Ash: The Lost History Part 23

"Here." Ash took off her sallet and handed it to Rickard. Condensation misted the bright metal.

It was, when she entered, no different from any other room in any other city. Stone-framed windows with diamond-leaded panes, looking out on rain on the cobbled streets below. Four-storey houses across the narrow alley, plaster-and-beam frontages gleaming in the wet - in rain turning to sleet, she suddenly realised. White dots dropped into the circles of lantern light, light from other windows, and the pitch-torches illuminating the men-at-arms below.

Sloping roofs blocked the black sky above the street. The room sweltered and stank with a hundred tallow candles and rush-lights. When she looked at the marked wax candle, she saw it was just past midday.

"Ash." She produced a leather livery badge. "Condottiere to the Faris."

The Visigoth guards let her pa.s.s in. She seated herself at table, her men behind her, reasonably secure in her knowledge that Robert Anselm could handle both Joscelyn van Mander and Paul di Conti, that he would take notice of what the leaders of smaller lances said; that, if it came to it, the company would follow him into an attack. A quick glance around showed her Europeans and Visigoths, but not their Faris.

An amir (by his robes) said, "We must arrange this coronation. I appeal to you all for procedure."

Another Visigoth civilian began to read, carefully, from a European illuminated ma.n.u.script. '"As soon as the Archbishop hath put the crown on the king his head, then shall the king offer his sword to G.o.d on the altar . . . the worthiest earl that is there present shall . . . bear it naked before the king . . ."15 This is not what I do, Ash thought. How the h.e.l.l do I get to speak to their general?

She scratched at her neck, under her mail standard. Then she stopped, not wanting to draw attention to rat-nibbled leather and the red dots of flea-bites.

"But why crown our Viceroy by heathen ceremonies?" one of the Visigoth qa'ids demanded. "Even their own kings and emperors don't command these people's loyalty, so what good will it do?"

Further down the table, on the far side, a man with yellow hair cut short in the Visigoth military fas.h.i.+on lifted his head. She found herself staring at the face of Fernando del Guiz.

"Ah - nothing personal, del Guiz," the same Visigoth military officer added genially. "After all, you may be a traitor, but, h.e.l.l, you're our traitor!"

A ripple of dry humour went around the wooden table, quelled by the amir; who nonetheless glanced at the young German knight quizzically.

Fernando del Guiz smiled. His expression was open, generous, complicit with the high-ranking Visigoth officer; as if Fernando were seeing the joke against himself.

It was the same disarming smile he had shared with her outside the Emperor's tent at Neuss.

Ash saw his forehead gleaming in the candlelight: s.h.i.+ny with sweat.

Not a sign of strength of character. Not at all.

"f.u.c.k!" Ash shouted.

" 'And the king shall be'-" A white-haired man, in a murrey-coloured woollen pleated gown, with a silver-linked chain around his neck, looked up from tracing a hand-written doc.u.ment with his be-ringed finger. "Your pardon, Frau?"

"f.u.c.k.!" Ash sprang up and leaned forward, her gauntleted hands resting on the table. Fernando del Guiz: stone-green eyes. Fernando del Guiz, in a mail hauberk, and a white tunic under it; the badge of a qa'id laced to his shoulder, and his mouth now white around the lips. He met her eyes and she felt it, felt the eye-contact as a literal jolt under her ribs.

"You are a f.u.c.king traitor!"

The hilt of her sword is solid in her grip, the razor-sharp blade drawn two inches from the scabbard before she even thinks about it, every trained muscle beginning to move. She feels in her body the antic.i.p.ated jolt of the sword-point stabbing through his bare, unprotected face. Smas.h.i.+ng cheekbone, eye, brain. Brute force solves so many things in life not worth wasting time thinking about; this is what she does for a living, after all.

In the split second before she drew, Agnus Dei - now visible, sitting in his Milanese armour and white surcoat beyond the amir - gave a shrug that said plainly, Women!, and said loudly, "Keep your private business for another time, madonna!"

Ash flicked a glance back to ascertain where her six men-at-arms were positioned, behind her. Impa.s.sive faces. Ready for back-up. Except for Rickard. The boy bit on his bare hand, appalled at the silence.

It reached her.

Fernando del Guiz watched, no expression on his face. Safe behind the walls of public protection.

"I will," Ash said, sitting down. Around the low-beamed room, suddenly tense men wearing swords relaxed. She added, "I'll keep my business with Lamb for another time, too."

"Perhaps mercenaries do not need to attend on this meeting, condottieri," the lord-amir offered drily.

"Guess not." Ash braced her hands against the edge of the oak table. "I really need to speak with your Faris."

"She is in the town's great hall."

It was clearly the placation of a quarrelsome mercenary. Ash appreciated it. She pushed herself to her feet, and concealed a smile at Agnus Dei having also to gather his men, make his farewells, and leave the meeting and the house.

She glanced back as Lamb and his men stepped carefully out on to the cobbles after her. She tugged her cloak around her against the sleet. "All mercenaries out on the street together ..."

