Ash: A Secret History Read online

  It was the first time she saw that she was beautiful.

  Blood thundered in her ears with frustration. She could think of no use for that beauty.

  The bearded man, the Captain of the company, said, “Have you father or mother living?”

  “I don’t know. One of them might be my father.” She pointed at random at men re-fletching bolts, polishing helmets. “Nobody says they’re my mother.”

  A much thinner man leaned down beside the Captain and said quietly, “One of the dead men was stupid enough to leave a crossbow spanned with a bolt in it. That’s an offence. As to the child, the washerwomen say she’s no maid, but no one knows her to be a whore either.”

  “If she is old enough to kill,” the Captain scowled through wiry copper-coloured hair, “she is old enough to take the penalty. Which is to be whipped at the cart-tail around the camp.”

  “My name is Ash,” she said in a small, clear, carrying voice. “They hurt me and I killed them. If anyone else hurts me, I’ll kill them too. I’ll kill you.”

  She got the whipping she might have expected, with something added for insolence and discipline’s sake. She did not cry. Afterwards, one of the crossbowmen gave her a cut-down jack, a padded cloth jerkin, for armour, and she exercised devotedly in it at weapons practice. For a month or two she pretended the crossbowman was her father, until it became clear that his kindness had been a momentary impulse.

  A little later in her ninth year, rumours went through the camp that there had been a Lion born of a Virgin.

  II

  The child Ash sat with her back to a bare tree, cheering the mummers. Furs kept some of the ground’s ice from her backside.

  Her scars were not healing well. They stood out red against the extreme pallor of her skin. Visible breath huffed out of her mouth as she screamed, shoulder to shoulder with all the camp strays and bastards. The Great Wyrm (a man with a tanned horse’s skin flung over his back, and a horse’s skull fitted by ties to his head) ramped across the stage. The horse skin still had mane and tail attached. They nailed the freezing afternoon air. The Knight of the Wasteland (played by a company sergeant in better armour than Ash had thought he owned) aimed skilful lance blows very wide.

  “Oh, kill it,” a girl called Crow called scornfully.

  “Stick it up his arse!” Ash yelled. The children huddling around her tree screamed laughter and disdain.

  Richard, a little black-haired boy with a port-wine stain across his face, whispered, “It’ll have to die. The Lion’s born. I heard the Lord Captain say.”

  Ash’s scorn faded with the last sentence. “When? Where? When, Richard? When did you hear him?”

  “Midday. I took water into the tent.” The small boy’s voice sounded proud.

  Ash ignored his implied unofficial status as page. She rested her nose on her clenched fists and huffed warm breath on her frozen fingers. The Wyrm and the sergeant were having at each other with more vigour. That was because of the cold. She stood up and rubbed hard at her numb buttocks through her woollen hose.

  “Where’s you going, Ashy?” the boy asked.

  “I’m going to make water,” she announced loftily. “You can’t come with me.”

  “Don’t wanna.”

  “You’re not big enough.” With that parting shaft, Ash picked her way out of the crowd of children, goats and hounds.

  The sky was low, cold, and the same colour as pewter plates. A white mist came up from the river. If it would snow, it would be warmer than this. Ash padded on feet bound with strips of cloth towards the abandoned buildings (probably agricultural) that the company officers had commandeered for winter quarters. A sorry rabble of tents had gone up all around. Armed men were clustered around fire-pits with their fronts to the heat and their arses in the cold. She went on past their backs.

  Round to the rear of the farm, she heard them coming out of the building in time to duck behind a barrel, in which the frozen cylindrical block of rainwater protruded up a full handspan.

  “And go on foot,” the Captain finished speaking. A group of men clattered with him out into the yard. The thin company clerk. Two of the Captain’s closest lieutenants. The very few, Ash knew, with pretensions (once) to noble birth.

  The Captain wore a close-fitting steel shell that covered all his body. Full harness: from the pauldrons and breastplate enclosing his shoulders and body, the vambraces on his arms, his gauntlets, his tassets and cuisses and greaves that armoured his legs, down to the metal sabatons that covered his spurred boots. He carried his armet2 under his arm. Winter light dulled the mirrored metal. He stood in the filthy farmyard wearing armour that reflected the sky as white: she had not thought before that this might be why it was called white harness. The only colour shone from his red beard and the red leather of his scabbard.

