Ash: The Lost History Part 19

22 July-10 August ad 1476.

'How a Man Schall be Armyd at His Ease'

Chapter One.

Forty pitch-torches flared in the wind, under an ink-black daytime sky.

A great lane of people opened in front of Ash as she galloped into the centre of the camp outside Cologne. She halted astride G.o.dluc, in full armour, the company banner cracking in the wind above her; the noise loud in the silence. Yellow light blazed across her strained white face. "Geraint! Euen! Thomas!"

Her lance-leader lieutenants ran to stand either side, ready to repeat her words the instant that she spoke, feed them out to the hundreds of her archers and billmen and knights gathering in front of her. Voices began shouting, chaotic in the unnatural dark.

"Listen to me. There is," Ash spoke perfectly steadily, "nothing for you to be afraid of."

Above, what should have been a July midday blue sky showed only black, empty darkness.

There is no sun.

"I'm here. G.o.dfrey's here, and he's a priest. You're not d.a.m.ned and you're not in danger - if we were, I'd be the first one out of here!"

No response from any of the hundreds of fearful faces. The torchlight wavers across their s.h.i.+ning silver helmets, loses itself in darkness between their crowded, armed bodies.

"Maybe we're going to be like the lands Under the Penance now," Ash continued, "-but - Angelotti's been to Carthage, and the Eternal Twilight, and they manage well enough, and you're not going to let a bunch of shabby rag-heads outdo the Lion!"

Nothing like a cheer, but they made the first responsive noise she'd heard out of them: a subdued mutter, full of f.u.c.k! and s.h.i.+t! and n.o.body quite saying the word desertion.

"Right," she said briskly. "We're moving. The company's going to strike camp. We've done a night dismount before, you all know how to do this. I want us loaded and ready to go at Vespers."2 A hand went up, just visible in the streaming sooty light of the makes.h.i.+ft torches. Ash leaned forward in the saddle, peering. She realised it was her steward Henri Brant, his body still banded with bloodstained cloths, leaning on the shoulder of her page Rickard. "Henri?"

"Why are we moving? Where are we going?" His voice sounded so weak, the young black-haired boy beside him shouted his questions up to Ash.

"I'll tell you," Ash said grimly. She sat back in her saddle, surveying the ma.s.s of people, keenly watching for those slipping away, those already carrying their packs, those familiar faces she couldn't see present.

"You all know my husband. Fernando del Guiz. Well, he's gone over to the enemy."

"Is that true?" one of the men-at-arms yelled.

Ash, remembering Constanza, rescued from the tourney field's riot; the tiny woman's absolute distress; her unwillingness to confess to Fernando's peasant wife that the court n.o.bility knew exactly where her son was - remembering this, she pitched her voice to carry further into the dark day: "Yes, it's true."

Over noise, she continued: "For whatever reason, it seems that Fernando del Guiz has sworn fealty to the Visigoth Caliph."

She let them take it in, then said measuredly, "His estates are south of here, in Bavaria, at a place called Guizburg. I'm told Fernando's occupying the castle there. Well - they're not his estates. The Emperor's put him under attainder. But they're still my estates. Ours. And that's where we're going. We're going to go south, take what's ours, and then we'll face this darkness when we're safe behind our own castle walls!"

The next ten minutes was all shouted arguments, questions, a few ongoing personal quarrels dragged into the discussion, and Ash bellowing at the highest, most carrying pitch of her voice; ramrodding her authority home.

Robert Anselm leaned from his saddle and murmured in her ear. "Christ, girl! If we move this camp, we'll have everybody all over the place."

"It'll be chaos," she agreed hoa.r.s.ely. "But it's this or they panic, run off as refugees, and we're not a company any more. Fernando's neither here nor there - I'm giving them something we can do. Something - anything. It really doesn't matter what it is!"

The void above pulls, sucks at her. The darkness doesn't fade, doesn't give way to dusk or twilight or dawn; hour upon hour upon hour is going by.

"Doing anything," Ash said, "is better than doing nothing. Even if this is the end of the world . . . I'm keeping my people together."

Chapter Two.The striking of the Guizburg town clock reached Ash over the intermittent sound of cannon. Four bell-chimes. Four hours after what would have been midday.

"It's not an eclipse." Antonio Angelotti, where he sat at the end of the trestle table, observed without raising his head: "There's no eclipse due. In any case, madonna, an eclipse lasts hours at most. Not twelve days."

