Ash: The Lost History Part 137

"Are you sure she hasn't?"

"Frankly? No." Ash turned to the Earl of Oxford. "This is speculation. What do you know?"

"I know," the Earl said, "that my men and I are a week in front of two Visigoth legions travelling north to Dijon."

"s.h.i.+t!" Ash stared at him. "Fresh troops from Africa? He hasn't got any! Has he pulled them out of Egypt - or Carthage itself?"

"Sultan Mehmet has an extensive spy network." John de Vere placed his goblet carefully on the floor. "I trust his information. The Sinai fortresses are still manned. As for Carthage . . . Riding with these legions, on his way here to take personal command of his armies and send the Faris home to Carthage, is the King-Caliph Gelimer."

Stunned, Ash said, "Gelimer's coming here?"

"He has to make his example of Burgundy."

"But, Gelimer?"

The Earl of Oxford leaned forward in his chair, stabbing a finger emphatically in the air between them. "And not alone, madam. According to the Sultan's spies, he has representatives of two of his subject nations with him. One is Frederick of Hapsburg, lately Holy Roman Emperor. This I know for truth; we came across his lands, riding here. The other is said to be an envoy of Louis of France."

The travel-stained English Earl paused. Olivier de la Marche, nodding furiously, bent to hear what Chamberlain-Counsellor Ternant whispered in his ear.

"King-Caliph Gelimer must take Dijon," John de Vere announced flatly. "And - pardon me, madam Florian - he must kill the Duke or d.u.c.h.ess. You are the heart of resistance to him, and Burgundy is the last land that stands against him in conquered Europe. That's why, if his female general won't do it for him - the man must come here and do it himself."

Olivier de la Marche glanced at Floria for permission, and spoke. "If he fails, lord Oxford?"

John de Vere's gaze sharpened, the lines creasing in the corners of his eyes. It was, Ash saw, a smile that lacked all kindness: a pure wolfish expression.

"France has a peace treaty with the King-Caliph." De Vere displayed an open hand to Ash. "Your French knight who was so anxious to escape Dijon? He would have been trying to reach Louis with news of the failing siege. France has been all but untouched by this war. I give you the dark, but, Maine, Anjou, Aquitaine, Normandy - all of them could mobilise, now, if they thought Gelimer weak."

"And the north Germanies-!" Ash ignored de la Marche's sharp look, lost in battle calculations of her own that momentarily ignored Burgundian troops and d.u.c.h.ess and Wild Machines. "Frederick surrendered so fast this summer, half his armies never got into battle! Sweet Christ, the Visigoths are out on a limb!"

John de Vere's gaze stayed on Floria. "Madam, there are villagers and villeins from France and the Germanies flocking over the borders into Burgundy. Outside of your lands there is nothing but howling darkness, cold, and a winter such as men have never known. That is all Louis or Frederick would need as an excuse to come in now and attack the King-Caliph, that their own people have taken protection with you."

"Refugees." Floria winced, wrapping her fur-lined gown more tightly around her. "Out in that. Good G.o.d. What's it like beyond the border, if this is better? But I don't know about these refugees."

"You don't need to know, madam, for the Spider to make that his excuse."

"And then there's the Sultan." Ash ignored her surgeon's outrage; looked at de Vere with growing fierce exultation. "The waiting armies of the Turk . . . Gelimer has to take Burgundy. If he doesn't win here, and quickly, France and the Germanies will carve up Europe between them and the Turks will be in Carthage in a month."

"Sweet Christ, As.h.!.+" Floria stood up. "Don't sound so b.l.o.o.d.y pleased about it!"

"Maybe England will come in, too-" Ash broke off. She looked down at her hands, and then back up at Floria. "I enjoy the thought of that son of a b.i.t.c.h in trouble."

"He's in trouble? What about us!"

Ash guffawed, not able to stop herself even for the look of sheer outrage on Philippe Ternant's face. Floria laughed out loud. She sat down again in the ducal chair with her legs apart under her skirts, as a man wearing hose sits; and her bright eyes and thick gold brows were still the same under the horn crown.

"No harvest," Floria said. "No cattle. No shelter. Those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds have made it a wasteland out there. If people are coming into these lands, it must be h.e.l.l outside ..."

Excitement died. And we don't even know why we have the sun - by right, we shouldn't have.

Floria's expression was taut, ambiguous - also gnawing at that unspoken question?

Olivier de la Marche lifted his hand, catching de Vere's attention. "It's dark as far as Constantinople now, you say, my lord? The King-Caliph can't have intended that. Not such a deliberate provocation to the Turk."

