Part 134 (2/2)
”No wonder, boss!” Rickard straightened up, still bundled in jack, livery jacket, and fur-lined demi-gown; his hood barely pushed back from his face even inside the tower and close to the remaining hearth-fire. ”Look at this.”
He held up Ash's cuira.s.s by the shoulders, fauld and ta.s.sets still attached. The plackart, unstrapped from the upper breastplate, caught the light in a glinting craze.
”f.u.c.k me.” Ash reached out and slid her gloved fingers across the case-hardened steel. The curve of the plackart was shattered, like ice when a rock hits it. At her gesture, he turned the body-armour around. On the back of the breastplate, over the place where her left ribs would be, the softer iron bulged back.
Her fingers went without volition to her bare torso, touching the swelling skin.
”It b.l.o.o.d.y cracked it. My plackart! And the breastplate, too. Two layers of steel, and it f.u.c.king cracked it!”
The light from the winter-blue sky outside the window flashed from the steel. She slowly removed her gauntlets, and fumbled to pull the edges of her doublet together. Florian took her left hand, probing for stone splinters. Her breath hissed as she stared at the Milanese breastplate in Rickard's hands. ”The armourer can't hammer that out. Sweet Green Christ up a Tree, that's my luck for this siege! Holy Saint George!”
”Never mind the soldier saints,” Floria remarked under her breath, with asperity, ”try Saint Jude! Tilde, I'll need a witch hazel and St John's wort poultice. Wash this hand in wine. It doesn't need bandages.”
The maid-in-waiting curtseyed, to Floria's obvious amus.e.m.e.nt.
Jeanne Chalon caught Ash's eye and sniffed again, disapprovingly.
”Niece-d.u.c.h.ess,” she said pointedly, ”remember you are called to the council, at Nones.”
”Actually, aunt, I think you'll find that I called them.”
Jeanne Chalon flushed. ”Of course, my lady.”
”'Of course, my lady',” Rickard muttered under his breath, in mincing mockery.
Floria caught his eye and scowled. ”You need to get the rest of this metalware off her. Tilde, where's that poultice?”
A man sat up, on a pallet closer to the hearth. Ash saw it was Euen Huw. Dirty beyond belief, and gaunt, with the fine cat-gut of Floria's st.i.tches poking up out of his shaven hair, the wiry Welshman still managed to grin woozily at her.
”Hey. Don't you let her prod you around, boss. Heavy-handed, she is. Working for the rag-'eads, I swear it!”
”You lie down, Euen, or I'll put some more st.i.tches in that thick Welsh head of yours!”
He smiled at Florian. As he half-fell back on to his pallet, he murmured, ”Got a cushy number, now, haven't we? Comes of having a smart boss, see. Gets our surgeon crowned d.u.c.h.ess. Boss in charge of the army. Even the d.a.m.n rag-heads give up when they hear that.”
I wis.h.!.+ Ash thought. She saw it mirrored on Florian's face.
She held out her arms to Rickard and the pages, who stripped her of couters, vambraces, cannons. Shucking the arming doublet painfully down to her waist, she flinched as Florian prodded at her back.
The woman surgeon straightened up. ”Whatever you hit when you landed, the armour saved you. Have you got a s.h.i.+rt I can tear up? I'm going to bind those ribs tight. You'll be stiff; it'll hurt; you'll live.”
”Thanks for your sympathy ...” Ash gritted her teeth at the touch of the poultice. ”Rickard, you take my kit across to the armoury. Tell 'em boss needs a new breastplate and plackart. They can pull anything they need out of the army stores. But I need it done yesterday!”
”Yes, boss!”
The light here came from one set of opened shutters. Further into the hall, the shutters were closed. Fire-heated bricks, placed under blankets, took a very little of the freezing chill off the air. Men on pallets moved, uneasily; someone groaning continuously, another man muttering to himself. Some had purple-bruised, st.i.tched flesh left uncovered; other men had bloodied bandages. Only a few men sat playing dice, or cleaning their kit, or arguing. Most huddled down.
