The roof and beams cramped her. Ash stuck the shaft of her poleaxe forward past Euen as he recovered his balance. She hooked the curved back edge of the blade behind the second man"s knee. Bracing both feet, she yanked.
The razor edge of the axe hooked the man"s knee forward, his mouth opening in a scream as the cut hamstrung him. He went over, on to his back, crumpling against the front wall of the brattice. Euen Huw stabbed with his sword, up between the legs, under his hauberk, into his groin.
The first man struggled upright, on to one knee, his other leg jutting at a twisted angle. Too close. Ash dropped the axe, grabbed her dagger out of its scabbard with her right hand, and threw herself down on to his back.
She wrapped her forearm around his helmet, twisted his head around, and slammed the blade down into his eye-socket, straight into the brain.
Despite helmet, despite blood and the scream and the disfigurement of his face, she had a moment to recognise the man. Bartolomey St John - Joscelyn"s second - I know him!
Knew him.
Anselm bellowed something. Two or three dozen men in Lion livery piled over the battlements into the brattice, iron cook-pots manoeuvred gingerly between them on bill-shafts. The first two tipped their cauldrons, and a white mist of steam hissed up: boiling water spilling through the gaps and planks alike. More men: Henri Brant and Wat Rodway heaving a cauldron between them, laughing under the clamour, tipping hot sand down through the nearest opening- A yard under Ash"s feet, men screamed, shrieked; there was the recognisable crack of a siege ladder shattering under panicking men"s weights. Screams diminishing, bodies falling into the bright air.
"s.h.i.t, boss, that was close!" Euen bellowed, mouth at her ear, one hand reached out absently to pull her to her feet.
Ash grabbed the axe with her free hand, hauling it out from under Bartolomey St John"s dead body. Her hands were, she realised, shaking; with the same uncontrollable tremor that one has when badly injured. But nothing"s touched me: the blood isn"t mine!
She lifted her head, couldn"t see Anselm, could hear him and her sergeants yelling orders back on the battlements - he"s done it, we"re holding!
"Euen, send a runner! The Byward Tower, now. What the f.u.c.k are the Burgundians doing up there? We need covering fire! They"ve got no business letting these guys get anywhere near the foot of this wall!"
One of Euen"s squires pelted off down the brattice, regained the battlements, and vanished in the direction of the nearest tower. Can we cover it still, from the Byward Tower to the White Tower?
Ash ducked back, and stepped off the h.o.a.rdings on to the walls. Only the backs of men visible, now; a hundred or so here: blue-and-yellow Lion livery for the most part; a couple of Burgundian red Xs. Further along, where the brattices had been on fire, and chopped away because of that, she saw swords, axes; men hooking bills over the tops of ladders - no time for anything subtle: slam them into position along the battlements and tip down everything available on the scaling ladders below.
Robert Anselm jogged up in a clatter of armour and hard breathing. "I"ve sent my lance to the tower to kick some sense into the Burgundian missile troops!"
"Good! We got "em turned round here, Roberto!"
Something bright and burning dropped out of the sky, with the whistle of flames fanned by the wind.
The stench of it warned her.
"Greek Fire!"
Oh, sweet Jesu, they will fire on their own men if it means getting us too, they just don"t care!
She threw herself back across the battlements to the inside of the wall, hauling Anselm with her, yelling orders: "Back! Off the walls! Away from the walls! "
Fire hit and splashed.
Inside a second, the nearer brattices burst into flame. She saw the flaming greasy liquid splash and spread. One high voice shrieked. No use to call for water- "Cut the h.o.a.rdings free!" she ordered, swinging her axe up and over, chopping down at the supporting beams, and she stood back as the men of three more lances took over.
The shrieking figure rolled on the stone battlements, Greek Fire clinging, a stench of burning coming from blackened skin. Ash recognised red hose and brown padded jack, and the frizzled hair under the melting steel of her sailer. Ludmilla Rostovnaya, half her torso and one arm coated in gelatinous, burning fire.
Anselm yelled, "Thomas Tydder!"