Philippe Ternant added, "If it is the lands which they conquer that fall Under the Penance with them, then Constantinople would still be bright. Not Visigoths, then. My lord of Oxford, our d.u.c.h.ess's knowledge of the Great Devils must be shared with you."

"I know something of this matter already." De Vere's face was still; Ash thought him remembering a sea-strand outside Carthage, and a silver glow in the south. "Only, I am uncertain as to the lady's place in this."

"The d.u.c.h.ess will tell you later." Ash caught Floria's eye, and surprised herself by waiting for the surgeon's nod before going on: "My lords, it seems to me that Gelimer's caught in his own trap. I stood in Carthage three months ago, when he took the crown, and I heard him promise the Visigoth lords and everyone else that he'd smash Burgundy as an example - he has to do it now. He's got his own amirs on his heels, Louis and Frederick closing in, and the Sultan waiting to see if now's the time to come in from the east." A brief smile moved her mouth. "When he started to get reports of the Faris soft-pedalling the siege here and his conquests grinding to a halt, I'll bet money that he shat himself."

Floria sat up in her chair. "Ash, what you mean is, he has to kill us. Me. As quickly as possible."

Clear through the frost-bitten air, not m.u.f.fled by the expensive gla.s.s, a lone bell tolled. Potter's Field, Ash realised: more bodies stacked for a thaw that would enable burial. The impact of rocks and artillery boomed from the south of the city. The roofs and walls between this palace and the army outside the city did not seem much of a barrier.

Ash slowly nodded.

"Christ up a Tree!" Floria exclaimed, oblivious to the shock of her Burgundians. "And you act like this is good news!"

Her head whipped round at John de Vere's burst of laughter. The English Earl met her questioning stare, shook his head, and held out an inviting hand to Ash: "Madam, you have it, I think?"

"It is good news!" Ash walked across the bare boards to Floria, taking the woman's hands between her own. Fiercely intense, joyous; she said, "It's the best news we could have. Florian, the d.u.c.h.ess of Burgundy has to stay alive. You know that's all that matters, whether you like it or not. I've spent five weeks trying to find a safe way out of Dijon, to get you away to somewhere else -France, maybe; England, who cares? Anywhere, as long as it's not here, at risk from any d.a.m.n Visigoth peasant with an arquebus. And every time I've got someone over the walls, they've come back dead."

De Vere nodded approval; some of the Burgundians looked grim.

"I haven't been able to break us out of here," Ash said, still holding Floria's gaze. "There's been nothing we can do. That's what's demoralising. Doing nothing except wait for the Faris to make up her mind to attack or not. Well -now someone else is making it up for her."

"Someone who's not going to sit outside the walls waiting," the surgeon-d.u.c.h.ess observed. The grip of her fingers tightened on Ash's hands. "Christ, As.h.!.+ What happens when Gelimer gets here and they really start trying!"

"We hold out."

She spoke so closely on the heels of Floria's words that she eradicated them.

De la Marche and Ternant began to look up with cautious enthusiasm.

"We hold out," Ash said again. "Because the longer we can do it - the longer Dijon stands - then the weaker Gelimer looks. Day by day by day. He's made us a public test of his strength. The weaker he looks, the more chance of Louis or Frederick breaking their treaties and attacking him without warning. The more chance of the Sultan deciding to invade, without warning. Once that happens -once it does turn into a three-cornered fight - then we've got options again. We can get you out of here. We can hide you."

"Get you to a foreign court," the Earl of Oxford put in.

Ash let go of Floria's hands. She reached out and picked the horn cross from the woman's breast, the antler chill under her fingers.

"If it comes to it," she said softly, "and they kill you outside of Dijon, but they're occupied with a full-on war, then the Burgundians can hold another Hunt. It doesn't matter who's Duke or d.u.c.h.ess, so long as somebody's there. Someone who can stop the Faris."

Ash could see on Olivier de la Marche's face that he took it for a hard piece of military realism. Florian snorted.

"You always did have odd priorities! I want to stay alive. But you're right, they could hunt," she said, "and there would be someone to stop the Wild Machines."

I would sooner have you alive.

It caught under her breastbone, a pain as sharp as sheered ribs. Ash stared at the woman - dishevelled, insouciant; not one word in five weeks of refusal to take on the appalling responsibility of the Duchy. And in five weeks I haven't seen you drunk.

Ash said quietly, "We've got a chance. Other enemies for the Visigoths mean other allies for us. The Faris can die on a field of battle just as easily as Jack Peasant can. If the Visigoth army is defeated by someone else, we fight back, go south, destroy Carthage, destroy the machina rei militaris - destroy the Wild. Machines."