  Ash knelt back on her knees and toes. Her frozen fingers rested against the cold barrel, too numb to feel the wood staves. The strapped and tied metal plates rattled as the man walked. When his two lieutenants thumped down into the yard, also in full armour, it sounded like muffled pans. Like a cook’s wagon overturning.

  Ash wanted such armour. It was that desire, more than curiosity, that made her follow them away from the farm buildings. To walk with that invulnerability. With that amount of wealth on one’s back… Ash ran, dazzled.

  The sky above yellowed. A few flakes of snow drifted down to lie on top of her untidy hair (less purely white than it) but she took no notice. Her nose and ears shone bright red, and her fingers and toes were blue and purple. This was nothing unusual for her in winter: she thought nothing of it. She did not even pull her doublet tighter over her filthy linen shirt.

  The four men – Captain, clerk, two young lieutenants – walked ahead in unusual silence. They passed the camp pickets. Ash sneaked past behind while the Captain exchanged a word with them.

  She wondered why the men did not ride. They walked up a steep slope to the surrounding woodland. At the wood’s border, confronting the thick bowed branches, the brambles and thorn bushes, the deadwood brushfalls built up over more than a man’s lifetime, she understood. You couldn’t take a horse into this. Even a war-horse.

  Now three of the men stopped and put on their armets. The unarmoured clerk fell back a step. Each man kept his visor pinned up, his face visible. The taller of the two lieutenants took his sword out of his scabbard. The bearded Captain shook his head.

  The sliding sound of metal on wood echoed in the quiet, as the lieutenant resheathed his blade.

  The wood held silence.

  All three of the armoured men turned to the company clerk. This thin man wore a velvet-covered brigandine and a war-hat3, and his uncovered face was pinched in the cold air. Ash sneaked closer as the snow fell.

  The clerk stepped confidently forward, into the wood.

  Ash had not paid much attention to the hills surrounding the valley. The valley had a clean river, and the lone farmhouse and its buildings. It was good for wintering out of campaign season. What else should she know? The leafless woods on the surrounding high hills had been bare of game. If not hunting, what other reason could take her here, away from the fire-pits?

  What reason could take them?

  There was a path, she decided after some minutes. None of the brambles and thorn bushes on it were more than her own height. Not disused for more than a few seasons.

  The armoured men pushed unharmed through the briars. The shorter lieutenant swore, “God’s blood!” and fell silent, as the other three turned and stared at him. Ash snuck under briar stems as thick as her wrist. Little and quick, she could have out-distanced them, protective armour or not, if she had known where the path went.

  With that thought she cast out to the side, wriggled on her belly along the bed of a frozen streamlet, and came out a hundred paces ahead of the leading man.

  No snow fell here under the tree canopy. Everything was brown. Dead leaves, dead briars, dead rushes on the streamlet’s edge. Brown bracken ahead. Ash, s
eeing the bracken, looked up, and – as she had expected – the tree cover over it was broken, as it must be to allow its growth.

  In the forest glade stood a disused stone chapel, shrouded in snow.

  Ash had no familiarity with the outside or inside of chapels. Even so, she would have needed to be very familiar indeed with architecture to recognise the style in which this one had been built. It was ruined now. Two walls remained standing. Grey moss and brown thorns covered them, old ice scabbing the vegetation. Two snow-plastered window frames showed grey, full of winter emptiness. Heaps of snow-rounded rubble cluttered the ground.

  Green colour took Ash’s eye. Under the thin covering of snow, all the rubble was grown over with ivy.

  Green flowered also at the foot of the chapel walls. Two fat white-moulded holly bushes rooted where the stone slab of the altar stood against the wall. They stood either side of the cracked slab. Under the snow, their red berries weighed their branches down.

  Ash heard clattering metal behind her. A robin and a wren took fright and flew out of the holly and away. The men behind her in the wood began to sing. They were fifteen feet behind her back, no further away than that.