That would either make him fight or laugh.

The creases deepened in his brown face, under his barbute with its sodden plumes. "What's she paying you, madonna?"

"More than you. Whatever it is, I bet it's more than you."

"You have the more lances," he said mildly, pulling on his heavy gauntlets.

Confused by the evaporation of her anger, Ash put on her helm and reached out as Rickard brought G.o.dluc, and mounted quickly and easily. Not that a war-horse's shod hooves were any more certain on the cobbles than her own slick-soled boots.

Lamb called, "Did your Antonio Angelotti tell you? They've burned Milano, too. Down to the dirt."

A smell of wet horse permeated the chill air.

"You were from Milan, weren't you, Lamb?"

"No mercenary is from anywhere, madonna, you know that."

"Some of us try." That brought Guizburg to mind, fifty miles away: shattered town walls and unbreached keep; and another jolt left her breathless: He is upstairs in that little room and I wish he was dead!

"Which one of you was it?" she demanded. "Who let 'twins' meet, without warning either of us?"

Lamb chuckled harshly. "If the Faris believed it was my fault, madonna, would I be here?"

"But Fernando's still here, too."

The Italian mercenary gave her a look that said you are a child and had nothing to do with her age.

Ash said recklessly, "What about if I paid you to kill my husband?"

"I'm a soldier, not an a.s.sa.s.sin!"

"Lamb, I always knew you had principles, if I could only find them!" She made a joke of it, laughing it away; uncomfortably aware from the look on the Italian's face that he knew it was not a joke.

"Besides, he's the coming man with the Faris-General." Agnus Dei touched his white surcoat, his expression changing. "G.o.d judges him, madonna. Do you think you're the only enemy he has, having done this? G.o.d's judgement comes on him."

"I'd like to get in first." Ash, grim, watched Agnus Dei and his men mount up. Hooves and voices echoed between high, narrow houses. A b.i.t.c.h of a street to fight along, she thought, and dropped her chin into her mail standard to mutter aloud - purely as a supposition - and for the first time since Genoa: "Six mounted knights against seven; all Carrying war hammers, swords, axes; on very bad ground-"

And stopped. And reached up to jerk the visor of her sallet down, hiding her face. She whirled G.o.dluc, iron shoes striking sparks in the sleet, and slid off at a gallop, men-at-arms following her all anyhow, Lamb's appalled shout lost in the clatter.

No! I said nothing! I don't want to hear-!

Nothing rational: a wall of fear rose up in her mind. She would not consider the reasons why.

It's only the saint I have heard since I was a child: why- I don't want to hear my voice.

Eventually she let G.o.dluc slow, on the dangerous cobbles. Torches flared as Ash led her entourage through narrow, pitch-dark streets. A clock distantly struck two of the afternoon.

"I know where we'll pick up the surgeon on the way," she told Thomas Rochester, having given up Floria-Florian as a name that made her speech stumble. Rochester nodded and directed the manner of their riding: himself and another armoured horseman before her, two more at the rear, and the two mounted crossbowmen in their felt hats to ride beside her. The road underfoot changed from cobbles to frozen mud ruts.

Ash rode between houses with tiny paned windows illuminated by cheap rush-lights. A black dot jerked and darted across her vision. G.o.dluc tossed his head at its angular flight. Bats, she realised: bats flying out from under the house-eaves, in this dark daytime, s.n.a.t.c.hing at insects, or trying to.

Something crunched under the war-horse's shod hooves.

Stretching across the cold dirt in front of them, insects lay like a crisp frost.

Pismires of the air, all dead from cold: honey-bees, wasps, blow-flies. A hundred thousand of them. G.o.dluc's feathered hooves came down on the bright, broken wings of b.u.t.terflies.

"Here," she directed, at a three-storey house with a stack of overhanging windows. Rochester snuffled. She could see little of the dark-haired Englishman's face under his visor, but when she studied the house outside which they had halted, she guessed the reason for his humour. A hundred rush-lights shone in the windows, someone was singing, someone was playing a lute surprisingly well, and three or four men were being sick in the gutter in the centre of the alley. Wh.o.r.ehouses always do good business in a crisis.

"You guys wait for me." Ash swung down from the saddle. Light glinted from her steel armour. "And I mean here. I don't want to find any of you missing when I come back!"

"No, boss." Rochester grinned.

Thick-necked men in jerkins and hose, backlit, let her pa.s.s, seeing armour and livery jacket. Nothing unusual about a boy-voiced knight or man-at-arms in a Basle wh.o.r.ehouse. Two questions got her knowledge of the room occupied by a yellow-haired Burgundian-accented surgeon, two silver coins of indeterminate issue gained silence. She strode up the stairs, knocked once, and went in.

A woman was lying back on a pallet in the corner of the small room, her bodice pulled down and her long veined b.r.e.a.s.t.s drooping out. All her chemises and her woollen kirtle were ruffled up about her naked thighs. She might have been anything between sixteen and thirty, Ash couldn't tell. She had dyed yellow hair, and a small plump chin.

