Part 114 (1/2)
The man-at-arms nodded, turning his mount awkwardly among wilted banks of briar and dead goldenrod; and spurred back into the company cavalry. She watched the few seconds necessary to see him approach the lance-leaders.
”Florian.” She checked position of her banner, the tag-end of the running crowd among holly, hornbeam, and oak wood; the standard of the Visigoths -out of sight, somewhere back at the edge of the wood. ”Get your a.s.s up there with the hunters. When you get back to the city, have everything ready for wounded.”
The surgeon ignored her. ”They're coming back!”
A throng of men on foot and on horse went past, couples of hounds tugging away from their handlers, moving too fast for the rough ground underfoot.
Swept back towards a holly thicket, Ash s.h.i.+fted her weight forward and hauled on the rein.
The pale gelding turned. Ash s.h.i.+fted her weight back, ta.s.sets sliding over cuisses, and brought the horse around. Apart from Rochester's sergeant with her banner, a yard or two off her flank, all the riders and people on foot around her now were strangers. She risked a glance off to the far right - to see the backs of men in Lion livery riding out into thicker woods that way - and another look behind her.
Two heavy cataphracts in scale armour, that flashed in the slanting light under the trees, were riding up close behind; the Visigoth company standard caught up somewhere in branches behind them, and fifty or more serf-troops with spears running on foot with the riders.
”It is not their business to be here!” a tight-lipped voice said, at her right side. Ash, turning in her saddle, found herself right beside Jeanne Chalon's palfrey.
”It is not yours, either!” the woman added, her tone not hostile, but disapproving.
Ash could not now see Soeur-Maitresse Simeon, or Floria, in the mob. She kept the gelding tightly reined in as he rolled his eye, s.h.i.+fting his hooves on the bank that sloped down ahead of them.
”Better hope the chase doesn't come back this way!” Ash grinned at Mistress Chalon, and jerked her thumb at the serf-troops running past them through briar and tree-stumps. ”What happens to Burgundy if a Visigoth kills the hart?”
Jeanne Chalon's pursed mouth closed even tighter. ”They are not eligible. Nor you, you have not a drop of Burgundian blood in your veins! It would mean nothing: no Duke!”
Ash halted the pale gelding. Water ran black under the leafless trees. A pale sun, above, put white light down through the tall branches. Ahead, men with hose muddy to the thigh, and women with their kittles kilted up and black at the hem, waited patiently to cross a small stream. Ash thumbed the visor of her sallet further up.
A strong smell hit her. Made up of horse - the gelding sweating, as it fretted in the moving crowds of peasants - and of wood-smoke, from distant bonfires, and of the smell of people who do not bathe often and who work out in the air: a ripe and un.o.bjectionable sweat. Tears stung her eyes, and she shook her head, her vision blurring, thinking, Why? What does- What does this remind me of?
The picture in her head is of old wood, that has been faded to silver and cracked dry by summer upon summer in the field. A wooden rail, by a step.
One of the big roofed wagons, with steps set down into gra.s.s; the earth trodden flat in front of it, and gra.s.s growing up between the spokes of the wheels.
A camp, somewhere. Ash has a brief a.s.sociational flavour in her mouth: fermented dandelion, elderflower; watered down to infinitesimal strength, but enough to make the water safe for a child to drink. She remembered sitting on the wagon steps, Big Isobel - who could only have been a child herself, but an older child - holding her on her knee; and the child Ash wriggling to be set down, to run with the wind that ruffled the gra.s.ses between lines of tents.
The smell of cooking, from campfires; the smell of men sweating from weapons practice; the smell that wool and linen get when they have been beaten at a river bank and hung out to dry in the open air.
Let me go back to that, she thought. I don't want to be in charge of it; I just want to live like that again. Waiting for the day when the practice becomes real war, and all fear vanishes.
”Cy va!”
Hounds gave tongue, somewhere far ahead in the wood. The crowd at the stream surged forward, water spraying up. Both her sergeant and banner were gone. Ash swore, unbuckled the strap under her chin, and wrenched her sallet off. She pushed the cropped hair back from her ears, tilted her head, and listened.
A confused noise of hounds echoed between the trees.
”That's not a scent - or they've lost it again.” Ash found that she was speaking to the empty air: the Chalon woman vanished into the throng.
Visigoth serf-troops pounded past on foot, either side of her; most of them with nothing but a helmet and a dark linen tunic, running b.l.o.o.d.y and barefoot on the forest floor. Skin p.r.i.c.kled down the whole length of her spine. She dared not put her hand to her riding sword. She sat poised, bareheaded, waiting, ears alert in the cold wind for the sound of a bow- ”Green Christ!” a voice said at her stirrup.