  Ash shot in rabbit-jinks across the rubble. She hit the snow by the wall and wormed her way in under the lowest holly branches.

  Inside, the bush was hollow and dry. Brown leaves crackled under her dirty hands. Black branches supported the canopy of shiny green leaves above her head. Ash lay flat on her belly and eased forward. Barbed leaves stuck into her woollen doublet.

  She peered from between the leaves. Snow fell now.

  The thin clerk lifted a tenor voice and sang. It was a language Ash did not know. The company’s two lieutenants stumbled across the broken ground, singing, and it would have sounded better, Ash thought, if they had taken their helmets off instead of just putting up their visors.

  The Captain emerged from the wood’s edge.

  He put his gauntlets up to his chin and fumbled with buckle and strap. Then Ash saw him fiddle with the hook and pin. He opened his helm and took it off, and stood uncovered in the glade. Fat flakes of snow drifted down. They nestled in his hair and beard and ears.

  The Captain sang,

  “God rest ye merry, Gentlemen, let nothing you dismay;

  This darkest hour, the Sun returns; so we salute the Day.”

  His voice was very loud, very cracked, not very much in tune. The silence of the wood shattered. Ash cried sudden hot tears. He had wrecked his voice bellowing above the noise of men and horses; it was a powerful ruin.

  The company clerk came close to the holly bush in which Ash hid. She made herself still. Tears dried on her scarred cheeks. Half of being hidden is to remain utterly, completely still. The other half is to think yourself into the background. I am a rabbit, a rat, a briar, a tree. She lowered her mouth into the neck of her doublet so that her white breath would not betray her.

  “Give thanks,” the clerk said. He put something up on to the old altar. Ash was below and could not see, but it smelled like raw meat. Snow tangled in the man’s hair. His eyes were bright. Despite the cold, sweat ran in drops down his forehead, under the brim of his metal hat. The rest of what he said was in the other language.

  The taller lieutenant screeched “Look!” so loudly that Ash started and jumped. A disturbed twig dumped snow down her face. She blinked it out of her eyelashes. Now I’m discovered, she thought calmly, and put her head out into the glade and found no one even looking in her direction. Their eyes were on the altar.

  All three knights went down on their knees in the ivy-covered rubble. Armour scraped and clattered. The Captain’s arms fell to his sides, and the helm from his hand: Ash winced as she heard it hit rocky earth and bounce.

  The company clerk took off his dish-shaped war-hat and moved to one knee with a singular grace.

  Snow whirled faster from the invisible whiteness of the sky into the glade. Snow covered the green ivy, the red berries of the holly. Snow froze on the spindly brown arcs of briar. A great huffing animal breath came down from the altar of the ruined green chapel. Ash watched its whiteness on the air. Animal-breath hit her in the face, warm and wet.

  A great paw trod down from the stone altar.

  The paw’s pelt was yellow. Ash stared at it, two inches from her face. Yellow fur. Coarse yellow fur, paler and softer at the roots. The beast’s claws were curved, and longer than her hand, and white with clear tips. Needle tips.

  The haunch of a Lion passed Ash’s face. Its flank obscured the clearing, the wood, the men. The beast stepped down fluidly from the altar. It threw up its maned head, bolting down whatever the offering had been. She saw its throat move, swallowing.

  A coughing roar broke the air a foot away from her.

  She pissed the crotch of her woollen hose. Hot urine steamed in the cold, chilled clammily down her thighs, instantly cold in the snowy air. Eyes wide, she could only stare, could not even wonder why none of the kneeling knights sprang up or drew their swords. The Lion’s head began to swing around. Ash knelt, paralysed.

  The Lion’s wrinkled muzzle swung into the hollow leaves. Its face was huge. Great luminous, long-lashed, yellow eyes blinked. A heavy smell of carrion, heat and sand choked her. The Lion grunted, flinched back slightly from the berry-laden pricking branches. Its black lips writhed back from its teeth. It reached in delicately and nipped the front of Ash’s doublet between an upper and a lower incisor.

