Ash: The Lost History Part 47

The two women stared at each other.

"Didn't you use something?" Floria demanded.

"Of course I did! Do you think I'm stupid? Baldina gave me a charm to wear. As a wedding present. I had it in a little bag around my neck, both times we- every time." Ash felt the close evening air bring sweat out on her forehead. Her injury throbbed dully.

She saw Floria del Guiz survey her: did not know that the woman was seeing a young girl in hose and a big doublet; sword belted at her side, and gloves tucked under the belt; nothing female about her except her cascade of hair, and her face, momentarily looking all of twelve years old.

"You used a charm." Floria's voice sounded flat. She spoke quietly, as if afraid they could be heard outside. "You didn't use a sponge, or a pig's bladder, or herbs. You used a charm."

"It's always worked before!"

"Thank Christ I don't have to worry about any of this! I wouldn't touch a man if-" Floria took two or three quick steps, back and forth on the boards laid down against mud, her arms tucked tightly about her body. She stopped in front of Ash. "You feel sick at all?"

"I thought that was the head injury."

"t.i.ts tender?"

Ash considered. "I guess."

"And you bleed what time of the moon?"

"It's been the last quarter, most of this year."

"When did you last bleed?"

Ash frowned, thinking back. "Just before Neuss. Sun was still in Gemini."

"I'll have to look at you. But you're pregnant." Floria spoke with conclusive abruptness.

"You're going to have to give me something!"

"What?"

Ash reached behind herself with one hand, touching the back-stool, and slid down to a sitting position, adjusting her scabbard. She brought her hands around in front of her, clasping them first across her belly, and then around the grip of her sword. "You're going to have to give me something to get rid of it!"

The blonde woman dropped her arms to her sides. The lantern swung, as the tent creaked in the night wind. She squinted uncertainly into the light at Ash's face. "You haven't thought about this."

"I've thought!" Cold inside, flooded by terror, Ash gripped the leather-bound wood of her sword-hilt and stared down at the faceted, wheel-shaped pommel. She had a sudden urge to draw the blade, and cut. An urge to proclaim that her self is still her self. She tried to feel any sensation inside her body, to feel a difference, and felt nothing. No sense that she might be carrying a foetus.

"I can give you herbs in wine, to calm you down," Floria said.

With that note of caution, of professional calming of an overwrought patient, Ash's rage flared. She stood up. "I'm not going to be treated like some wh.o.r.e off the street! I will not have this baby."

"You'll have it." Floria del Guiz took hold of her arm.

"I will not. You'll have to cut it out of me." Ash shook herself free. "Don't tell me there's no surgery for that. When I was growing up in the wagons, any woman who would have died from another baby got rid of it by the company surgeon."

"No. I've sworn an oath." Floria's voice became flat, angry, tired. "You remember your condotta? This is mine. 'Never to procure an abortion.' For anybody!"

"And now they know you're a woman, they say you haven't got the wit to take an oath. That's what your fraternity of doctors think of you!" Ash s.h.i.+fted her blade an inch out of the scabbard, and banged it home. "I will not have that man's child!"

"You're sure it's his, then?"

The slap was deliberate, a solid whack across the face that left Floria's cheek bright red, and her eyes running water. Ash yelled, "Yes, it's his!"

Floria's dirty face shone, some emotion twisting her features that Ash couldn't identify. "It's a legitimate baby. Christ, Ash. It could be my nephew! My niece! You can't ask me to kill it."

"It's not quickened, it hasn't kicked, it's nothing." Ash glared. "You didn't understand me, did you? Listen to me: I will not have this baby. If you won't abort it, I'll find someone who can, I will not have this baby."

"No? You'll come round. Trust me." Floria shook her head. Snot ran clear from her nostril, and she wiped her sleeve across her face, leaving a smear of clean skin. She laughed, a break in her voice: "You won't have it? Not when it's his, and you can't keep your hands off him?"

Ash's mouth remained a little open; she said nothing. Her mind struggled, racing for a reply. A sudden picture came into her mind of a small child, about three years of age, with solemn green eyes and flaxen hair. A child to run about the camp, fall off horses, cut itself on the edges of weapons, be sick of a fever, die maybe in a famine some lean year; a child that would have the same features as Fernando del Guiz, and maybe the same humour as Floria- She met the eyes of Floria del Guiz and said with utter certainty, "You're jealous."

"You think I want a baby."

"Yes! And you never will have." Conscious of saying the unforgivable, powered more by fear than rage, Ash plunged on in razor-edged sarcasm: "What are you going to do, get Margaret Schmidt pregnant? A niece or nephew is as close as you'll get."