The room smelled of s.e.x.

There was a lute beside the wh.o.r.e, and a candle and some bread on a wooden plate on the floor. Floria del Guiz sat cross-wise on the pallet with her back against the plaster of the wall. She drank from a leather bottle. All her points had been unlaced; one brown nipple was visible where her breast lay out of her open s.h.i.+rt.

As Ash watched, the wh.o.r.e stroked Floria's neck.

"Is this a sin?" the girl demanded fiercely. "Is it, sir? But fornication is a sin in itself, and I have fornicated with many men. They are bulls in a field, with their great c.o.c.ks. She is gentle and wild with me."

"Margaret. Sssh." Floria leaned forward and kissed the young woman on the mouth. "I am to leave, I see. Shall I come back and visit you?"

"When you have the money." A glint, under the bravado, of something else. "Mother Astrid won't let you in if you don't. And come in your man-shape. I don't want to make a bonfire for the church."

Floria met Ash's black look. The surgeon's eyes danced. "This is Margaret Schmidt. She's excellent with her fingers - on the lute."

Ash turned her back on the young wh.o.r.e rearranging her clothes; and on Floria, tying her points with a surgeon's neatness. She walked across the floor.

Boards creaked. A deep male voice shouted something from upstairs; there was a series of rising cries, faked, in another upstairs room.

"I never wh.o.r.ed with women!" Ash turned, stiffly, in metal plates. "I went with men. I never went with animals, or women! How can you do that?"

Margaret murmured, shocked, "He's a woman!', to which Floria, now tying on her cloak and hood, said, "She is, greatheart. If you fancy life on the road, there are worse camps to join."

Ash wanted to shout, but kept her mouth shut, halted by the decisions pa.s.sing across the young woman's face.

Margaret rubbed her chin. "It's no life, among soldiers. And listen to him, to her, I couldn't be with you, could I?"

"I don't know, sweetness. I've never kept a woman before."

"Come back here before you go. I'll give you my answer then." With remarkable self-possession, Margaret Schmidt tidied the lute and the plate on to an oaken stool, in the chiaroscuro of the rush-light. "What are you waiting for? Mother will be sending another one to me. Or she'll charge you double."

Ash didn't wait to see what she thought might be a kiss of parting - except that wh.o.r.es do not kiss, she thought; I never- She turned and stomped down the narrow stairs, between doors sometimes open to men with bottles and dice, sometimes to men fornicating with women; until she stopped and spun around in the hallway, nearly impaling the surgeon on the sharp edge of her steel elbow-couter. "What the h.e.l.l do you think you're doing? You were supposed to be sounding out other physicians, picking up trade gossip!"

"What makes you think I haven't been?"

The tall woman checked belt, purse and dagger with an automatic touch of one hand, the other still clasped around the neck of the leather bottle.

"I got the physician to the Caliph's cousin truly rat-a.r.s.ed, right here. He tells me in confidence that Caliph Theodoric has a canker, months to live at best."

Ash only stared, the words going past her.

"Your face!" Floria laughed. She drank from the bottle.

"s.h.i.+t, Florian, you're f.u.c.king women!"

"Florian's perfectly safe f.u.c.king women." She swept her man-cut hair back into her hood, where it framed her long-boned face. "Now wouldn't it be inconvenient if I wanted to f.u.c.k men?"

"I thought you were just paying for a room, and her time! I thought it was a trick, to keep up your disguise!"

Floria's expression softened. She patted Ash gently on her scarred cheek, and then dropped the empty bottle, and whipped her mittens on against the chill seeping in from the street. "Sweet Christ. If I can put it the way our excellent Roberto would - don't be such a humourless hard-a.s.s."

Ash made a half-noise not speech, all breath. "But you're a woman! Going with another woman!"

"It doesn't bother you with Angelotti."

"But he's-"

"He's a man, with another man?" Floria said. Her mouth shook. "Ash, for Christ's sake!"

An older woman with a tight face under her coif came out from the kitchens. "Are you bravos looking for a woman or wasting my time? Sir knight, I beg your pardon. All our girls are very clean. Aren't they, Doctor?"

"Excellently." Floria pushed Ash towards the door. "I'll bring my lord back, when our business is done with."

Cold darkness blinded Ash outside the doors; then Thomas Rochester and her men and their pitch-torches dazzled her, so that she hardly saw a boy bring Floria her bay gelding. She mounted and settled herself down in G.o.dluc's saddle.

She opened her mouth to shout. And then realised that she had no idea what to say. Floria, watching her, looked supremely unapologetic.

"G.o.dfrey will be at the hall by now." Ash s.h.i.+fted, rousing G.o.dluc to a slow walk. "The Faris will be there. Ride on."

Floria's gelding s.h.i.+vered and flicked its head up. The white, soundless swoop of a disorientated barn owl curved past in flight, not a yard from the surgeon's hat.