Sheets of ephemerides and his own calculations lay in front of him. Ash put her elbow on Angelotti's table and rested her chin on her hand. Inside this room, boards creaked as G.o.dfrey Maximillian paced up and down. Candlelight s.h.i.+fted. She looked at the shattered frames of the small windows, wis.h.i.+ng for lightening air, for the damp cold of dawn, the interminable singing of birds, above all for the sense of freshness, of beginning, that sunrise has outdoors. Nothing. Nothing but darkness.

Joscelyn van Mander put his head around the door of the room, between the guards. "Captain, they won't hear our herald, and they're still shooting at us! The garrison doesn't even admit your husband's inside the keep."

Antonio Angelotti leaned back in his chair. "They've heard the proverb, madonna - 'a castle which speaks, and a woman who listens; both will be taken in the end'."

"They're flying his livery and a Visigoth standard - he's here," Ash observed. "Send a herald every hour. Keep shooting back! Joscelyn, let's get inside there fast."

As van Mander left, she added, "We're still better off here - as long as we're containing del Guiz, who's a traitor, the Emperor's happy; and we get a chance to stay out of the way and see how hot this Visigoth army really is ..."

She got up and strode to the window. Cannon fire had exposed the lath and plaster of the wall by the sill, but it would be easy to patch up, she thought, touching the raw dry material. "Angeli, could your eclipse calculations be wrong?"

"No, because nothing that happened accords with the descriptions." Angelotti scratched at the gathered neck of his s.h.i.+rt. Plainly, he had forgotten the ink stone and the sharpened quill: ink liberally dotted his white linen. He looked at his stained fingers in annoyance. "No penumbra, no gradual eating-away of the disc of the sun, no uneasiness of the beasts of the field. Just instant, icy lightlessness."

He had bone-framed single-rivet spectacles clamped to his nose for reading. As he squinted through the lenses, in the candlelight, Ash noted the lines at the corners of his eyes, the squinching of flesh between his brows. This is how that face will look in ten years, she thought, when the skin is no longer taut, and the s.h.i.+ne is off his gold hair.

He finished, "And Jan tells me the horses weren't bothered beforehand."

Robert Anselm, clumping up stairs and entering the room on the tail of this remark, pulled off his hood and said, "The sun darkened - weakened - once when I was in Italy. We must have had four hours' warning from the horse lines."

Ash spread her hands. "If no eclipse, then what?"

"The heavens are out of order ..." G.o.dfrey Maximillian did not stop pacing. There was a book in his hands, illuminated in red and blue; Ash might have made the text out with enough time to spell it letter by letter. He paused by one of the candles and flicked from page to page with a rapidity that both impressed her and filled her with contempt for a man who had no better use for his time than to learn to read. He did not even read aloud. He read quickly, and silently.

"So? Edward Earl of March saw three suns on the morning of the field of Mortimer's Cross. For the Trinity." Robert Anselm hesitated, as ever, mentioning the current English Yorkist king; then muttered aggressively, "Everyone knows the south exists in an eternal twilight, this is nothing to get worked up about. We've got a war to fight!"

Angelotti took off his spectacles. The white bone frames left a red dint across the bridge of his nose. "I can take down the keep walls here in half a day." On the word day, his voice lost impetus.

Ash leaned out of the broken window frame. The town outside was mostly invisible in darkness. She sensed a kind of straining in the air, in the odd warm dusk - cooling, now, perhaps - that wanted to be afternoon. The Drown beams and pale plaster of the house's facade were dappled with red, reflections from the huge bonfires burning in the market square below. Lanterns shone at every occupied window. She did not look up at the crown of the sky, where no sun shone, only a deep impenetrable blackness.

She looked up at the keep.

Bonfire-light illuminated only the bottom of the sheer walls, shadows flickering on flints and masonry. Slot-windows were eyelets of darkness. The keep rose into darkness above the town, from steep bare slopes of rock; and the road to the gate ran along one wall, from which the defenders had already shot and dropped more killing objects than she thought they had. A slab-sided building like a block of stone.

That's where he is. In some room behind those walls.

She can envisage the round arches, the wooden floors crammed with bedrolls of men-at-arms, the knights up in the solar on the fourth floor; Fernando perhaps in the great hall, with his dogs and his merchant friends and his handguns ...

No more than a furlong from where I am now. He could be looking at me.

Why? Why have you done this? What is the truth of it?

Ash said, "I don't want the castle damaged so much that we can't defend it when we're in there."

All the armed men she could see in the streets near the keep wore livery jackets with the pewter Lion badge fastened to the shoulder; most of those company people who went unarmed - women selling goods, wh.o.r.es, children -had taken up some kind of strips of blue cloth sewn to their garments. Of the town's citizens, she could see nothing, but she could hear them singing ma.s.s in the churches. The clock struck the quarter on the far side of this market square.