"That's true."

"Uh." Ash, expecting her rage, was confused. "I'm sorry I said it, but it is true, isn't it?"

"Jealous." Floria looked at Ash with an expression that might have been sardonic humour, or relief, or betrayal; or all three. "Because I won't cut a baby out of your belly. Woman, I don't want to see you bleed to death or die of childbed fever; but for Christ's sake have the thing! You won't die. You're strong as a b.l.o.o.d.y peasant, you can probably drop it one day and get back on your war-horse the next. Don't you understand that getting rid of it is dangerous?"

"A battlefield isn't safe!" Ash remarked with asperity. "Look, I'd as soon not go to a city doctor, I don't trust them, money-grubbing b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, and besides, there isn't time to get one now. I don't want to use the remedies they use on the wagons unless I have to. And I trust you because you've patched me up every time someone's hacked a chunk out of me!"

"Holy Saint Magdalen! Are you completely stupid? You - might - die."

"Am I supposed to be impressed? I train for that every day. I'm fighting tomorrow!"

Floria del Guiz opened her mouth and shut it again.

Unhappy, Ash said, "I don't want to give you an order."

"An order?" Floria's face, in profile, dripped a clear drop from her eye, that still ran from Ash's blow. She didn't look at Ash. "And what are you going to do if I don't perform an abortion? Throw me out of the company? But you'll have to do that anyway."

"Christ, Florian, no!"

Her hand came up and grabbed Ash's arm. "It isn't 'Florian', it's 'Floria', I'm a woman. I love other women!"

"I know that," Ash said, hastily. "Look, I-"

"You don't know it!" Floria let go of Ash's arm. She stood for a moment with her head lowered, and then turned her face to Ash. "You don't have the slightest idea, don't tell me you do. What am I supposed to do when people go mad around me, because I've lain with a woman? What? I can't fight them. I couldn't hurt them even if I did! I have to pretend I'm something I'm not. What if someone decides to burn me because I'm a woman-lover and I practise medicine?"

Ash s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably.

Floria del Guiz held out her hands, palm up.

In the cool air and lantern light, Ash saw familiar white marks on the surgeon's fingers.

Floria said, "These are burn scars. Old burns. I got them trying to drag -trying to drag something out of a fire, after it was much too late, because I wanted just something, a relic, a memory, if I couldn't have her alive, with me, with me." Floria pushed her hands across her face, sweat and tears dampening her hair. "Some man p.i.s.sed on you once and you think you know about this? Don't you tell me you know what it's like, you thug, because you don't know! You've never been defenceless in your life!"

The empty air echoed to her shout. Outside the tent, the guards stirred. Ash walked to the tent-flap, to give quiet orders.

Floria del Guiz spat, "So now you're having a baby. So welcome to being a woman!"

"Christ, Floria," Ash protested.

She didn't let Ash finish. "Maybe you shouldn't have been so d.a.m.n eager to f.u.c.k my brother!"

Ash could only look at her. Between amazement and the shock of feeling kicked in the gut, she couldn't put her thoughts in order to find an answer, couldn't say anything at all.

"I'd do anything for you! I always have. But I won't do this!" Floria's voice scaled up an octave. "Don't just sit there! Say something!"

Ash stared in panicked silence; tried to speak; then dropped her gaze from the woman's fierce face and stared down at the rush-strewn forest-earth.

Clear and decisive, the thought came into her head: I should tell Fernando.

But if it's a son, he'll take it away from me.

And I can't have it, anyway.

More than one woman's ridden into battle with a belly on her.

Yes, and more than one woman's got a fever after the birth and died, and the surgeons no use to her at all.

Equally clearly, a realisation came to her: I won't have it because it's his.

Floria's voice snarled, "As.h.!.+"

Ash ignored her.

Very cautiously, she began to consider the thought of carrying the baby to term.

It isn't that long out of my life. Months. Bad timing, though, if we're facing war . . . well, women have fought wars like this before. They'd still follow me. I'd make d.a.m.n sure of it.

The strength of her fear of her body changing out of her control, the sheer enormity of that physical reality, left her amazed. But when it's done? Born? Conscious that she was, to some degree, indulging herself in a pretty dream, Ash imagined a son or a daughter.

At least then I'll have blood kin. Someone who looks like me.

With that, a chill quite literally moved the hairs on the back of her neck.

You've already got someone who looks like you. Exactly like you.

And who knows what I'd give birth to? Some deformed village idiot? Christ and all the saints, no! I can't give birth to a monster.