"Blow them up!" Floria said. "If it takes all the powder in Christendom!"

"All we have to do, now, is hold Dijon." Ash grinned at her; at them all. Cynicism, black humour, desperation, and excitement: all clear on her scarred face.

"Hold Dijon," she repeated. "Just a little bit longer. Against Gelimer and all his legions. It's a war of nerves. All we have to do is hold out long enough."

Chapter Three.A bare five days later, the legions of the King-Caliph marched up from the south to Dijon.

The torches and campfires of the Visigoth armies surrounded the city with an unbroken rim of flame. Ash, on the battlements of the company's tower, peered out into a frost-bitter and utterly clear night. The moon, three days past the full, illuminated every bare yard of earth out to the enemy trenches and barricades, every tent-peak and eagle and standard in their camp- Where they sleep, warm and fed. Or fed, anyway.

-and every patrolling guard squad.

She went down, s.n.a.t.c.hing an hour's sleep between briefings with her Burgundian command-group; was back up on the roof at false dawn.

Rickard came up, bringing her nettles brewed into small beer - Henri's current subst.i.tute for wine - and sat with her, bundled into Robert Anselm's great cloak, trying not to show how much his teeth chattered.

"Let 'em come, right, boss?"

Ash hauled her coney-fur-lined gown tighter over her mail. Hunger was a dull ache in her gut. "You got it. Let 'em make the worst mistake they've ever made."

With dawn, a killing frost fell. A lone bell rang out for the hour of Terce.11 "There." Rickard freed an arm from the thick woollen cloak to point.

Breath misted the air in front of her face. The skin of her face was numb. Ash peered off the tower into the clear, freezing light that fell from the east: let her gaze swing around over the Visigoth camp: the movement of men around the tents, turf huts, fire-pits, and trenches, until she saw where Rickard pointed.

"They're early," she commented. "My lord of Oxford underestimated them."

Pray G.o.d that's his only mistake.

Men were running, in the freezing morning; Visigoth serf-troops piling out of their barrack-tents, the sun glinting off the scale armour of the cataphracts, spear-points glinting; the harsh bellow of horns and clarions ringing out across the chill earth. She shaded her eyes from the fierce rising white sun, wondering if somewhere in that moving ma.s.s the Faris woke, walked, gave orders, sat alone.

Within a very few minutes the Visigoth troops were formed up in legionary squares, the eagles of the XIV Utica and VI Leptis Parva way beyond bow and cannon range of the walls of Dijon, all along the road. The wind brought distant horns. Ash watched as the road up from the south filled with men marching, black standards and eagles catching the light, and below the flags the helmets of hundreds of soldiers, and ahead of them all the ceremonial bronze-armoured war-chariot of the King-Caliph.

Ash nodded to herself, watching a banner with a silver portcullis on a black field come into sight. Carthage's twilight walls pressured her memory. Her bowels churned uncomfortably.

"There you go, Rickard. That's the King-Caliph's household guard. And the Legio III Caralis . . . can't see the other one ..." Ash put her arm around the boy's cloaked shoulder. "And that's Gelimer's personal banner, there - and there's the Faris's. Right. Now we wait, while the pot comes to the boil."

Two hours later, Ash fell asleep sitting upright in the main hall.

One oak chest remained, tucked into the side of the big hearth against the wall. She sat on it, in full armour, hearing the Burgundian centeniers, each in turn; and then her own lance-leaders and their men. Willem Verhaecht and Thomas Rochester, Euen Huw and Henri Brant, Ludmilla Rostovnaya and Blanche and Baldina. Processing problems. Where exhaustion slowed her mind, instinct and experience took over.

She fell asleep leaning into the hearth corner, upright, in full armour, in the middle of a briefing. Dimly, she heard the plates of her harness sc.r.a.pe against stone; it was not enough to wake her. The banked fire glowed, giving warmth to one side of her face.

She was still aware, as from a long way away, of the laconic voices of exhausted men, dropping kit on their pallia.s.ses and slumping down; hoping for sleep to do away with hunger. And of Anselm's voice bellowing up from the courtyard: holding close-quarter weapons drill. Some part of her still ran through Angelotti's and Jussey's calculations of remaining ammunition: bolts, arrows, arquebus- and cannon-b.a.l.l.s.

Even held by the paralysis of sleep, some part of her still remained on guard.

She had a moment to realise It's because I don't want to dream. I don't want to hear G.o.dfrey, it's too hard when I can't talk to him. Because the Visigoths can ask the Stone Golem what I say. Because the Wild Machines will hear, even if they don't speak . . . Then she fell into sleep as if down a dark well, and a heartbeat later hands were shaking her by the pauldrons and she moved a sleep-sticky mouth and looked up into the face of Robert Anselm.