She longed for light with a physical desire, like thirst.

"I thought it might end with dawn," she said. "A dawn. Any dawn. It still might."

Angelotti stirred his sheets of calculations, scribbled over with the signs of Mercury, Mars; estimations of ballistics. "This is new."

Something leonine in the way he stretched his arm reminded Ash of the physical strength he possessed, as well as his male beauty. Points were coming undone at the shoulder of his padded white jack. All the cloth over his chest and arms was pitted with tiny black holes, burned through the linen by sparks from cannon.

Robert Anselm leaned over the master gunner's shoulder, studying the scribbled sheets of paper, and they began to talk in rapid low tones. Anselm thumped the trestle table with his fist several times.

Ash, watching Robert, was a.s.sailed by a paradoxical feeling of fragility: he and Angelotti were physically large men, their voices booming now in this room simply because they were used to conversing out of doors. Some part of her, faced by them, was always fourteen, in her first decent breastplate (the rest of her harness munition-quality tat), seeking out Anselm by his campfire after Tewkesbury and saying, out of the flame-ridden darkness, Raise men for me, I'm fielding a company of my own now. Asking in the dark because she could not bear a refusal in cold daylight. And then hours spent sleepless and wondering if his curt nod of agreement had been because he was drunk or joking, until he turned up an hour after sunrise with fifty frowsty, cold, unfed, well-equipped men carrying bows and bills, whose names she had immediately had G.o.dfrey write on to a muster-roll. And silenced their uncertainty, their jocular complaints and unspoken hope, with food from the cauldrons she had had Wat Rodway at since midnight. The strands of authority between commander and commanded are spider-webs.

"Why the f.u.c.k doesn't it get light. . . ?" Ash leaned out further from the broken frame, staring at the castle's walls above the town. Angelotti's bombard and trebuchet crews had done no more than knock patches of facing plaster off the curtain walls, exposing the grey masonry. She coughed, breathing air that smelled of burning timber, and pulled herself back into the room.

"The scouts are back," Robert Anselm said laconically. "Cologne's burning. Fires out of control. They say there's plague. The court's gone. I have thirty different reports about Frederick of Hapsburg. Euen's lance picked up a couple of men from Berne. None of the pa.s.ses south over the Alps are pa.s.sable - either Visigoth armies or bad weather."

G.o.dfrey Maximillian momentarily stopped pacing and looked up from the pages of his book. "Those men Euen found were part of a procession from Berne to the shrine at St Walburga's Abbey. Look at their backs. Those lacerations are from iron-tipped whips. They think flagellation will bring back the sun."

What was similar between Robert Anselm and G.o.dfrey Maximillian, the bald man and the bearded, was perhaps nothing more than breadth of chest, resonance of voice. Whether or not it came from recent s.e.xual activity after long celibacy, Ash found herself aware now of difference, of maleness, in a way in which she was not used to thinking; as something pertaining to physicality rather than prejudice.

"I'll see Quesada again," she informed Anselm, and turned to G.o.dfrey as the other man strode downstairs. "If not an eclipse, then some kind of black miracle-?"

G.o.dfrey paused beside the trestle table, as if Angelotti's astrological scribbles might touch somehow on his biblical readings. "No stars fell, the moon is not as red as blood. The sun isn't darkened because of the smoke of the Pit. The third part of the sun should be smitten - that's not what's happening. There have been no Hors.e.m.e.n, no Seals broken. It is not the last days after which the sun shall be darkened."3 "No, not the troubles before the Last Judgement," Ash persisted, "but a punishment, a judgement, or an evil miracle?"

"Judgement for what? The princes of Christendom are wicked, but no more wicked than the generation before them. The common people are venal, weak, easily led, and often repentant; this is no alteration from how things have always been. There is distress of nations,4 but we have never lived in the Age of Gold!" His thick fingertips strayed over curlicued capitals, over painted saints in little illuminated shrines. "I don't know."

"Then b.l.o.o.d.y well pray for an answer!"

"Yes." He folded the book shut over one finger. His eyes were amber, full of light in the room lit by lanterns and fires. "What use can I be to you without G.o.d's help? All I do is puzzle it out from the Gospels, and I think I am more often wrong than right."

"You were ordained, that's good enough for me. You know it is." Ash spoke crudely, knowing exactly why he had left after instruction. "Pray for grace for us."

"Yes."

A shouted challenge, and footsteps sounded on the stairs below.