Ash's eyes narrowed against the dull light. ”You've got twice the number of sick here since yesterday. We haven't had an attack on the walls. Is it the bombardments?”
Florian looked up briefly. ”Let's see. I've got twenty-four men wounded here. Three men are going to die, because I can't do anything about the shock and bleeding; one man from a stinking wound, the other from a poisoned wound. The broken shoulder-bones, ribs, and broken wrists should mend. I don't know about the stove-in breastbone. Baldina took an arrow out of one of Loyecte's men; I haven't wanted to move him out of here. There are ten burn-cases, that's Greek Fire. They'll survive.”
She spoke without reference to the parchment notes stuffed in the corner of the medicine chest.
”There's more than twenty-four men in here.”
”Twenty men down with campaign fever,” Florian stated. Her expression, studying Ash's half-bare body, was clinical in the extreme. She ignored the hiss of breath as the poultice touched Ash's skin.
”Dysentery,” she elucidated, whipping bandages with a sure hand. ”Ash, I tell them to bury bodies away from the wells. The ground's rock-hard. I tell them to make sure there are slit-trenches dug, on the waste-ground back of the forge.2 They s.h.i.+t anywhere they please. I've got civilian cases of dysentery in the abbeys. More than there were yesterday. And that's more than there was the day before. Once it gets a hold . . .”
”What about stores?”
”No fresh herbs. Even with the civilian abbeys, we're low on Self-Heal, goldenrod, Lady's Mantle, Solomon's Seal. Baldina and the girls can give them camomile, to calm them down. Marjoram, on sprains. That's it.” Her gaze flicked to Ash's face. ”I'm out of everything else. We bandage. We sew.” She smiled wryly. ”My people are was.h.i.+ng out wounds with Burgundy's finest wines. Best use for them.”
Ash shrugged herself painfully back into her doublet. Rickard held out a brigandine, brought by one of the pages, and began to buckle her into it.
”I got to go. In case they think I am dead. Morale.”
Florian glanced at the pallets, her attention on a man with a chopping cut across the side of his jaw. ”I hadn't finished my rounds. I'll see you at the palace. Dusk.”
”Yes sir ...” Smiling, Ash essayed a few steps, a little shaky, but mostly balanced.
Back on the first floor, she found the stench of cuckoo-pint starch and billowing steam filling the entire hall. Damp warmth hit her. Women with sore hands, kirtles caught up into their belts, banged around the tubs, through the wet; shouting orders and lewd comments. She found herself behind Blanche and Baldina at the foot of the stairs as Antonio Angelotti appeared, holding out a yellowed linen s.h.i.+rt and complaining in rapid-fire Milanese.
”Madonna,” he broke off to greet her. His expression changed, seeing her damaged left hand. ”Jussey wants you at the mills.”
”Yeah, I was on my way there. You come with me-”
”Boss,” a female voice said.
Ash halted, as Blanche put her arm around her daughter's shoulders, the dyed blond heads together. Baldina's kirtle as she turned to face Ash was laced only loosely at the front.
Under it, the belly of a woman great with child showed as a sharp curve. Not visible before Auxonne. But she must have been carrying it from spring: at Neuss, say?
”You should be eating better,” Ash said automatically. ”Ask Hildegarde: tell her I said so.”
Baldina put her hands on her belly in an immemorial gesture. Winter sunlight shot through the steam, illuminating her in a glaze of light; and Angelotti's icon-face and yellow ringlets beside her made Ash think caustically, Haven't I seen you guys in a church fresco somewhere?
”Have you got a father for it?” Ash added.
Baldina grinned wryly. ”Now what do you think, boss?”
”Well, draw on company funds: an extra third-share.”
Not that that amounts to much, now.
The younger woman nodded. Her mother, a little awkwardly, said, ”Put your hand on it, boss. For luck.”
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