, towering over him.

"I believe you to be honourable," he said, "but, were a man to come before me with a stiletto up his sleeve, and if there were no other way to stop him, Paul here would put himself between me and such a weapon, and take the blow into his own body. I cannot honourably send aside a man prepared to do this."

"Thomas, stand back."

Ash stood, waiting.

"We have much to say to each other. First, go to that window," the Duke said, indicating one of the chamber's two gla.s.sed windows, "and tell me what you see."

Ash crossed the two yards' s.p.a.ce in a stride or so. The tiny, thick panes of gla.s.s distorted the view below, but she made out that she was looking south, under a changeable sky, now greying; clouds racing on a rough wind that rattled the window in its frame. And that she was high enough that she must be, now, standing in the Tour Philippe le Bon, the palace's notorious look-out post.

Doesn't look any f.u.c.king better from up here . . . !

Wind yanked at the withy barriers surrounding rows of catapults. Squinting, she could make out men crowding around the jutting beams of trebuchets, long lines pa.s.sing rocks up to the slings; and loaded oxen dragging carts full of quarried stone through the flooded Auxonne road.

"I can see as far as the joining of the Ouche and Suzon rivers, beyond the walls," she said, loudly enough for the sick man to hear her, "and the enemy siege-machine camp in the west. River's up: there's even less of a chance to a.s.sault across it at those engines."

"What can you see of their strength?"

She automatically put her hand up to shield her eyes, as if the rattling wind were not outside the gla.s.s. The sun - somewhere around the fourth hour of the morning22 - was a barely visible grey light now, low in the southern sky.

"Unusual lot of cannon, for Visigoths, your Grace. Sakers, serpentines, bombards and fowlers. I heard mortars when we were coming in. Maybe they're concentrating all their powder weapons with these legions? Above three hundred engines: arbalests, mangonels, trebuchets - s.h.i.t."

A great tower began to roll forward as she watched, towards the bastion where the southernmost bridge over the river had been thrown down. A fragment of escaping sunlight glanced back from its red sides.

A tower shaped like a dragon, bottle-mouthed - she glimpsed the muzzle of a saker projecting from between the teeth - but with no soaked hides coating it to protect it against fire-arrows.

A wheeled tower made of stone, twenty-five feet high.

"Christus Imperator ..."

No slaves pushed the tower forward to the river's edge.

Instead, it rolled forward of itself, upon bra.s.s-bound stone wheels twice the height of a man, that settled deep into the mud. As it came closer, she could just see a Visigoth gun-crew inside the tower's carved head, furiously sponging and loading their cannon.

The window-gla.s.s distorted a commotion on the city walls. Feeling cut off, Ash watched men running, crossbows being winched, spanned; steel bolts shot into the chill wind, all in silence, up here in the Duke's tower. A bang and crack from a Visigoth saker came m.u.f.fled to her, and the whine of plaster fragments spraying from the bastion wall.

Arbalest and crossbow crews crowded the city's battlements. Anxiety sharpened her eyesight. Any Lion liveries? No!

A thick bolt-storm rattled against the sides of the stone dragon-tower, sending its gun-crew scuttling deeper inside for shelter.

Stomach churning, she watched. The tower lurched. One wheel bit deeper into the mud, sinking to the axle. A throng of Carthaginian slaves, herded out of the legion camp with whips, began casting fence-posts and planks down under the great stone wheel for traction; falling man by man under a constant arrow-fire from the city walls. As Ash watched, they ran away from the siege-tower, leaving it and its crew desolate.

Evidently the Faris believes in keeping up the pressure.

"If I had to find a word for ... for golem-towers," Ash said, still staring, her tone somewhere between awe and black humour, "I think my voice would call them 'self-propelled artillery' . . ."

The Duke of Burgundy's voice came from behind her. "They are stone and river-silt, as the walking golems are. Fire will crack their stone. Arquebus bullets will not. Cannon have cracked their bodies. The Faris has ten towers, we have immobilised three. Go to the north window, Captain Ash."