  The Lion’s rump went up. Its tail lashed. It pulled her out of the bush. Only a child’s weight, no effort – a child snarled up in holly leaves and bramble, pulled forward, in green wool doublet and blue stinking hose, spilled face-down on the snow-shrouded ivy and rocks.

  The second roar deafened her.

  Ash had become too frightened to move. Now she jammed her arms up over her head, covering her ears. She burst into noisy uninhibited tears.

  A rasping tongue as thick as her leg licked up one side of her scarred face.

  Ash stopped wailing. Her sore face stung. She got slowly up on to her knees. The Lion stood twice as tall as she did. She looked up into its golden eyes, whiskered muzzle, curved white teeth. Its great tongue slobbered down and rasped up her other cheek. Her unhealed scars throbbed rawly. She poked at them with fingers blunt and senseless as wood. A robin on the ruined chapel’s wall burst into song.

  She was young to have such an awareness of herself, but she was perfectly sure of two separate, distinct, and mutually exclusive reactions. The part of her that was camp-child and used to large feral animals, and to hunting in season, froze her body very still: it hasn’t touched me with its claws, I’m too close to run, I mustn’t startle it. Another part of herself seemed less familiar. It filled with a burning happiness. She could not remember the words or language that the clerk had been using. In her utterly clear voice, she began to sing the Captain’s hymn,

  “God rest ye merry, Gentlemen, let nothing you dismay;

  This darkest hour, the Sun returns, so we salute this Day.

  We march forth to Your Victory, our foes in disarray!

  Oh, his Brightness brings comfort and joy

  None can destroy:

  Oh, his Brightness brings comfort and joy.”

  The clearing was silent when she ended. She could not hear the difference between the man’s cracked voice and her own purity. She did not have the age to distinguish between his bad voice, singing with maturity, and her own blurring of breath, and pauses, that were a reflection of rote learning by some campfire.

  All the while her young soul sang, her mind whimpered, no, no. Remembering a leopard hunt once near Urbino. The cat’s claws had sliced open a hound’s stomach in an instant and tangled its stinking intestines in the grass.

  The great head dipped down. For a second she breathed in fur. She choked, drowned in its mane. The Lion’s eyes looked into hers, with a flat animal awareness of her scent and presence. The huge muscles clenched and bunched and the beast sprang over her head. By t
he time she could turn, it had crashed through the light underbrush at the edge of the clearing and vanished.

  She sat for a few moments, clearly hearing the diminishing noise of its departure.

  The clatter of metal woke her attention.

  Ash sat, legs aspraddle, on snow-smeared rock and ivy. Her head was on a level with the articulated poleyns or knee-armour of the Captain’s harness, now that he stood beside her. The silver chape on his scabbard glittered near her eye.

  “He didn’t speak,” she complained.

  “The Lion born of a Virgin is a beast,” said the clerk, tenor voice loud and flat in the abandoned clearing. “An animal. Lord Captain, I don’t understand. The child is known to be no virgin, yet He did not harm her.”

  The bearded Captain stared down from his great height. Ash felt afraid of his frown. He spoke, but not directly to her.

  “Perhaps it was a vision. The child is our poor land, waiting the breath of the Lion for salvation. This winter barrenness, her spoiled face: all one. I cannot interpret, I have not the skill. It could mean anything.”

  The company clerk replaced his steel hat. “My lords, what we have seen here was for us alone. An you will, let us retire to prayer and seek guidance.”

  “Yes.” The Lord Captain bent and picked up his helmet, brushing the caked snow off the metal. The sun, through an unexpected break in the winter cloud, struck fire from his red hair and beard and hard metal shell. As he turned away, he added, “Somebody bring the brat.”

  III

  She found out what she could do with her scar-emphasised child’s beauty.

  By the age of nine she had a mass of curls that she kept long, halfway to her waist, and washed once a month. Her silver hair had the grey shine of grease. No one in a soldiers’ camp could notice the smell. She never showed her ears. She learned to keep dressing in cut-down hose and doublet, often with an adult’s jerkin over them. Something in the too-large clothing made her look even more of a little child.