"Wha-?"

"I said, you should have seen it!"

The line of sun from the arrow-slit windows lay much further across the floorboards. Ash blinked, said grittily, "Give me a report, Robert," and reached out as Rickard handed her a costrel of water.

"We've had a parley come out from the rag-head camp." Robert Anselm squatted down in front of the chest she sat on. "You should have seen it! Six f.u.c.king golem-messengers, each with a banner. A f.u.c.king dwarf drummer. And one poor sod with a white flag walking up to the north-west gate between them, praying our grunts weren't trigger-happy, and shouting for a parley."

"Who was it?"

"Mister Expendable," Robert Anselm said, with a smile at once wolfish and sympathetic. "What did you think, girl, Gelimer himself? No way. They sent Agnes."

Caught by surprise, Ash snickered. "Yeah, I can see Lamb wetting himself with that one. Remind me to make that man an offer if the situation changes. Tell him if he hires on with Florian, I won't give him all the s.h.i.+tty jobs! When was this? Why do they want a parley? What's the result?"

"About an hour ago." Robert Anselm's hazel eyes gleamed, under arming cap, and sallet. "The result is, Doc Florian wants to go out and talk to them."

"You're out of your f.u.c.king mind!"

The Burgundian knights and n.o.bles in Floria's chamber glared at Ash; she ignored both them, and Olivier de la Marche's covert, relieved look of approval.

"Someone has to tell her," the d.u.c.h.ess's deputy murmured.

"If you set one foot outside the walls, I don't care if you've got Mehmet's five hundred Turks up your a.r.s.ehole, you are a dead woman. Don't you understand me?"

Floria del Guiz held her crown between her hands, turning it, fingers stroking the contours of the carved white horn: She raised her eyes to Ash.

"Get a grip," she advised.

"'Get a grip'? You get a f.u.c.king grip!" Ash clenched her fists. "You listen to me, Florian. The Wild Machines have to kill you, and they know it. If Gelimer's still taking the Stone Golem's tactical advice, that's what it'll be telling him. If he isn't, he still has to kill you - you're Burgundy: if he kills you, the war in the north fizzles out, the rest of Christendom starts saying 'yes, boss,' again, and the Turks look for a peace treaty!"

In the background she was aware of de la Marche and the council nodding agreement; John de Vere exchanging a quiet comment with one of his brothers.

"You know what I'd do, if I were Gelimer," Ash continued softly. "Once I had you in the open outside these walls, I'd open up with the guns and siege-machines and wipe you off the map. You and anybody else at the parley. I wouldn't care if it meant wiping my own guys out too. Then I'd apologise to the Sultan for killing his Turks - an 'unfortunate accident'. Because with you gone, and Europe solid, there's a two-to-one chance Mehmet will decide it's not the time for a war just yet. I'm telling you, you go out there and you're dead. And then there's nothing to stop the Wild Machines, nothing at all!"

The overcast sky glimmered pale grey through the gla.s.s. s.h.i.+fting cloud disclosed a white disc of sun, no stronger than the full moon. Floria del Guiz continued to turn the horn crown between her strong, dirty fingers. Exhaustion marked her, as if two thumbs of candle-black had been smeared under her eyes.

"Now you listen," she said. "I've spoken to this council, and to my lord Oxford, and now I'll tell you. We have no food. We've got sickness: dysentery, maybe plague. We've got a city full of starving people. I'm going to hold a parley with the Visigoths. I'm going to negotiate their release."

Ash jerked a thumb at the world beyond the window. "So they can starve out there with the other refugees?"

"I'm not a d.u.c.h.ess, I'm a doctor!" Floria snapped. "I didn't ask for this crown but I've got it. So I have to do something. The hospices are full; the abbot of St Stephen's was here in tears two hours ago. There aren't enough priests to pray for the sick. I took an oath, As.h.!.+ First of all, do no harm. I'm going to get the civilians out of this siege before we have an epidemic."

"I doubt it. Gelimer's going to be happy enough if we die of disease."

"s.h.i.+t!" Floria swore, swung around and began to pace up and down the chamber, kicking the hem of her gown out of the way: a tall, dirty scarecrow of a woman, noticeably thinner now than when they had ridden in the wildwood. She scowled, gold brows lowering. "You're right. Of course you're right. Ash, there has to be some way we can do this. If there's a parley, at least they're not attacking us. It gains time. Therefore, we have to agree to it."

"We might. You don't. You hunted the hart, remember?"