This time, knowing what to look for, it was easier for Ash to rub moisture from the gla.s.s and lead and pick out details of the northern part of the encircling forces. Here, she saw the great camp between the two rivers laid out - the moats in front of Dijon's north wall half-full of bundles of f.a.ggots; dead horses rotting in the no-man's-land of open ground.

It took her a while to pick it out from the tents, pavises, barricades, and men queuing outside the cook-tents. A blink of brightness from the southern sun caught her eye, gleaming from a bra.s.s and marble engine longer than three wagons.

"They've got a ram ..."

A marble pillar as thick around as a horse's body hung sheathed in bra.s.s, suspended between posts, on a great stone-wheeled carriage. Men could not have swung the weight of that ram, or have wheeled the body of it up to the gates, but if the wheels would turn of themselves, the great metal-sheathed point slam into the timbers and portcullis of Dijon's north gate . . .

"If it hits too hard, it'll disintegrate." Ash turned back to face the Duke. "That's why they use their ordinary golems for messengers, not combat, your Grace. Bolts or bullets will chip them away. That ram, if it hits too hard, will crack its own clay and marble. Then it'll just be a lump of rock, for all the amirs can do."

As she walked back to stand in front of the Duke's austere bed, he said authoritatively, "You have not seen the most dangerous of their engines - nor will you. They have golem-diggers, tunnelling saps towards the walls of Dijon."

"Yeah, your Grace, my captain Anselm's told me about those."

"My magistri ingeniatores have been kept employed in counter-mining them. But they need neither sleep nor rest, these engines of the scientist-magi, they dig twenty-four hours a day."

Ash said nothing to that, but could not entirely hide her expression.

"Dijon will stand."

She couldn't keep the sudden scepticism off her face. She waited for his anger. He said nothing. A sudden spurt of fear moved her to snap, "I didn't bring these men halfway across h.e.l.l just to get them killed on your walls!"

He did not appear offended. "How interesting. That is not what I expect to hear from a mercenary commander. I would expect, as I heard from Cola de Monforte on his leaving, to hear you say that war is good, good for business, and however many men are killed, twice as many will flock to take their place in a successful company. You speak like a feudal lord, as if there were mutual loyalties involved."

Caught wrong-footed, Ash reached for words and failed to find anything to say. At last, she managed, "I expect to see my men killed. That's business. I don't expect to waste an a.s.set, your Grace."

She kept her eyes stubbornly on his face, refusing to identify, even for the briefest moment, a nagging dread.

"How are your men made up?" the Duke demanded. "Of what lands?"

Ash folded her hands in front of her, to stop the sudden tremble in her fingers. She ran through the muster in her mind: the comforting neutrality of names written on paper and read to her. "For the most part, English, Welsh, German and Italian, your Grace. A few French, a couple of Swiss gun-crews; the rest who-knows-what."

She did not say why? but it was plain in her expression.

"You had some of my Flemings?"

"I split the company, before Auxonne. Those Flemings are out there with the Faris, your Grace. Orders," she said, "will only take you so far. Van Mander was a liability. I want my men fighting because they want to, not because they have to."

"So do I," the Duke said emphatically.

Feeling verbally trapped, Ash spelled out the necessary conclusion. "Here in Dijon, you mean."

Charles's face tightened. He gave no other sign of pain. He looked around for a page to wipe the sweat from his face; they having been sent away, he wiped his sleeve across his mouth, and raised his dark eyes to look at her with determined authority.

"I show you the worst, first. The enemy. Now. Your men will be one in five, or one in six, of my total forces here." A sharp jerk of the head, towards his captains further down the chamber. "It is my intent to bring you into my counsel, Captain, since you form a sizeable part of the defences. If I will not always take your advice, I will listen to it nonetheless."

That's the respect he'd show a male captain.

She said soberly, and completely neutrally, "Yes, your Grace."

"But in that event you will say that you and your men are, nonetheless, fighting only because you must. Because you must fight to eat."