Ash looked down. A Visigoth in a round steel helm with a nasal bar, arquebus clutched loosely in a dirty hand, had stopped and was staring up at her. Boots, and a mail s.h.i.+rt, marked him out as a freeman; what she could see of his face was weather-beaten, middle-aged, and thin.
”Ash,” he said. ”Christ, girlie, they did mean you.”
In the rush of people, the two of them went unnoticed; Ash's gelding sidling back into the shelter of a beech tree with a few last brown leaves still curled like chrysalides on its twigs; the Visigoth's mounted officer too busy yelling his men back into some kind of order and off the trail of the hounds.
Alert, safe in her armour, she tucked her sallet under her arm and looked down from the high saddle. ”Are you one of Leofric's slaves? Did I meet you in Carthage? Are you a friend of Leovigild or Violante?”
”Do I sound like a b.l.o.o.d.y Carthaginian?” The man's raw voice held offence, and amus.e.m.e.nt. He cradled the arquebus under one arm and reached up, pulling his helmet off. Long curls of white hair fell down around his face, fringing a bald patch that took up almost all his scalp, and he pushed the yellow-white hair back with a veined hand. ”Christ, girl! You don't remember me.”
The belling of the hounds faded. The hundreds of people might as well have not been present. Ash stared at black eyes, under stained yellow eyebrows. An utter familiarity, coupled with a complete lack of knowledge, silenced her. I do know you, but how can I know anyone from Carthage?
The man said rawly, ”The Goths hire mercenaries, too, girlie; don't let the livery fool you.”
Deep lines cut down the side of his mouth, ridged his forehead; the man might have been in his fifties or sixties, paunchy under the mail, with bad teeth, and white stubble showing on his cheeks.
The gulf that she felt opening around her was, she realised, nothing but the past; the long fall back to childhood, when everything was different, and everything was for the first time. ”Guillaume,” she said. ”Guillaume Arnisout.”
He had shrunk, and not just by the fact that she sat so high above him. There would be scars and wounds she knew nothing of, but he was so much the same - even white-haired, even older - so much the gunner that she had known in the Griffin-in-Gold that it took her breath: she sat and stared while the hunt raged past, silenced.
”I thought it had to be you.” Guillaume Arnisout nodded to himself. He still wore a falchion; a filthy great curved blade in a scabbard at his waist, for all he carried a Visigoth copy of a European gun.
”I thought you died. When they executed everybody, I thought you died.”
”I went south again. Healthier overseas.” His eyes squinted, looking up at her, as if he looked into a light. ”We found you in the south.”
”In Africa.” And, at his nod, she leaned down from the saddle and extended her hand, grasping his as he offered it; forearm and forearm; his covered in mail, hers in plate. A great smile spluttered out of her, into a laugh. ”s.h.i.+t! Neither of us has changed!”
Guillaume Arnisout looked quickly over his shoulder, moving back into the scant concealment of the branches. Thirty feet away, a Visigoth cataphract bawled furiously and obscenely at the standard-bearer, the eagle still tangled between hornbeam clumps.
”Does it matter to you, girlie? Do you want to know?”
There was no malice, no taunt, in his tone; nothing but a serious question, and the rueful acknowledgement of a nearby sergeant likely to exercise proper discipline for this infringement.
”Do I?” Ash straightened, looking down at him. She abruptly put her sallet back on, unbuckled, and swung down from the saddle. She looped the gelding's reins around a low branch. Safe, unnoticeable among the pa.s.sing heads, she turned back to the middle-aged man. ”Tell me. It makes no difference now, but I want to know.”
”We were in Carthage. Must be twenty years ago.” He shrugged. ”The Griffin-in-Gold. A dozen of us were out in the harbour, one night, drunk, on somebody's stolen boat. Yolande - you never met her, an archer; she's dead now - heard a baby crying on one of their honeyboats, so she made us row over there and rescue it.”
”The refuse barges?” Ash said.
”Whatever. We called them honeyboats.”
A shrill horn sounded close by. Both she and the white-haired man looked up with identical alertness, registered a Burgundian n.o.ble carrying a lymer across his saddle-bow; and then the rider and hound were past, gone into the people still ma.s.sing to cross the stream.
”Tell me!” Ash urged.
He looked at her with a pragmatic sadness. ”There isn't much more to tell.
You had this big cut on your throat, bleeding, so Yolande took you to one of the rag-head doctors and got you sewn up. Hired you a wet-nurse. We were going to leave you there, but she wanted to bring you back with us, so I had the charge of you in the s.h.i.+p all the way over to Salerno.”
Guillaume Arnisout's creased, dirty face creased still further. He wiped at his s.h.i.+ny forehead.
”You cried. A lot. The wet-nurse died of a fever in Salerno, but Yolande took you on into camp. Then she lost interest. I heard she got raped, and killed in a knife-fight later on. I lost track of you after that.”