The boy and the rest of his fire detail rushed up along the wall, doused leather buckets of sand over the screaming woman, sc.r.a.ping the stuff away. Ash glimpsed their hands going red in the process.
"Stand aside!" Floria del Guiz sprinted past her with a stretcher team.
The brattice creaked, tilted; gave way with a rush. Flaming wood collapsed out into the empty air.
Ash moved forward to the wall. Below, she saw siege ladders tipping back, screaming men falling from them. Bodies in twenties and thirties plummeted to the broken ground at the foot of the city wall. Visigoth slaves - without armour, without weapons - ran about on the escarpment, darting forward, lifting and carrying men with broken limbs.
As she watched, one pale-haired slave fell with a bolt in him. A few yards away, a soldier wearing the Crescent Moon knelt down beside another trooper who writhed with a broken back, gave him the coup de grace with his dagger, and ran on, leaving the slave jerking and twitching and alive.
Ash looked up to the Byward Tower. Archers and crossbow troops surged past to the shuttered embrasures and arrow-loops; some of the Welsh longbowmen recklessly shooting over the merlons.
Another bolt of Greek Fire impacted, further down the wall.
Under her breath, Ash muttered, "Come on. Take that machine out!"
She grabbed the edges of the battlements, staring out from the walls. Under the pale sun, four carved limbs of turning stone flashed white in the November day. Four carved marble cups, on stone beams, like the cups of a mangonel, revolved around a stone spindle. There wasn"t a soldier or a slave within yards of it to wind it. Ash watched it moving, golem-like, of itself.
Stone chips exploded off it, under a hail of crossbow bolts.
A shrill voice from the Byward Tower yelled, "Gotcha!"
As Ash watched, the bra.s.s-bound wheels of its carriage began to turn, and it swivelled away from the walls and back towards the Visigoth camp to reload. Blue flickers of fire still burned in the cups at the end of each of its four arms.
"We"re holding!" Ash yelled at Anselm.
"Only just!" Ordering the sergeants back to the wall, Robert Anselm broke off to add: "They got the ram going against the main gate! This is just a diversion!"
"Yeah, I could"ve guessed that!" Ash wiped her mouth, took her hand away b.l.o.o.d.y. "Are they holding the gate?"
"Up till now!"
Breathless, Ash could only nod.
"Motherf.u.c.kers!" Robert Anselm narrowed his eyes against the light. ""Ere they come again. Auxiliaries and mercenaries again. Wait till they f.u.c.king mean it."
Aware now that her chest was heaving to gain air, Ash s.n.a.t.c.hed a second to look out at the distant enemy camp. Three or four hundred men, ma.s.sing in preparation for the a.s.sault"s success. "No eagles!"
Robert Anselm tilted his sallet down, against the sun that showed the dirt and stubble on his face. "Not yet!"
Another stone machine edged forward out of the makeshift vast city that is the Visigoth camp. Ash watched. The cups were loaded: fragile clay pots with fuses already lit, shimmering with heat.
"Look at that! They"re not supporting that engine. Robert, send to de la Marche, tell him to sally out and take out those b.l.o.o.d.y engines! Tell him if he won"t, we"ll be happy to!"
As Anselm signalled a runner, Ash narrowed her eyes in the sunlight. Below, the ground before the walls was strewn with the dead, already; in what must be the first fifteen minutes of fighting. The moat was full of bodies, moving feebly, or still and broken, bleeding on to the f.a.ggots and mud and shattered rock.
Two or three riderless horses wandered aimlessly. Carts with pavises mounted on them, slave-hauled, began to recover enemy wounded.
And this wasn"t even an attack. A feint. Just so they can get the ram or the saps up to the north-west gate.
It isn"t what we can see. It"s what we can"t see.
With that thought, and almost as she thought it, a great section of the city wall five hundred yards to her right, past the White Tower to the east, first rose up slightly - mortar puffing out between themasonry - and then slumped by ten or eleven inches.
A hot wind blasted her: a thunderous m.u.f.fled roar shook the paving stones under her feet.
"f.u.c.king saps!" Thomas Rochester thrust through the command group, joining her. His scream was almost hysterical. "They had another f.u.c.king sap!"