Ash walked around and seated herself on the stool behind the trestle table. That put her with the Lion Azure standard, leaning on its staff against the wall, at her back. Sallet and gauntlets rested on the table, with her sword-belt, scabbard and sword. Her priest praying in the corner at his Green Shrine. Her master gunner calculating expenditure of powder. More than enough for effect, she calculated, and did not look up for a good thirty heartbeats after she heard Floria del Guiz and Daniel de Quesada enter the room.

De Quesada spoke first, quite rationally. "I shall construe this siege as an attack on the armies of the King-Caliph."

Ash let him listen to the echo of his voice in silence. The lath and plaster walls m.u.f.fled shouting and the infrequent small cannon fire. Finally she looked at him.

She suggested mildly, "Tell the Caliph's representatives that Fernando del Guiz is my husband, that he is now under an act of attainder, that I am acting on my own behalf in recovering what is now my property since he was stripped of it by the Emperor Frederick."

Daniel de Quesada's face was crusted with healing scabs, where the hairs of his beard had been ripped out. His eyes were dull. His words came with an effort. "So you besiege your husband's castle, with him in it, and he is now a sworn feudal subject of King-Caliph Theodoric - but that is not an act of aggression against us?"

"Why should it be? These are my lands." Ash leaned forward over linked hands. "I'm a mercenary. The world's gone crazy. I want my company inside stone walls. Then I'll think about who's going to hire me."

De Quesada still had a febrile nervousness, despite Floria's opiates and restraining hand on his arm. The doublet and hose and rolled chaperon hat he had been given sat awkwardly on him; you could see he was not used to moving in such clothes.

"We can't lose," he said.

"I usually find myself on the winning side." That was ambiguous enough for Ash to let it rest. "I'll give you an escort, Amba.s.sador. I'm sending you back to your people."

"I thought I was a prisoner!"

"I'm not Frederick. I'm not a subject of Frederick." Ash gave a nod, dismissing him. "Wait over there a minute. Florian, I want to speak with you."

Daniel de Quesada looked around the room, then walked across the uneven floorboards as if across the uncertain deck of a s.h.i.+p, hesitating at the door, finally moving to stand in a corner farthest from the windows.

Ash stood up and poured wine into a wooden goblet and offered it to Floria. She spoke briefly in English - it being the language of a small, barbaric, unknown island, there was a sporting chance the Visigoth diplomat might not understand it. "How mad is he? What can I ask him about this darkness?"

"Barking. I don't know!" The surgeon hitched one hip up on to the trestle table and sat, long leg swinging. "They may be used to their amba.s.sadors coming back G.o.d-struck, if they send them out with messages about signs and portents. He's probably functional. I can't promise he'll stay that way if you start asking him questions."

"Tough. We need to know." She signalled the Visigoth. He came forward again. "Master Amba.s.sador, one other thing. I want to know when it's going to get light again."

"Light?"

"When the sun's going to rise. When it's going to stop being dark!"

"The sun ..." Daniel de Quesada s.h.i.+vered, not turning his head towards the window. "Is there fog outside?"

"How would I know? It's black as your hat out there!" Ash sighed. Evidently I can forget a sensible answer from this one. "No, master Amba.s.sador. It's dark. Not foggy-"

He huddled his arms around himself. Something about the shape of his mouth made Ash s.h.i.+ver: adult men in their right minds do not look like this.

"We were separated. Almost at the top - there was fog. I climbed." Quesada's staccato Carthaginian Gothic was barely comprehensible. "Up, up, up. A winding road, in snow. Ice. Climbing for ever, until I could only crawl. Then a great wind came; the sky was purple above me. Purple, and all the white peaks, so high above- Mountains. I cling. There is only air. The rock makes my hands bleed-"

Ash, with her own memory of a sky so dark blue it burns, and thin air that hurts the chest, said to Floria, "He's talking about the Gotthard Pa.s.s, now. Where the monks found him."

Floria put a firm hand on the man's arm. "Let's get you back to the infirmary, Amba.s.sador."

Half-alert, Daniel de Quesada met Ash's gaze.

"The fog - went." He moved his hands apart, like a man opening a curtain.

Ash said, "It was clear a month ago, when we crossed the pa.s.s with Fernando. Snow on the rocks either side, but the road was clear. I know where they must have found you, Amba.s.sador. I've stood there. You can stand and look straight down into Italy. Straight down, seven thousand feet."

The wagons creak, horses straining against the ascent; the breath of the men-at-arms streams on the air; and she stands, the cold striking up through the soles of her boots, and peers down a mottled green-and-white cliff face, funnelling down towards the foothills. But it seems puny to call it a cliff, this southern side of the saddle-pa.s.s across the Alps; the mountains rise up in a half-circle that is miles across.