Ash : A Secret History by Mary Gentle

Author:Mary Gentle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781857987447
Publisher: Orion Pub Co
Published: 2001-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

III

Lowering her face from the faint but perceptible warmth of the risen sun, Ash wiped her muddy palm across her scarred cheeks.

Beside her, the woman took her gaze from the eastern sky and shivered in the cold morning.

“Girl, I wouldn’t want your job right now!” Florian briskly blew on her bare fingers, looking around at the camp. “We can’t go back. Can we go forward? What are you going to tell them?”

“That?” Ash, for the first time in weeks, gave a genuinely relaxed smile. “Oh, that’s not the difficult part. Okay: here we go…”

Ash walked on, out into the middle of the clearing, clapping her hands.

Five hundred people stopped talking fast enough, gathering around once they saw it was her: men in mail, and rusted plate, or padded jacks, standing, or squatting on the mud where it was too filthy to sit down. Some few diced in the wet. Rather more were drinking small ale. She gazed around her, at their faces that kept turning away in wonder to the sky.

“Well,” Ash said. “Will you look at your sorry asses!”

“We can take it, boss!” one of the Tydder brothers yelled: Simon or Thomas, Ash was momentarily unsure which. He ducked a shower of punches, mud-balls, and insults.

“Creep!” Ash remarked. Laughter started, unstrained; going round the crowd.

Well, well. Geraint was wrong. And I was right.

She rubbed her hands together, and grinned broadly back at the drawn faces. “Okay, lads. We’re broke again. Not for the first time – won’t be the last. It means a day or two more on bread-rations, but hey, we’re rough, we’re tough, we can hack it.”

The other one of the Tydder brothers whimpered in a shrill falsetto, “Mummy!”

Ash took the laughter that followed as an opportunity to look at them closely. The Tydders and a lot of the younger men-at-arms were elbowing each other in the ribs; one with his lance-mate’s head wrestled under his arm. Two hundred fighting men with faded liveries and ragged hose, bundled up in every garment they owned; mud-stained, fingers white with chilblains, noses dripping clear liquid. She took the feel of them, electric in the air; read from their faces that they seemed tighter, more exultant, high on being rough, ragged, tough, and soldiers in a world of refugees.

It’s because there’s sun. We’ve come across the border. For the first time in weeks, there’s the sun…

And they’ve got out of Carthage in one piece and force-marched the better part of one hundred leagues in moonlight and darkness: right now, they think they’re shit-hot.

And they are.

Please God it’s not all for nothing.

As the laughter died down, Ash lifted her head and looked around at the muddy encampment, and the mud-stained men in front of her.

“We’re the Lion company. Never forget it. We’re fucking amazing. We’ve come across a hundred leagues of this, through night and bitter cold; it’s taken us weeks, but we’re still here, we’re still together, we’re still a company. That’s because we’re disciplined, and we’re the best. There isn’t any argument about it.

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