The high-pitched painful ringing in her ears began to deaden a little.
Euen Huw yelled, "I thought we were supposed to be counter-mining!"
Now a vast number of men came running forward from the Visigoth lines, obviously at this signal; dozens of scaling ladders carried aloft over their heads. Ash heard Ludmilla Rostovnaya"s lance-mate, Katherine Hammell, yell a shrill "Nock! Loose!" and hundreds of shafts whirred blackly into the middle air from the Lion archers, twelve per minute; vanishing into the ma.s.s of men, impossible to see any single strike.
"They"ve f.u.c.ked it!" Ash slapped her palm down hard on Rochester"s shoulder, grinned at Euen Huw. "They didn"t bring the f.u.c.king wall down. You must be right about the counter-mine!"
She stared at the point where the wall now dipped, and the unsafe battlements along it. h.o.a.rdings smouldered. Burgundian men with red St Andrew"s crosses on their padded jacks were moving slowly out of the wreckage, a few men being carried.
They may not have brought the wall down. But that"s going to be a h.e.l.l of a weak spot from now on.
"We"ll have to hold the wall for them while they sort it! Every second man! Robert, Euen, Rochester: on me!"
Reckless of the likelihood of collapsing masonry, she ran lightly down on to the broken section of wall, the company swarming through the White Tower after her. Rapidly hammering out orders, Ash saw the tops of scaling ladders appear; and hand-to-hand fighting start all along the wall. Four hundred men, a line three and four deep in places; war-hats bright in the light, the spiked blades of bills throwing up a fine red mist. Behind, on the parapet, the Burgundian troops regrouped.
"They blew it!" Ash yelled to Robert Anselm, over the shrieks, the harsh bellowing of "A Lion! A Lion!", and the bang of swivel guns brought down from the far end of the wall. She saw men-at-arms, sunlight glinting off their war-hats, pa.s.sing up hooked poles, shoving scaling ladders off the walls; and more than one lance were picking up the shattered fragments of trebuchet and mangonel missiles, and dropping chunks of masonry back down off the battlements.
On to the men below.
"The wall didn"t come down in front of "em!" Robert Anselm bellowed. "They ain"t got nowhere to go!"
Antonio Angelotti, arriving with more swivel guns, showed eyes that were the only white thing in his black face. He yelled to her, "We must have countermined some of their mines! Else this whole section would be down!"
"At least we"re doing something right - let"s hope de la Marche can hold the f.u.c.king gate!"
It seemed long - was probably not, probably only another fifteen minutes -before the only things visible on the walls were the backs of her own men, ignoring any wounds, still high on adrenalin, leaning over the battlements and shouting their raw, violent contempt down at the dying men below. One billman stood up on top of the battlement, his cod-flap unlaced, urinating off the wall. Two of his mates grabbed dead stripped Visigoths by wrists and ankles, and slung them out through the embrasures.
She did not draw breath again until the Burgundian combat engineers had sh.o.r.ed up the fallen section of wall with forty-foot planks as thick as a man"s arm, supported by wooden b.u.t.tresses; and the attack on the north-west gate had petered out into a rout, under missile fire, men running back behind the wooden palisades of the Visigoth camp; the golem-ram abandoned, sunk over the axles in mud.
"s.h.i.t..."
Standing with her command group, she made an a.s.sessment of the sagging wall in front of her, almost without thinking of it. Merlons broken, like jagged teeth. Men-at-arms moving back from the walls as the sergeants stood them down, leaving anything else to the missile troops.
When they come again, this is where they"ll come.
"Can we stand them all down?" Angelotti demanded. He appeared oblivious to the blood dripping on to the stone from the fingers of his left hand. "My boys too?"
"Yeah. Pointless wasting ammunition."
Her gaze went up and down the parapet. One crossbowman had his foot planted firmly in the stirrup of his crossbow, winding the winch, but with little urgency now. A hand-gunner in breastplate and war-hat was kneeling, leaning over, hook-gun braced against the edge of the crenellation. As Ash watched, her lance-mate touched a slow-match to the touch-hole; then stuck it back in a sand-barrel, unconcerned by the noise of the shot.