It must already be more than forty days.. I've got to get rid of it now, before it quickens.

Before it gets a soul.

The woman's voice abruptly broke her concentration: "I'm off. What am I supposed to do? Wait for you for ever? Sit around here until those a.s.sholes out there make up their minds whether a d.y.k.e doctor is just fine and dandy? Keep your d.a.m.n company."

Floria turned and walked away, to the tent-flap; not slowing as she went out.

"And your baby! It's your problem, Ash. Solve it. You don't need me. Ash doesn't need anybody! I'll be with the Duke's Surgeon-General on the field tomorrow - where I can do what I trained for."

Before dawn, with the woods scarcely light enough to move without stumbling, Ash went out with the other commanders to walk the ground for the battle.

Air moved against her face. Condensation gathered on the inside of her helmet's visor, smelling of rust and armouries. Her boots skidded on the wet leaves. She almost barged into the Earl of Oxford, standing back a little from the main group of the Duke of Burgundy and his officers on the Dijon-Auxonne road. A growing paleness on her left showed her John de Vere's silhouette.

Ash asked quietly, "Is the Visigoth army still in position? What's the Duke planning?"

"They are. The Duke will fight this field outside Auxonne," Oxford murmured succinctly. He added, "Their campfires are where the scouts reported, near enough. A half-mile south, on the main road. You and I, madam, are to take the left of the line, with his other mercenaries."

"He doesn't trust us, does he? Or he'd put us on the right, where the fighting's heaviest."13 Ash slid her hand down to adjust the buckle of her cuisse: even with an extra hole bored in the strap, the borrowed leg armour did not fit her very well. "Will he at least let us try a flying wedge attack? We could take out the Faris."

"The Duke says not: she will have battle doubles14 on the field."

The silhouettes of shoulders moved against the light. Here the road and river swung suddenly away east, on her left hand, away from the shallow slope blocking the river valley to the south. Men moved off the road, on to rough pasture, striding up the hill in front of them. The sky was barely brighter than the earth. Ash realised de Vere's brothers were with him; peered over her shoulder for Anselm - present - and a bleary-eyed Angelotti.

"Okay," Ash said steadily to Oxford, as they stumbled into the cold morning, "so we might have to take her out several times! Let me put a s.n.a.t.c.h-squad together, my lord. Go round the flanks with about a hundred of us, we could be in and out and away. It's been done."

"The Duke requests that I bring your company to the field, under his banner," Oxford said, voice bleak. "We do as we're commanded. And hope that by this evening it is no longer necessary to think about raiding Carthage."

The ground lifted under her feet. Dew blackened the leather of her boots, and the lower part of her scabbard. The air remained chill, but clear: no more rain.

"My lord, my sources-" G.o.dfrey's contacts now reporting direct to her "-say they're still bringing up supplies, in the dark. We might have caught them on the hop," Ash said. "Some of their wagons are being pulled by their messenger-golems. Maybe they're desperate!"

"G.o.d send they are overstretched," de Vere said, grimly for a man with a force that outnumbers his enemy.

Boots skidding in mud, Ash topped the hill, her breathing harsh in her own ears; and peered out across the dimness.

A spur of hill here jutted into the river valley. They stood on its shallow western knoll, with the ancient wildwood hard up on her right hand. No way to move troops through it. Scouts reported not walking the ground so much as scrambling ten feet above it on clotted deadfalls.

This should bring us north of their camp - wonder if the heralds have gone down yet? Well, at least we found each other. . . ! Could have wandered around this wilderness for days.

The temptation to murmur, to that interior part of herself that hears a voice, Battle commander, Visigoth army, probable location? is almost irresistible.

Could the machina rei militaris answer that one? Would it lie? Would she know I've asked-?

No point wondering. Act as if she would. It's the only safe thing to do.

They set off down the slope in front. She clattered in the Duke of Burgundy's wake, aware that most other commanders would ride the ground, but that Duke Charles wants to know what this hill is like for men on foot, and men with gun-carriages. She was mildly impressed; cheered. Rapid, low-voiced conferences went on ahead of her. She squinted into the weak light of dawn.

Her strides ate up ground, going downhill, and her calves ached. At the foot of the long slope, she noted that the ground was squashy - thickets and reeds blocked the dawn, that side: marshes, maybe? On this edge of the river?

The pre-dawn greyness did not grow any brighter.

A skyline of hills and thick forest, ahead. A faint bell split the darkness, maybe from the abbey in Auxonne. She had the thought, Are the other side out walking the territory, right now? If we met-!