The gunner, as she bent her head to re-load and her face became visible, was Margaret Schmidt.
"Stop wasting your f.u.c.king ammunition!" Angelotti"s sergeant, Giovanni Petro, bawled, as Ash opened her mouth to give the order. "Don"t shoot while they"re running away. Wait till the b.a.s.t.a.r.d Flemings come back - with all their little Visigoth friends!"
There was a mutter of laughter along the wall. Ash, approaching the edge, and leaning out, caught glances from her men: most of them in the exultation that comes immediately after an action, which is nothing more than the joy of having survived it. One or two of the billmen were prodding corpses in obviously European livery, their expressions hard.
Conscious of a wired rapture that is her own response to survival - a hard joy that wishes every man in the Visigoth camp maimed and bleeding - she leaned over and looked down at the innocent earth in front of the city. Studied it again for disturbance: saw nothing.
"They must have been counter-mined; if they"d managed to set off all their petards, they"d have breached this wall."
Not particularly aware of her p.r.o.nouns, she thought, We nearly lost Dijon in one attack!
The noon sun winked back in sparks from the ground. She realised after a second that she was seeing the caltrops5 that had been thrown down by the defenders.
"Greek Fire, too. Think they"re f.u.c.king "ard," Anselm grunted cynically. "What"s the rush?"
Ash gave him a breathless, diamond-hard grin.
"Don"t be in such a hurry, Roberto. They"ll be back."
"You reckon?"
"She wants in here fast. I don"t know why. All she has to do is sit out there and let starvation do it for her. Christ, she even fired on her own men!" Her facial muscles ached, and she realised the grin had gone. Almost inconsequentially, she added, "d.i.c.kon"s dead - d.i.c.kon Stour."
His gaze was not unaware of other casualties; nonetheless, there was a deep disgust in his voice. "Ah, f.u.c.k it. Poor f.u.c.king s.h.i.te."
Ash busied herself in the business of clearing up, seeing her men rea.s.sembled, and on their way back to their quarters. Groups of men carried heavy, red-soaked blankets between them: d.i.c.kon Stour, his two mates, and seven others dead. And Ludmilla not the only screaming survivor of Greek Fire, but what the wounded list was, she would not, she supposed, hear from Florian until later.
It was a stranger who found her as she was coming down off the wall at last: a Burgundian knight who rode up to her and her command group in the street, intercepting her as she stepped across the central gutter; still, even in this bitter weather, semi-liquid with excrement.
"Demoiselle-Captain-"
"Just "Captain"!"
"-the Duke sends word."
Ash, every muscle aching, and wanting little more than to find Floria"s salve for bruises, dark beer, and pottage - in that order - eyed him wearily. "I"m at the Duke"s command."
"He told me that you have a more urgent task than the defence of the walls," the knight said, "and he asks you, when will you begin it?"
Chapter Two.The November day died in grey twilight, an hour or more before Vespers. Of the wounded, all survived that long. Those inns within a quarter-mile radius of the company tower became packed with mercenary men-at-arms getting loudly drunk. Riding back through the streets, Ash thought it wise not to see, officially, what might be going on in the way of brawls and s.e.xual encounters in the street; wise to leave ab Morgan to keep it from becoming murder and rape. The top floor of the company"s tower having been reorganised to contain the armoury, the war-chests, and Ash"s own belongings, they were now stacked more or less in order on the open, rush-strewn floor. Ash strode past the armed men at the door, nodding her acknowledgement.
She threw a handful of sketches down on the trestle table in front of Robert Anselm. "There."
"You"ve been all round the walls."
"Twice." Ash moved over to a brazier, unbuckling and stripping off her gauntlets. A page - one of half a dozen recruited new from the baggage train -ran to take them from her. She huffed, grinned, beating her cold hands together. "Euen Huw"s whingeing on again. He said, You"ll wear the lads out before the rag-heads even get in here-"
Her accurate mimicry made Robert Anselm laugh.